Tips on Designing Your Shopping Site

   

Conventional shopping has taken the back seat and online shopping is getting popular every day. Since the competition is fierce and visitors are choosy, unless customer's browsing experience and expectations are met, long time goals and visions of any online business can't be attained. The sensitive online shoppers of late, term the simple process of collecting information as 'harassing'. Customer is the Boss! The Boss is always right!

Hopefully, your company did some market research before deciding to jump into the e-commerce world, so you should have access to some basic demographic information on your customers. Although a small part of this demographic information such as how familiar your customers are likely to be with online shopping, Internet stores and the internet in general, is helpful in designing the customer experience, most of the demographic information serves to point the way for further market research into how your customer demographic expects to use your site.

Identifying the Required and Desirable Information:
The primary method for making a site easy for customers to use is to minimize the information that a customer has to provide and wherever possible, allow the customer to choose from lists rather than type information. In the browsing experience, using this method means providing a clear enough navigation design, so that customers don't need to guess the names of your product departments. Present your departments in a list that customers can choose from. Of course, the concept of asking for as little information as possible means that customers performing a complex shopping task to take more steps to drill down to the information that they need.

Reducing Clicks:
The goal of any e-commerce web site is to get customers to the products that they want and help them check out as quickly as possible. This is the goal of commerce everywhere. Supermarkets have 'express' checkout lanes, fast-food stores have drive-thru lanes, and so forth.

The drive through, in fact, is the perfect example of a customer experience designed to reduce clicks. In a normal fast-food experience, customers must find a parking space, park, go inside, make their selections, pay, find a table, sit down, eat, throw away their trash, and leave. The drive through reduced this experience to the bare minimum number of steps necessary to complete a transaction. The customer makes their selection, pays and drives away!

The industry best practice is that, four to five clicks should place a product in a customer's basket. Customers may opt for a longer path, but it shouldn't be forced upon them. For example:

• If you list a product, you should include enough information for an informed customer to recognize that product as the one they want, including price, short description, model number etc.
• Any product listing should include a 'buy' button as well as a 'more info' button that takes the customer to the product detail page, which should also have a 'buy' button.
• If you show case 'featured products' on your site, whether in banner ads or elsewhere, you should include a 'buy' button that immediately adds the item to the customer's cart.

Design techniques like these will help reduce the number of clicks that customers must complete in order to add an item to their cart. You should examine your entire site to see if you can reduce the number of clicks that customers have to take to get to products.

Keep in mind that you also have to weigh the concern of overwhelming your customers with too many choices at once. Asking to select from a list of fifty departments is probably going too far in the name of reducing clicks and you need to break things down into some kind of hierarchy. However, remember to provide that complete list for customers who are willing to use it, because it will help them complete their shopping tasks faster.

Marketing Opt-in and Opt-out Programs:
The overwhelming success that most e-commerce companies have with marketing opt-in programs like e-mail newsletters is proof that they work. The trick is to get your site visitors to actually sign up for these programs. Marketing opt-in programs are laced with conflicting goals in this regard. Ideally, you want shoppers to provide you with as much information as possible, allowing you to better target advertising to their specific interests. On the other hand, the more information that you ask for, the more likely shoppers are to shy away from the whole thing.

Your initial opt-in signup should only require shoppers to provide a couple of basic information, such as their e-mail address and name. Your first e-mail to them can then be an offer to visit the site and fill out a short five question survey, on their interests. You may even reward them with a coupon or special discount for completing the survey. After a few weeks go by, invite them back for a slightly longer survey, with another commensurate reward upon completion. By asking for their information in small doses, you are more likely to get that information.

If you do intend to offer your customers some kind of e-mail newsletter, build your site from the start to support multiple news letters. The customer's initial signup, for example, may be for a basic, general interest news letter. As your site matures, you can offer your customers additional newsletters. By building your site to handle this functionality up front, you will save considerable time and effort in the future.

An opt-out program, which allows customers to remove themselves from your mailing list, must accompany marketing opt-in programs. Again, keep the initial opt-out simple. Make sure that any e-mails you send out contain clear instructions on how recipients can remove themselves from the list. Also, make sure your home page includes a clear indication of where visitors can go to unsubscribe.

Searching:
As with many other click-reducing techniques, the customer should be able to approach your search functionality incrementally. A basic text box search form should appear on every major page of your site, giving customers easy access to a basic search. An advanced search link, located on the main search form as well as any search results pages, should link to a complete, comprehensive search form allowing customers to perform more specific, complex queries. Search results pages should also offer a single click way to narrow the search results, to perform the same search again with additional criteria.

It is extremely important to know how the end users, who are the customers, expect the e-commerce site to work. Either expressed or implied, any e-commerce and online retail site owners need to have complete understanding and must have feelers on the customers' browsing requirements. This can be realized by analyzing the net sales, results and other statistics for a given period of time. Remember! Progress and growth are the two most important products among all other inventory of yours!