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 […]
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) […]
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. […]
There are various ways that social media is slowly being adopted by online retailers. It’s becoming increasingly common to find facebook, twitter & blogs on ecommerce sites, and “share this’ bookmarking & product reviews seem fairly standard now on product pages. Apart from product reviews where there’s a proven link to increasing conversion rate (79% […]
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) […]
I met with with owner of this clothing website which, (amongst many other issues!) has a strange background colour choice. Apparently this was chosen to be a bit different from “all the other websites” using white. Of course it’s tempting to point out that if most websites are doing something, especially the major ones, it’s […]
I’ve encountered various companies where having an ecommerce website was seen as a threat to other channels in the business – either conflicting with other retail channels (“you’re stealing my customers!”) or conflicting with wholesale channels (“why should I buy from you when you’re selling direct?”). Perhaps people who are used to meetings and sales […]
I seem to be noticing more and more online shops not using breadcrumbs in the navigation. For example radley.co.uk has no breadcrumbs net-a-porter.com shows you where you are up to the product summary level using the sidebar menu (although it’s quite subtle), then there’s nothing on the product detail page moss.co.uk using breadcrumbs up until […]
This is a good summary of the role of title tags and domain names in Search Engine Optimisation. I would add also, click-through-rate will be improved with better title tags and meta descriptions: If your title tag just says “Welcome” and your competitors nicely describe their products, which one is more likely to be clicked […]
A new study of 1,500 consumers’ experience of shopping for gifts online found that the majority were continuing to experience ‘virtual’ queues at online shops in the run up to Christmas. 80% of shoppers encountered slow working websites around Christmas and 30% believe that websites perform more slowly in the run-up to the holiday season. […]