This is an elegant example of offering a “collect in store” option. I think all too often “reserve and collect” on an ecommerce site can be overly complex, with too many checkout stages, an unnecessary search to locate your nearest store, and restrictions on which products can be collected from which stores. The Futon Company […]
This site, launched in 2007, is run by a subsidiary of Zara parent Inditex, ITX e-commerce Ireland. The site apparently made a loss of €692,000 during the year to the end of January 2009. Homepage/ general Initial impressions; the design is on-brand, nice and colourful. It’s clearly an online shop, and you know you’re shopping […]
This is a question I’ve been asked recently, and the easy answer is anything from £200 up to £2,000,000, with most sites I imagine costing between £2,000 and £20,000. A key factor is the scale of the site (do you have 10 products or 10,000 products) and obviously there is a wide spectrum of ecommerce […]
Hearing it might snow again, I thought I would try and buy some firewood online… It’s interesting to compare the delivery strategies of these two sites, which both appear top of the organic listings; neither website gets it right in my opinion. The first site, Onlinelogs.co.uk has good call to action (big buttons to “buy […]
This is an unusual use of .gif product images on a patterned background in an online shop – perhaps inspired this trend for web design inspired by poster design. I also like how the price (and all product text) is only shown when you mouse over the product. Not very search engine friendly, but a […]
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 […]
“Whizzy imagery out-performs ratings and reviews in Adobe survey” A survey by Adobe concluded the following are effective in increasing conversion rate. Product tours or multi-media viewing which combines guided spin, zoom imagery, videos or animations with copy (36% Visual filtering and advanced search on product features including size, color, and price (33%) User comments […]
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. […]
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) […]