Imagine walking into a John Lewis store through an entrance that doesn’t really exist. You’ve come in via a car park five storeys above the shop, a portal that isn’t on any map. There’s a dog bed just sitting there. Someone steps out of the shadows. “Psst. Wanna buy a dog bed?” you say yes. They take you into a room full of something completely different.
That's what happened to me online. Except it's been happening for three months, and nobody's fixed it.
How I found the category that doesn't exist
I was looking for a dog bed for my puppy, Eliot. Google dropped me somewhere deep in the John Lewis website, onto a product page for a dog bed that looked promising. I hadn't navigated there. I hadn't browsed there. I'd arrived through a side door that Google had found but the website itself doesn't acknowledge.
From that product page, I used the breadcrumbs to work my way back up to the parent category. That's how I discovered John Lewis sells pet products at all.
You would never know this from the navigation. Pets doesn't appear as a top-level category. It doesn't appear as a second-level category. It's buried at the bottom of "Home accessories," which is a categorisation decision that makes sense to precisely nobody. My dog is not a scatter cushion. No customer looking for pet supplies would ever think to browse Home accessories to find them.
On mobile, the navigation is different. You can see the Pets link, but only if you already know it's hiding inside Home accessories. There's no discovery path for anyone who doesn't already know where to look.
The broken link that's still broken
Once I'd found the pet category through breadcrumb archaeology, I clicked on the dog beds link. It took me to "Wild for Dogs pet care," which is an entirely different category selling entirely different products. I tried again. Same result. I gaslit myself for a full minute before accepting the site was broken.
That was three months ago. As of today, the link is still broken.
What the analytics probably say
John Lewis almost certainly has data showing low traffic to their pet category. Someone, somewhere, is looking at that number and concluding there's low demand. The category isn't performing. Customers aren't interested.
The actual explanation is that customers cannot find the category. It's not in the navigation in any logical place. The only way to reach it is through a search engine, a lucky guess, or the kind of stubborn breadcrumb detective work most shoppers won't bother with. And once you're there, a key link has been broken for months.
This is the findability trap. When something is hard to find, the traffic data makes it look like nobody wanted it. So nobody prioritises fixing it. So nobody finds it. So the data confirms the assumption. Low traffic isn't proof of low demand. It might be proof of invisibility.
The question to ask yourself
If you've got a category with disappointing traffic, ask whether customers can actually find it. Check the navigation path. Check it on mobile. Click the links. See if your analytics are measuring disinterest or measuring the absence of a front door.
Sometimes the data isn't telling you what customers want. It's telling you what customers gave up looking for.
Murmuration helps retailers and digital teams understand and fix findability problems. Get in touch if you'd like to talk through what a diagnostic might look like for your site.
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