How Do Users Revise Zero-Hit Product Search Queries?

A product search on an e-commerce site can return zero hits for several reasons. One major reason is that a user’s query may not be appropriately expressed for locating existing products. To enable successful product purchase, an ideal e-commerce site should automatically revise the user query to avoid zero hits. We investigate what kinds of query revision strategies turn a zero-hit query into a successful query, by analyzing data from a major Japanese e-commerce site. Our analysis shows that about 99% of zero-hit queries can be turned into successful queries that lead to product purchase by term dropping (27%), term replacement (29%), rephrasing (17%), and typo correction (26%). The results suggest that an automatic rewriter for avoiding zero-hit product queries may be able to achieve satisfactory coverage and accuracy by focusing on the above four revision strategies.