Since this final article focuses on the importance of design in the usability of ecommerce websites, let’s get back to the basics of design. To begin with, design has been defined as ‘the purposeful or inventive arrangement of parts or details’. To put it simply, design in relation to websites is an amalgamation of appearance and usability. Design more often than not defines the user experience and is important to the functionality of a product, especially when everything depends on how a product is perceived and used.
Thus in an E-commerce website, a well-defined website design will influence how the user perceives your website and spur their interest to further explore it.  

Strategic image placement

While shopping in the off-line world, you may have noticed how supermarkets create elaborate floor plans to attract your attention and ensure that you browse through all the products in their various aisles. You must do the same for your eCommerce website to attract online shoppers and compel them to browse and purchase products from you.

You can start by creating something like a window display that one would have in an off-line store. All you need to do is to strategically place images of the products you sell, for each of your departments various sections.

Audio-visual product descriptions

The image of your product should be accompanied by audio-visual content that demonstrates how your product is used and displays its features along with the user benefits. Research has proven that online shoppers are extremely video savvy and prefer viewing a product in real time, instead of merely reading the product description. By incorporating product videos on your product page, you can create a potent ecommerce solution.

Create product review and rating sections

Alongside your product image and description, your ecommerce site should also include a customer review and rating section to further augment your sales. When customers are given the liberty to rate and review your product it improves your sites credibility while allowing customers to interact with one another and delivers prospective buyers with unbiased information. Once again studies indicate that ecommerce sites which include customer reviews and ratings increase product sales by well over 25%.

Recommend relevant add-ons

Most online shoppers in the buy-mode are quite literally an easy target to gain you sales, if only you play it right. While browsing, they are most likely to click on the first link that comes their way. Hence it makes great business sense for you to place relevant product suggestions on the product page of every item they browse. For instance, if you sell sportswear, on your product page for trainers, you could suggest add-ons like a nice pair of coordinated track pants or socks to go with it. While this add-on suggestion may involve some extra scripting and require a more elaborately designed website, it is sure to benefit you with additional shopping from your customers.

Create last-minute deals

Now that the customer is heading straight towards making the payment after finalising his order via your shopping cart software’s interface, don’t leave him by himself. Continue to engage him with exciting offers. Create last-minute deals that he would find interesting and therefore difficult to resist. The last-minute deal is an extension of the earlier recommendation offer; however it’s more of an impulse purchase.
All you need to do is offer an affordable item that will again accessorise or add-on to the product that the customer is purchasing, which makes him believe that it is important to add to his shopping cart, especially at the price you are offering it to him for. Most shoppers will buy-in to this last-minute deal offer in the belief that these extra items will not make too much of a difference to the total amount.

Single-page checkout

While an ecommerce website should be visually appealing, it must also include an important usable feature of a single-page checkout. Thoroughly verify your e-commerce shopping cart solution, as the checkout process is built into it. When customers realise that they have to keep on clicking through your web store’s checkout process to make a purchase, they will certainly get bored and sign-off midway in the shopping process.

Finally, gaining greater profits is not merely about attracting more customers to purchase from you. It is much easier and advantageous to attract the same number of customers to buy more from you. As you are achieving this increased profit without paying more for additional traffic or optimizations.

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In the first article of this 3-part series on ‘Ecommerce Site Design and Usability Guidelines to Gain Sales’ we discussed how navigation plays an important role in ensuring that customers purchase products from your website. In this article, we continue to highlight additional usability areas like user-friendly links that should be incorporated in order to prevent poor merchandising and convert your website visitors into customers.

Deliver precise product information

Just suppose a website visitor has managed to narrow down your product list and discovered the product that he wants to purchase. Now, he needs to further feel comfortable that your product is the appropriate one for him based on the information you’ve provided. As an online e-tailer, you have a great advantage of displaying comprehensive product information unlike a printed brochure, which has limitations. However, the information should be conveyed in a factual, informative and interesting manner. You should refrain from merely highlighting product specs and instead focus on delving on the resultant benefits to the customer. This way, you will spur on the customer’s interest to purchase your product.

In addition, you need to place a thumbnail photograph of the product which the customer can enlarge and view from various angles.

Display product prices

The fact that your website visitor can view the price of a product, while trying to make an online purchase is often a deciding factor in converting him into a buyer. In viewing the price, he has the option to compare dealers or make a decision to purchase directly from the manufacturer. This ability has effectually been found to increase conversion rates by as much as three percent. Alternately, if the price is not displayed the customer has to go through the laborious process of clicking through to every dealer to review their price, which violates the ‘reduce the number of clicks’ thumb rule.

Ensure your credibility

While a new customer visits your website with the intention of purchasing your product; he is simultaneously filled with trepidation on several parameters, as to whether he can trust you; from delivering him value for his money, to protecting his identity despite the data you hold. He has concerns as to whether he will receive the product he purchased from you and if you are going to sell his confidential information to blacklisted sites.

You need to overcome this critical credibility hurdle by incorporating a declaration statement to the customer stating, ‘We will never give out your e-mail address for any reason.’ You further need to enhance your credibility by listing your physical address on the website as well as including a photograph of yourself and key company associates and possibly shots of your office building too.

Display out-of-stock Dealers

It is interesting to note that more than half of all customers commence their online shopping with product searches on a retailer website. This is evidence of the fact that consumers do have preferences when it comes to where to shop. Therefore it is important to include relevant dealers in your listing even if their products are out of stock. This is simply because if you do not include some dealers you could deter prospective shoppers from purchasing at your site. You can still show the dealer who stocks the product, mentioning that it is currently out of stock, giving the consumer the option to wait if he so desires.

Avoid delays during product purchase

Now, that your customer is well on his way to purchase a product from your site, you need to make the process easy for him. More often than not, several online sites end up haggling customers with questionnaires just as they are poised to give them their sale. This practice of trying to collect customer data at such a moment is less important than clinching the customer sale. You run the risk of detracting your customer and losing his trust and resultant sale. Reserve customer data collection for a later stage, after the order is placed and the sale is yours.

Finally, the potential of usability should go beyond navigation and extend to website design and placement. It is as critical as navigation in advancing usability and ensuring you bag that online sale. In my 3^rd and final article on ecommerce design and usability guidelines I look forward to sharing with you insights on the finer design aspect of ecommerce websites.

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While in the past I focussed on website design tips in general, this time round I’m packing in specific information on how as an ecommerce website owner you can increase your online sales by incorporating succinct navigation and usability techniques into your website’s design. Several research insights indicate that ease of navigation is crucial in enhancing user experience, leading customers to make purchases from well laid-out websites.

Clear navigation leads the way

As an astute marketer you can’t afford to lose your customer as he navigates your site to make a purchase. Reduce his burden of having to figure out what to do next by guiding him to the product he desires to purchase, in a way that is simple and easy. Else you stand the chance of losing out on a prospective customer and potential sale.

Review your website’s status quo

Before you embark on the path to helping your customer navigate your website, you must first review your website’s status quo. The best method to find out whether it is usable enough is to find a test shopper and sit besides him as he navigates your website. You will be surprised at what this test experience throws up. More often than not, you’ll discover that poor merchandizing, insufficient and inaccurate information coupled with lack of credibility prove to be deterrents in clinching the online sale.

Construct structured buy-paths

Generally, a customer has two obvious paths to follow – an optimal one that spurs him on directly to the sale. The other, a long-winding one includes several diversions and areas of interest, which may not necessarily be relevant to the customer. Naturally, the choice is to choose the optimal path. You must be aware that the optimal path too offers myriad possibilities like providing the customer with the option to purchase the product offline, straight from the manufacturer or online from a retailer or reseller. Ideally the customer has made up his mind in advance as to what product and path he’s interested in embarking upon. Thus if he is unable to find the path that interests him, he will out of sheer disgust discontinue his purchase process.
It takes time and effort to incorporate structured buy-paths into your site, but it is definitely worth the trouble. Along the buy-paths you can include short stops where the customer can browse through accessories, product information as well as compare products too. But remember to include a prominent link that leads the customer back on track to his original purchase.

Prominently placed product buttons

If your customers are unable to find your product where they want to, then there’s no way they are going to buy it. Your product buttons must be in easy view of the visitor and placed prominently on the homepage, making it amongst the first things a website visitor notices. It has been researched that placing product buttons on the upper left hand side of the page layout; contrasting it in colour or size from other links and supporting it with page layout design that guide the eyes toward the button works successfully.

Focus on product winnowing

You could own a site that offers customers a comprehensive product catalogue, which will definitely satisfy the requirements of a broad range of customers. However your website should allow product winnowing, whereby customers can narrow down the product search list to the desired item. There’s a possibility that if you offer the customer a little too many choices, you may end up confusing him and losing the sale. However, if narrow down your choice list, allowing the customer to easily find what he’s looking for, your sales could look promising
Your first link that throws up in a search on a product name should lead to a product description page to ensure optimal results. This will ensure that site visitors are within easy reach of relevant product resources, images and corollary buy paths.

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Until recently, website effectiveness was measured through increased traffic and Google PageRanks. The greater the number of hits your website received implied that it was attracting visitors and therefore successful. This method of measuring web traffic and ranking status has undergone a drastic change in today’s business environment; as marketing and web-savvy business professionals incorporate analytics tools to quantify their websites strengths and weaknesses. But before we get into the nitty-gritty of the latest web measurement parameters let us look at what constitutes a website’s success.

Defining web success

I believe defining website success is a very subjective issue and consists of what success means to you and your company. It can imply different things to different businesses and institutions. While, in general, success for most businesses is more often related to the profits they derive through their website, in reality it is not the case for everyone. For instance, a banking website can measure success on various fronts, from enhancing customer service, to increasing online transactions and product sales. However law enforcement agency’s website would exist to simply disseminate essential public information, while a news portal may target traffic to justify its advertising rates. Therefore, for your website to succeed, you need to develop it with the desired goal in mind and figure out the most appropriate way to measure its success.

Now let us consider the other metrics you can incorporate to effectively ensure your website’s success.

Page-views versus time-on-page

Visitor page-views per visit are an indicator of how attracted your visitors are to your website. If you’re selling products through your website, a 1 to 1 ratio is bad unless the purchase button is clicked. The amount of time people spend on your website can help you discern if they are merely skimming through your content or reading your entire editorial. Though a longer duration cannot always be taken as a guarantee of your website’s effectiveness.

Lead-in versus web views

Your website’s aim may not be product sales, but possibly you are a service company where you’d like to disseminate service-based information through your website. Based on the information visitors discover on your website, you’d like them to contact you. In this case page views will be of no consequence unless they translate into leads. You should then focus on an SEO campaign that will probably bring you 50 potential clients rather than a 1000 page views that give you no leads.

One-time versus repeat visitors

If your website draws visitors back over and over again, it implies that there’s something that attracts them to return. Casual, one-time search visitors and stumble-upon social media draws cannot be considered as a yardstick of website success.

Traffic versus bounce rate

The bounce rate is a critical usability metrics and the best part is its available free through Google Analytics. This means if your website attracted 100k visitors from StumbleUpon with a bounce rate of 95%, in reality only 5.000 actually visited your site. Therefore, a website with reduced, but targeted and quality traffic combined with a low bounce rate would prove to be more effective than a website with huge traffic numbers.

Conversion ratio

There are times when you want visitors to recommend your website, participate in a survey or campaign, subscribe to your online newsletter or merely join your mailing list for future marketing opportunities. In this case, it is essential to measure this subscriber list as it can transform from a prospect to a customer evangelist in the near future. Ensure that you keep them on your radar through possibly including an RSS feed to track, inform and convert them to customers.

There are several ways to track your website’s effectiveness – it all depends on your business goals. If you have any interesting analytic techniques that may have worked for you, feel free to share it.

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In my past posts, I have touched upon the importance of optimising eCommerce websites to attract search engines and users. As the main objective of any eCommerce website is to attract visitors to purchase products or services. Thus every eCommerce site should be created bearing this objective in mind. This time round, I’d like to focus on the necessity of conducting a thorough research and analysis while creating an eCommerce site.

A) Strategize

Do a thorough analysis of your current website design and marketing strategy and establish the areas you need to focus on. You must source information or ideas that will help in future website ranking efforts. Without an initial analysis it can be difficult in the long run to establish the outcome of your efforts.

B) Competitor analysis

Understanding your competitor’s niche is critical in enabling you to create your unique selling proposition. Study the varied keywords your main competitors are showing up under on various search engines. This will help you determine how you want to position yourself as well as select additional keywords or phrases to use on the search engines.

C) Keyword research

Everyday millions of keyword queries are carried out on search engines. Analyse different keyword and phrase combinations that are apt to include within your site copy and design elements. You can collate keyword data using industry keyword tools like Wordtracker, Overture Suggestions, Google keywords etc.; as well as through site query statistics and actual search engine queries that users use to search websites.

D) Design basics

A fulfilling online shopping experience is a fundamental requirement for an eCommerce website visitor. Visitors should be able to access the appropriate page in a minimum of one or two clicks. The focus of an eCommerce web design should primarily be about the layout. It is crucial to catch the visitor’s attention and the areas that attract them when accessing a web page. Research on this topic suggests that the middle left side area draws great attention, followed by the portion at the centre of the page. These layout techniques create a simple navigation path for the visitor.

E) 1) HTML Sitemap

Create an extensive HTML sitemap for visitors to navigate as well as for those who are disabled or use text-based browsers. Sitemaps are web pages consisting of your most important and content rich pages. A sitemap will also assist search engines in discovering all your website content, so that they can scan it to include within their search results. Large eCommerce sites have several pages that need indexing and can really benefit from a sitemap.

2) XML Sitemap

You also need to include an XML sitemap to enable search engines to regularly track your content and product updates. These sitemaps are special files that contain links to the most important sections and pages of your site. XML sitemaps can be transmitted electronically to major search engines. While dynamic sitemaps are optimal, manually updated sitemaps can also be useful. eCommerce stores that require updates of their catalogues at regular intervals must consider incorporating an XML sitemap to enable search engines to find new products and the updated old ones.

Finally, ensure that you include simple and clean navigational elements and a site search that are easily accessible. Link all your pages back to your homepage and help pages like FAQs, forums, blogs, etc. Cross-link your topical content across your website so that search engines can pass the value to other content rich pages and users can easily find the content they are looking for. Google transfers the Page Rank (PR) to other pages on a site if you link one page with PR to another page with related content.

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A well-designed search engine friendly website can go a long way in improving user experience and advancing your profitability. By focusing on facilitating a pleasant online user experience, you enable users to accomplish their goals and greatly improve your chances of retaining them as satisfied customers. The internet is replete with websites that cannot be indexed owing to poor design choice, poor url structure and back-end programming.

While it is essential for your website to be visually appealing, it is even more important for it to be search-engine friendly. Let us explore visitor and search engine friendly design tips that you can incorporate while creating websites.

Unique IP address

Every website must have a unique IP address. However, if your website is hosted on a shared platform, ensure that you have a unique IP address. Most search engines block websites that try to manipulate rankings. Thus if your website is hosted on a shared server that utilizes a single IP address for all websites on that server and a website using that address is blocked, then your website will be blocked as well.

URL keywords

Your webpage names should reflect the content of the page. You must keep page names within a reasonable length and avoid using special characters unless they form part of your keyword. URLs are a great place to showcase keywords. If you utilize a sub domain structure, sub domain names should also reflect your selected keywords.

Graphic relevance

Effective website designs balance HTML-formatted text and graphic images. Be prudent about how you use graphics. Ensure that they are relevant to your content and insert an alt tag with relevant keywords for search engines to understand, as they cannot read graphics. Do the same for your visitors, so that they can view something while waiting for the graphics to load.

Standard software use

Create the website using standard HTML. As software like FrontPage, Dreamweaver or a WYSIWYG editor will add unnecessary scripting codes enlarging the page size, making it difficult for search engines to crawl. At times such software adds codes that are unreadable by search engines, resulting in the website not getting indexed. In case you need to use these web page creator software, exercise discretion and manually avoid or delete unnecessary scripting codes.

Ensure quick downloads

It is important to make use of external Cascading Style Sheets and Java Script files in order to reduce the page size and quicken the download time. This will enable search engines to index your web page faster as well as improve your rankings.

Don’t get framed

Avoid using frames as major search engines don’t list websites that utilize frames. Try creating standard HTML non-frame companion pages that are search engine friendly. Also, input relevant text containing keywords on your FRAMESET page between NOFRAME tags for search engines to parse. It isn’t uncommon for search engines that index frame websites to link to individual, non-relevant frames. To avoid displaying individual frames, provide JS in each frame to call the parent frame when a child frame is selected. For instance, if (top == self) self.location.href = “default.asp”;)

Link back

Ensure that every page on your website links back to your homepage. Several search engines estimate pages based on the depth level within the website. Root-level pages are considered more relevant to the website by search engines than pages in subsequent levels. Create a site map page to help search engines find your content and post a link to it on your home page. Dynamic websites that don’t hardcode page links should always provide a site map.

Link colours

In general search engines read tags and are not bothered by what colour you use to define the link unless you create a transparent user link. This means that the colour used for the link is the same as the background colour. Most search engines are equipped to recognize a transparent link and will lower your page ranking for their use. So be careful not to use transparent link colours.

Customer focus

Websites must be created with designs and words that your target audience types into search queries. As meeting the target audience needs is the main reason for the origin of your website in the first place. The needs could be varied: branding, direct sales, customer retention, trust, communication and online visibility. Your site must gain the user’s trust and be persuasive enough to address those needs.

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