Turn PDPs from dead-ends into powerful product discovery hubs.

Nearly 50% of your traffic today goes directly to your PDP. When you don’t give shoppers onward discovery opportunities, they bounce.

Everyone thinks of PDPs as the end of the customer journey. But for nearly half of your traffic it’s just the start.

When we design our PDPs solely as the location to make a purchase decision, we miss a big opportunity - to take our customers on an onward discovery journey and keep them on our site.

Ready to rethink PDPs?

Let’s get into it…

Everyone thinks that PDPs are the final destination

Here’s how classic customer journey site design goes…

The customer starts on the home page and we filter them down through category and list pages into the PDP where hopefully they make a purchase.

And the job of the PDP couldn’t be clearer. It’s to drive the customer to the purchase decision.

Shopping habits have changed

But this isn’t how retail works today.

Customers shop for products on Google or social media channels. They don’t start with retail brands. When they find something that looks interesting, they click into your site, check out the product, and when it’s not ‘right’, they bounce back out again to continue the search. This happens with about 50% of our traffic today.

What if we could find a way for them to stay?

From dead ends to product discovery hubs

We need to rethink PDPs from being the location where the customer has to make a purchase decision, into an opportunity to help them clarify and refine what they are looking for.

We do this by changing the job of the PDP.

From a place where we ‘force’ them to make a purchase decision.

Into a place where they can discover related range based on their intent.

We do this by presenting a curated range of products that help them say “yes, something that looks like this”.

It’s a change of mindset from ‘selling’ to serving the customer’s ‘shopping mission’.

Product recs ≠ discovery

Of course, you are likely saying, “but we do this already”. Product recs are the way we show related range. But the reality is that when we show product recs without understanding intent, we are merely subjectively picking what we think might be interesting, or what sells the best.

Intent brings intelligence to PDPs

When we use intent signals to understand the customer’s shopping mission, we can serve related range through curated navigation on the PDP. This way, we give our customers the ability to clarify and refine what they want.

In effect, we turn our PDPs into an intelligent product refinement and selection engine. This leads to far fewer bounces and a much higher chance of purchase.

Adding inspiration

When we turn our PDPs into true discovery hubs, we not only better serve our customers' shopping mission, we also create a way to inspire and excite them by showing them what they want but don’t know how to describe.

To our customers, it feels like we intuitively know their needs. For us as retailers, it’s a powerful way to build engagement and loyalty.

Ready to turn PDPs into discovery hubs?

It starts with understanding intent and using these signals to create engaging discovery experiences. We’ve done this for the likes of M&S, B&Q, and Neiman Marcus. If you want to find out how, give us a shout.

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FoundIt! helps large, multi-category retailers become intent-led so that their sites match how their customers want to shop, not how their catalogues are structured.

© 2025 Warren Cowan, FoundIt!