With all the modern gadgetry of eCommerce, it’s easy to overlook basics such as site navigation. In this post, the first in the 3 Things series, covering 3 innovative ways e-tailers are differentiating themselves, I’ll review some creative navigation strategies.
Solution Oriented Navigation

Traditionally, both retailers and e-tailers have organized their stores based on product categories. There’s nothing wrong with this, in fact it’s very effective. However, what happens when your site or in-store visitor doesn’t have a product in mind, but rather a problem? For example:

• “I don’t know what I’m looking for, I just need a gift for mom!”
• “I’m sick, and I need something to sooth a sore throat”
• “I’m disorganized, I need something to get me on track”

In addition to offering product based navigation, Seabear, a seller of fine seafood, offers a solution oriented navigation offering three choices: Give a Gift, Entertain Family & Friends, and Healthy Dining. For customers unfamiliar with fine seafood (like me), this is a great starting point that helps visitors select a product that meets their needs.

Filter Based Navigation

Many customers are accustomed to navigating to a product category page, then filtering down or sorting by various criteria. Some retailers are shortcutting this process by allowing customers to navigate directly to a product category with pre-filtered criteria.

For example, makeup retailer Lancome allows customers to browse by the color of the product.

Shoeline.com allows visitors to view pre-filtered product listings, narrowing down the selection by color or size. This greatly eliminates the frustration of having to sift through endless product listing pages of irrelevant merchandise.

Image Based Navigation

I hadn’t visited Overstock.com lately, and was surprised to see their untraditional homepage. In addition to placing a heavy emphasis on search, your eyes are effectively drawn to the image based categories. For department style stores with a wide variety of products such as Overstock, the pictures serve well to help visitors quickly scan and make a selection.

What do these 3 strategies have in common? Nothing, except these companies all sought to understand how their customers want to shop, and fulfilled these needs. Sometimes, going back to the basics of navigation can pay huge dividends.

What 3 Things does your site need? Get 3 recommendations from Palmer Web Marketing.

The following guest post comes courtesy of Linda Bustos from the Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog. After reading the post, be sure to stop by the blog. It’s a great resource for anything pertaining to Ecommerce, usability, or social media.

When you run an ecommerce website, you have the potential to sell products to people around the world — even from your own basement. But many online retailers expect to make international sales without doing all they should to help convert international shoppers. Here are a few ideas to help make the online shopping experience smooth for your international customers.

1. Have an International Shipping page

Sure, you could have it buried in an FAQ section, Help area or some other hard-to-find place — but why not make it easy for users to find International Shipping policies by making it its own link visible from every page on the site?

The footer menu is a common location for shipping information, as is the top right hand corner of your page. Conventions like this have conditioned online shoppers to check these areas for shipping information. If it’s not there, customers might just assume it’s not available. Placing this information in one of the two areas the customer is likely to look is a good idea. Placing it in both areas is even better.

Avoid hiding International Shipping information in the “Help” section. People can’t find it easily by scanning the page they are on, and some associate the word “Help” with technical assistance, not customer service.

2. Include Important Information on Shipping Page

Whenever possible, clearly state your:

- Return policies
- Telephone customer service hours of operation (and time zones)
- Estimated shipping times
- Order tracking availability

A list of all countries you ship to is also recommended. Remind customers that they may have to pay additional duties and taxes depending on where they live.

3. Make Your Shipping Policy Searchable

Make sure your international shipping page can be found using your site’s internal search engine. It’s a good idea to program your search engine to deliver this page for searches for “international,” “intl,” “international orders” and “international customers” too.

4. Show International Shipping Availability on Product Pages

You may carry some products that you can’t ship abroad even if you can ship most products. For example, certain health supplements are legal in some countries and illegal in others. It’s a courtesy to mention this before the customer gets to the checkout.

5. Convert Currencies, Weights and Measures on the Product Page

Most of us can’t convert centimeters to inches in our heads (clothing size charts, for example) or kilograms to pounds, let alone currencies that fluctuate daily. Providing conversion tools can increase conversions!

6. Estimate Shipping Costs on Your Product Pages

E-Commerce usability rockstars offer shipping cost tools right on product pages, which not only helps international customers but also locals. FedEx, UPS and USPS all provide API access for your web developer to make this happen. Offering the tool at the product page level also will reduce your rate of abandoned carts.

7. Send a Post-Sale Email

If you can segment your customer database by location, you can send targeted follow up emails to your international customers. For example, as the Canadian dollar rises more Canadians will shop online at US stores. Motivate your Canadian customers to visit you again by offering free shipping, discounts or other offers. Or, send an email from time to time asking how you can improve the shopping experience for international users. Even if they don’t respond, you send a powerful message that your business cares about foreign shoppers.

Of course, your own usability testing with international customers is the best way to learn about how your own site can be improved. There are even consultancies that offer international usability testing services. But these seven tips will give you a head start.

About the guest blogger:

Linda Bustos is an Emerging Media Analyst for Elastic Path ecommerce software. Linda writes daily about ecommerce marketing on the Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog.

When was the last time took a look at your top exit pages? Odds are, there’s a few pages that suffer from higher than average abandonment rates.

Off course, at some point, visitors will leave your site. But why not keep them there as long as possible? Below I’ve listed what I think are the most common exit pages on an eCommerce website. I’ll also cover some tactics for keeping the visitor engaged after they reach this page.

1. Order Confirmation Receipt Pages: After an order is completed, there are several ways to keep customers engaged. How about asking them to take a survey or to refer a friend? You may also do some pre-emptive customer service by showing them how to track their order or contact customer support. Checkout my previous post, where I discussed in more detail how to not waste your order confirmation page.
2. Email Subscription Sign up Confirmation Pages: Recently, I signed up for Gap’s email list. Rather that leaving me hanging with a dead end page, the confirmation screen displayed a large “Start Shopping Now” button.
3. Product Detail Pages: While product detail pages don’t seem like an obvious dead end, they often are. Consider the flow from the landing page, to the product category page, to the product detail page. If the visitor doesn’t like the product they’re viewing, they may abandon the effort rather than hit the back button. Make sure you display related items above the fold or a clear “Back” button they will take them back to the product category page.
4. No Search Results Found Pages: This is a tough one. When a visitor performs a site search that returns no results, frustration will often lead them to exit your site. While you can’t ensure that every search query returns a relevant result, there are several ways to optimize your internal site search. When a query returns no results, consider at least showing your most popular product categories in order to prevent frustrated searchers from abandoning their effort.
5. 404 Error Pages: Hopefully, your website doesn’t have any broken internal links, but it doesn’t hurt to optimize your 404 page to keep visitors on your site. Offer to take them back to the home page or the previous page they were on.
6. Customer Service Inquiry Confirmation Pages: After a customer sends a message to customer service through your site, show FAQs or suggested solutions to their problem. Nobody wants to wait for customer service to get back with you in order to proceed.

The ultimate disappointment for a customer is viewing the product page of an item they really want, and finding it’s not available. Recently, I came across several sites that take a unique approach with handling out-of-stock or discontinued items.

Example #1: Lancome-USA

Makeup retailer Lancome offers an extremely innovative “Since you liked… Now you’ll Love” feature to satisfy customers looking for discontinued makeup. This is a great sale-saver for picky customers looking for that perfect color.

Example #2: BPAV

It’s not uncommon for customers to land on the product page of an out-of-stock item either through the site navigation or directly from a search engine. If an item on your site is only temporarily out, a great way to save the sale (and capture an opt-in email addy) is letting customer request to be emailed when it’s re-stocked. BPAV.com does this nicely with their “Notify Me When It’s Back in Stock” feature.

Example #3: Threadless

Displaying “Old” items on a separate product listings page can have it’s advantages. Customers may want to compare new items to old ones, or maybe they need information on a product they already own. Threadless displays sold out or retired t-shirts separately and allows customers to request the design to be re-printed. Very innovative if you ask me.

In addition, Threadless also emphasizes urgency for in-stock items by showing a inventory level indicator on every product page. Messages like “A few in-stock” or “Only 2 Left” help turn browsers into buyers.

I believe eCommerce sites that innovate with useful and brand building features such as these will continue to thrive. Seen any other creative eCommerce site functions lately? Be sure to leave a comment.

 Handling eCommerce Stockout : 3 Best Practicies: Download (283)

Walking out of a theater last night, I struggled to convey to my wife why I didn’t like the movie. “I can’t tell you exactly what they could’ve done better,” I said, “I just know they did it wrong.”

Odds are, 99% of the internet population is clueless about good web design, just as I’m ignorant about creating a good movie. In other words, if you asked them which elements are most important in creating a professional website, they couldn’t tell you.

What they could identify, although subconsciously, is bad web design. If a customer perceives that little thought and effort was put into designing your site, they may draw a similar conclusion about your products or services.

While many factors contribute to site abandonment, some research suggests bad site design sits at the top of the list.

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 Usable Web Design Principles - How Bad Web Design is Like a Bad Movie: Download (221)

Google has raised the bar. If you misspell a word, it tells you. If you perform a search returning millions of results, they prioritize the results by showing you the most relevant page (usually).

Compare that to most internal site search features on eCommerce sites. Not only can they not handle misspellings, they usually to a poor job of ranking results. Combine a poor site search feature with a confusing navigation, and you’ve got a usability nightmare. Below I’ve gathered up 11 ideas for improving your internal site search feature.
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Ahh the shipping page. The un-welcome step in every eCommerce site’s checkout process. Because many sites fail to answer basic questions such as “how long will it take?” or “how much will it cost?”, many sales are lost at this important juncture. Some research shows that shipping concerns top the list of reasons why people abandon shopping carts. Below, I’ve listed some shipping best practices that I’ve used that help streamline the process for both the consumer and the company.

1. Don’t Require Login to View Pricing: Don’t make your customers jump through hoops in order to get a shipping price. Customers should be able to see the cost for shipping on the shopping cart page. If you base your prices on the location where the order will be shipped, give people the ability to enter their zip code for a quote.
2. Info on Product Page: Questions about shipping should be addressed early and often. A popup link on the product page is a great way to give customers price quotes or shipping time estimates.
3. Link to Shipping Page from Shopping Cart: In the shopping cart where customers select the shipping method, be sure to link to a page with more information regarding each option. On this page, specify estimated delivery dates for each region.

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Tags: E commerce Website Usability

Speed kills. In the case of website usability, the lack of speed kills. Many have erroneously assumed the advent of high speed internet connections would make website performance optimization irrelevant. On the contrary, it seems as internet connection speeds increase, users simply become more impatient and demand faster browsing. Below, I’ve gathered some simple (and advanced) ways to speed up your site.

Before making any changes, I would recommend benchmarking your download time with WebSite Optimization’s webpage optimization tool.

Image Optimizing Tips:

1. Compress .jpg and .gif images: If you use photoshop, always use the “Save for Web” feature. If you don’t have access to PS, there’s a ton of free image compressing freeware out there.
2. Compress or eliminate unnecessary Flash elements: In my opinion, flash is over-rated, slow, and buggy. It has it’s benefits, but make sure you don’t rely on it for navigation or other necessary site elements.
3. Don’t Resize Images within HTML: Don’t use the width or height attribute in the IMG tag to resize larger options. For example, if you resize an image that was originally 300 x 300 to 100 x 100, the user still has to download the full size one. Instead, use thumbnails.
4. Specify Image Dimensions: Don’t leave the width or height attributes blank. By doing so, you’ll slow down the browser rendering of the page, since it doesn’t know how much space to give for each image.
5. Slice Your Images: Slicing doesn’t actually reduce image size (in fact, it increases the overall size). However, it does increase the apparent load time by making each slice appear one at a time rather than one big image popping up after it downloads.

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Tags: 25 Ways Series Web Marketing Website Conversion Tips Website Usability

E-tailers have a lot to learn from traditional retailers. It seems that well-known eCommerce sites get away with atrocious usability mistakes simply because the internet as a shopping medium is growing so fast. Web managers may think that because sales numbers are up they must be doing everything right. For many online stores, nothing is further from the truth. Below I’ve listed what I consider to be the worst practices of eCommerce sites these days.

1. Requiring Login to Order: I would agree with Get Elastic’s Linda Bustos that this is one of many e-tailers’ favorite usability mistakes. Requiring registration is very obnoxious, especially when you have yet to establish any relationship with a retailer, and you have not idea if you’ll ever purchase again.
2. Not Showing Shipping Prices Upfront: I’ve abandoned dozens of online orders because of this. Sure, asking for the customers address may ensure a more accurate shipping cost for you, but its not worth losing a customer over. In my opinion, the best practice is to simply base your shipping costs on the merchandise total. It might not be the most accurate way, but if you average it out, it works great.
3. Vague, Hard to Find Return Policies: For me, returning products to an online retailer is right up there with getting my teeth drilled. Don’t make the process worse by hiding your return policy deep within your site or requiring your customers to jump through hoops to complete the process. Rarely do e-tailers make their return policy a selling point or competitive advantage. Wherever I can, I like to use the words “No-Hassle Return Policy” to reassure the customer that the process is quick and easy.
4. Poor SEO: Build it, and they will not come, unless your eCommerce site is on good terms with Google. Retailers tend to forget that search engines are the highways and byways of the internet. An eCommerce site not optimized for search is equivalent to a brick and mortar store conveniently located underground.
5. Poor Product Descriptions: Your product descriptions are the closest thing you have to an face to face salesperson. Make them work for you. Improving your product descriptions is one of the easiest, yet most neglected ways to improve your online sales. If your product catalog is large enough to justify hiring a copy-writer, than do it. If not, hire someone on the side to write your copy.
6. Lack of Filtering & Sorting: Imagine yourself walking unto a used car lot. What do you ask the salesperson in order to narrow down your options? You’ll likely say something like “show me all the vehicles this color, with this amount of mileage, or this make and model.” The same principle should be applied to your product department pages. Don’t overwhelm your audience with too many options. Let them filter down by criteria such as colors, sizes, or brand. Also, let them sort the listings by price, newness, popularity, etc.
7. Hard to Find Checkout Button: Imagine not being able to find the checkout lane at a grocery store. Many online stores assume shoppers know that the shopping cart is the first step of the checkout process. To prevent confusion of your customers, always have a clear “checkout” button visible on every page.
8. Poor Merchandising: If you owned a brick and mortar store, I’m going to bet you would walk your aisles every day to ensure your products are merchandised properly. Yet I think website owners expect their online stores to run themselves, and rarely take time for this important audit. Once a day, try to shop your store as if you were going to buy something. I’ll bet you’ll find one or two things out of place.
9. Getting too Personal: Do you really need your customer’s date of birth to complete an order? Even asking for information such as email or telephone number may arouse suspicion in your customers. Ask yourself an important question for each additional form field you add, “Is this worth losing a sale over?”
10. No Calls to Action: Don’t just assume your visitors will click on your image maps or “Click Here” links. Make your call to action buttons big, bold, and unmistakably clear. Every page of the conversion funnel (landing page to department page to product page to checkout) should clearly define the next step in the process.
11. No Error Reporting: From a technical point of view, it’s very simple to setup error notifications when certain unexpected events occur on your website. Montastic offers a completely free website monitoring service. In addition, ask your webmaster to setup email alerts for every time a 500 (internal server) error or 404 (page not found) error occurs.
12. Inaccurate Cross Sells: Embarrassing cross-sells can sometimes lead to more than just more than just missed opportunities. If your system for suggesting add-ons, cross sells, or up-sells doesn’t work, you’re probably better off not using it.
13. Unreachable Customer Service: Online retailers are typically not famous for their customer service. Phone numbers and emails should be listed prominently on every page. Responses to customer requests should be prompt and courteous. In a previous post, I outlined 25 tips for improving your online customer service.

I’m sure I didn’t mention everything, so be sure to leave a comment with your thoughts or experiences. 

Like the tips listed above? Get 3 of your own…

About PWM

Justin Palmer offers expert eCommerce consulting and SEO consulting in Orange County, California. Justin also has written an e-Commere e-book entitled The e-Commerce Roadmap.

Why do we hate car salesmen? Simple, we don’t trust them. It’s not that we don’t want the car, we just don’t find the salesman’s claims to be credible. Because of the lack of face to face interaction between you and your website visitors, customers will judge your company based on your website. Your products may be incredible, but if your site isn’t credible, you’ll never close the deal.

Below I’ve listed my top 5 tips for improving your website’s credibility.

1. Clean, Professional Site Design: Nothing says amateur more than an ugly or unprofessional website design. It’s painfully obvious when websites are designs by “techies” rather than graphic designers. While it’s certainly possible to go overboard with graphics, they are none the less important.
2. Personal Contact or About Page: More often than we realize, customers use contact or about pages to determine whether your company is reachable and or credible. Make sure you prominently display contact information on your contact page. In addition, you may want to add a personal touch by showing pictures of your customer service staff with their direct contact info.
3. Trust Logos: Secure logos from your SSL provider, Hacker Safe, or BBBOnline can go a long way to show credibility.
4. Privacy/Security Page: Display your privacy policy (you do have one, right?) for your customers to review. Assure them their information is kept safe and secure. Allow them to validate your SSL with click-through verification (most SSL providers offer this.)
5. Unfiltered Customer Reviews: If your site sells products, I would highly recommend allowing customers to review them. While it’s tempting to remove negative customer reviews from the site, they can be a great way to convince your customers that you are open and transparent about your products.

I hope you foundthese suggestions useful. Be sure to leave a comment if you have any other ideas.