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

• can you apply a discount across all products, or certain product categories?
• how will you highlight the before/ after price and saving? On the product page and summary page?
• how will you direct customers to the promotion – on the homepage or an offers page?
• do you have products that can appear in more than one category, and how does the design/ ecommerce platform cope with this?
• if you have a sale or clearance section, do the products appear in the main sections too?
• how will you highlight new products?
• what type of voucher codes can be used – can they be product-specific, or can you exclude certain products & categories? Can voucher codes be applied to delivery charges? Where does the voucher code redemption box appear? (You need customers who have a code to be able to find it, but you don’t want to distract customers from completing the transaction)
• what type of multibuy or “gift with purchase” offers are possible and how can these be communicated?

2. Stock management

• does the ecommerce platform give a stock monitoring solution?
• do you continue to show products which are out of stock, or hide them?
• if a product is available in more than one size / colour etc. how will you denote which sizes/ colours are available?
• can you automatically show a “low stock” message (a good call to action)
• do you show availability on the product summary page? You don’t want to appear to have poor availability, but equally you don’t want to annoy customers when they click onto a product page and find the product is unavailable.
• what would happen if all the products within a category are out of stock – how flexible is the menu and or product categorisation?

This is an interesting trend from the US; businesses that operate different ecommerce sites under different brands using tabbed navigation at the top to switch between stores. For example:

I haven’t come across any major UK examples yet. Potential sites might be the Arcadia brands (Topshop, Topman, Dorothy Perkins, Miss Selfridge, Wallis, Evans & Burtons) – all very distinct online shops which don’t even link to one another. At the very least you’d think there would be a synergy for TopShop and TopMan, which are often linked up in the physical world.

Gap/ Banana Republic is another candidate but they don’t have a transactional website yet. Interestingly their US site allows you to shop online for Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy and two other brands using a universal shopping cart.
There’s a huge difference between the brands (Old Navy is cheap and cheerful, Banana Republic very expensive and Gap in the middle) but Gap Inc. obviously see a benefit for them and for consumers in tying the brands together. Rather than a branding no-no they believe “the best brand strategy is to do things that customers love, not what the brand marketers think customers want”.