Aside from the obvious functional elements that a good ecommerce site needs it also has to be visually appealing. Furthermore, the visual and layout options of your products must be helpful and easy for your customers to use. If a site appears disorganised and provides too much information contrary to the sites purpose then it will bemuse customers and few will stick around to browse your site further or make a purchase.
While you will want your site to have its own unique feel and style, it is important to follow a few important standards when organising your product search. These can vastly improve a sites quality in the eyes of the visitor and potentially bring in a greater number of sales. Internet shoppers are a very different creature from your common high street shopper. The major difference is that while high street shoppers set out to make purchases, a large percentage of online shoppers are simply browsing and, as a result, are more fickle. This means they are easily put off by poor product layout and a lack of product filtering.
Precise navigation
Navigation is key in so much that if a user can’t find what they want they’re not going to be buying it. It’s imperative that when setting up your product databases you take into consideration how related products will be browsed and what grouping each product is most suited to. Furthermore, each product group must be relevant and you must also consider how sub genres could be applied. A TV for example would fall under the category TV’s with possible sub categories of LCD > Sony > Bravia. If your categories are too broad then a user will struggle to find what they’re looking for amid a mass of irrelevant products.
Provide Search Bar
In the same vein as anchor link navigation it is standard practice now that a user can browse a site using a search box. This is extremely useful as it allows a user to bypass the whole system of links and just look directly for a specific item. However equally as common as search boxes are faults within search boxes, too often users type in the name of a specific item and are returned an assortment of completely irrelevant items. It is essential to set a complex system of filters for your search box so that it is not too broad as this will return to many unrelated items. On the other hand, one that is too strict will be too harsh with user queries and often return nothing.
Refining search options for customer ease of use
There are a variety of other key features that any good ecommerce site should provide to allow easier browsing. When a customer is looking at a selection of items they should be provided with substantial details of the items in question, such as an image (of course), availability, cost and savings, colours and sizes. You want to provide the user with as much information about the product as you can in the small area available. It is often useful to have a feature available that will output the product in greater detail (perhaps a 3D viewer). Features of this sort are more difficult to set up but are massively beneficial in improving the user experience.
It is also critical to allow filtering and sorting of products. These features are vitally important as they allow the customer to be more specific about what they want. Customers should be able to filter products by a variety of features such as size and brand in order to narrow their search accordingly. Sorting should allow the user to put these items in order by price (high-low/low-high), best selling, user ratings, etc. Filtering should always be available on an ecommerce site and is a reasonably easy process to setup.
The point is that you are trying to make the experience for the user as simple as possible. Most important to note is that the user wants to browse the site their way. In order to allow this you must make the browsing of the site precise without making its navigation and filtering methods too rigid.
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Tags: Ecommerce, web design
