Spice up your magento store’s 404 page, don’t desert it

Ideally, you should never let your visitor sees a 404 page. But accident happens and when it does, show your visitor something nice, useful, informative instead.

First let’s see how other Magento stores do with their 404 page we randomly picked from the Magento showcase feed.

In this article we talked about fixing 404 page. There you go again! Your bad indeed!

6st shop

It’s early morning and we haven’t had our breakfast yet. We really want a yummy cupcake.

give me yummy cupcake please

We are shopping for a messenger bag and it would be nice if the store can show us one in their 404 page.

I am shopping for a messenger bag and it would nice if you can show me one

Koreans are proud people, and they are proud of their digital gadgets; they sure know how to show off their proud products.

Samsung


Some ideas we have for the 404 page.

  • Show a category listing page

    How about showing a category listing page? To do so, use this code in your 404 page:

    {{block type="catalog/product_list" category_id="44" name="product_list" template="catalog/product/list.phtml}}

    “44″ is the category ID, you can find it from Magento Admin Panel/Catalog/Manage Categories/, click on the category and you will see it next to your category’s name.

    You can also show promotion or random products, to do so, first you must have either of the products’ attribute setup (promotion or random), and have assigned some products to the attribute name. The code for promotion or random look like so:

    {{block type='catalog/product_list_promotion' template='catalog/product/list.phtm'}}

    If you don’t wish to use the same layout, try create a template for it. Let’s say you have a random.phtml setup, and you call it like this:

    {{block type="catalog/product_list_random" name="product_list" template="catalog/product/random.phtml}}

  • Give a nice surprise

    How about giving your visitors a nice surprise if they accidentally enter your 404 page?

    For example, setup a category just for the 404 page, use category price rules or shopping cart price rule to give them special discounts or offer free shipping.

    Everybody loves surprise and everybody loves discount, this delighted surprise and bargain may warm your customers’ hearts, make them repeated customers and spread the good words around.

Most Commented Posts