This is a fantastic article – So true, I could have written it myself…
I particularly like the closing paragraph:
Management must realise just how complex a job it is [managing a website] and ensure you have time dedicated to its execution. Perhaps you should print off this article and give it to them.
With a specialist website, selling one product or category of products, thinking early on about the best way to present products can be beneficial. Not only will you improve usability and conversion rate from the start but it’s an opportunity to make the site stand out from competitors, both the not-as-well-designed specialist shops and the more general retailers using the same layouts to sell a huge variety of different products.
Two contrasting examples I’ve worked on are cutlery and umbrellas.
In the first example, Viners cutlery, I was responsible for the design. Through looking at other websites selling cutlery (good and bad), and understanding patterns of sales through the company’s other sales channels, I made sure each cutlery range was presented with a means of ordering cutlery sets and loose pieces all on the same page (without having to go back and forward to the shopping basket).
Hence this page…
… is the same in terms the product hierarchy as this page…
The difference being, a customer is much more likely to purchase more than one product from a range of cutlery (e.g. some knives and some forks, or a cutlery set and some extra teaspoons). With cookware, it’s less likely a customer would want to purchase more than one saucepan. And there’s more detailed information on a saucepan on the product detail page a customer would want to see before making the purchasing decision.
In my second example, Fulton Umbrellas, my involvement was much further down the line, when the design was almost complete. The first design I saw showed around 10 umbrellas on the womens page, mostly black and with technical descriptions like Superslim-1 and Open and Close – 3. This was the way the company presented the range to trade customers, but obviously not the optimal way on B2C online shop; because consumers don’t know the difference between a Superslim and an Open and Close, and because a consumer looking at that page wouldn’t know unless they clicked on it that the black umbrella pictured came in 10 different designs.
Unfortunately the ecommerce platform chosen was limited in the filter and sort views available; the ideal solution would have been to allow the customer to view by type, by colour, by pattern, by price etc. however, the least-bad option for launch was to show all the products.
Most online shops standardise the dimensions of thumbnail images – for obvious reasons of neatness. In fact, by default most thumbnail images are either square or slightly portrait.
But what happens if you have a wide range of products and hence images – long and thin products, and short and wide products? How do you maximise the impact of the images whilst avoiding a lot of white space?
Two solutions I’ve found are:
The Holding Company – all images are 170px width, but heights range from 100px to over 300px. This works because the images are vertically-centered on a background colour, balanced with a large text box at the bottom.
Moss.co.uk – images are all the same width 185px and either 429px tall (full length – suits and trousers) or 215px (tops and accessories). Within each category images are likely to be the same type, so there’s a uniformity – you either look at all the suits together, or all the shirts together. An exception is the search results (e.g. I searched for “blue”products), but the designers have obviously weighed up the benefits of large, full thumbnail images vs the likelihood of seeing slightly messy search results. Besides, search results by default group the types of products together, and even price-based results will group similar products e.g. suits together.
I’ve been discovering how fantastic WordPress is – not just for blogging but as a CMS and also as an ecommerce solution.
www.exclusivef1experiences.co.uk is a little site I’ve designed from scratch, offering around 20 products (tickets to the Monaco 2010 Grand Prix) for sale using PayPal payments.
This uses a free plugin (WP Shopping cart) which is so easy you can literally set up a new website with a product for sale in 5 minutes as the video below demonstrates. Once I’d mastered the basics of WordPress, ExclusiveF1Experiences took me about a day to set up.
The basic WP Shopping cart plugin only allows you to list products, not as a grid, and I think would really only work for up to 20 or so products. However, the there are inexpensive upgrades to allow more flexibility, and with or without programming skills there’s a huge amount of scope, and sites listing 100s and 1000s of products using it – as this showcase demonstrates.
These are two important aspects of managing an ecommerce site which may not be top of your list when developing a new online shop. But thinking about these as early on in the design process (or better still when selecting an ecommerce platform) will bring immediate benefits and save time and expense later on.
1. Promotions & merchandising
2. Stock management
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