5 ecommerce navigation enhancements for customer experience & sales

Chris Boulanger, Online Marketing Consultant & Digital Project Manager chrisboulanger.com / @chrisboulanger

© Copyright Chris Boulanger, 2014

Ecommerce Navigation Enhancements 5 Good for your customers & your bottom-line.

Most ecommerce navigation is designed to surface as many of your offerings as possible. Everything is about hierarchy and logically descending from general to specific.

chrisboulanger.com / @chrisboulanger © Copyright Chris Boulanger, 2014

We Base Navigation on What We Carry…

But This Ignores 2 Key Truths of Our Stores.

1. 2. Some categories are more important than others (e.g. higher margins, higher conversion rates, larger order size)

Customers will spend the majority of their time and their money in a few categories (and maybe on a few products).



I’ll wager that you thought “Duh” for #1, but #2 may be hard to swallow. To understand #2, it helps to be familiar with the Pareto Principle.

“The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.” (Wikipedia)

What’s #2 About?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle


Your numbers might not be that clean cut (maybe 65/35 or 75/25). But your data will still show something like the chart to right. Top 10

Cats, 79.70%

Everything Else, 20.30%

% of Ecommerce Sales

There are Edge Cases: very small or very large catalogs, wide variation in product price that can throw off the distribution. – But you are probably not one of them.

This Principle Applies to Your Site & Customers


The Point of All This:

“If the majority of your customers shop in a few categories and the majority of your revenue comes from those categories, then your navigation’s main purpose is getting customers to those categories.


This Is a Sub-Optimal Way to Get Them There.

Click 1: Is the right place?

Click 2: Almost there.

Click 3: I think this is it.

Click 4: Finally arrived.


We want to give customers simple cues,


& Well-marked paths.


5 Ways that You Can Accomplish This


1. Order Navigation to give core customers priority.

Old Navy puts links for women, it’s core customers, at the start of it’s top navigation. If you know who your core customer is and what they want, then why not make their life easier?

bigger version on next slide.


Old Navy Example:


2. Align Navigation Options with Product Attributes Williams-Sonoma uses labels to orient users toward more specific solutions based on the selling points for their audience. Notice the sections for Materials and Brands.



Williams-Sonoma Example:


3. Be Selective in What You Show (Curate Your Internal Links) Target has thousands of categories and sub-categories but focuses attention on sets of sub-categories rather than forcing you to click on a top-category. They still link to multiple levels of the site, but the stuff they really want to sell is most prominent.



Target Example:


4. Consolidate Secondary Options

Zappos chose to group options in a separate dropdown rather than remove them completely. They focus on their main categories, but nothing is lost. Notice that they include the options from the main part of the top navigation as well as links to some deeper sub-categories.



Zappos Example:


5. Use Eye-Candy to Pull Them In

SurfStich carries the leading surf, snow and skateboard apparel brands. There audience trends younger and also wants to know what’s hot. Featuring merchandise in the navigation draws visitors to the merchandise they really want to move.



SurfStitch Example:


Key Things to Think About:

1. Who is your core customer and will they want to go? 2. What attributes of your products are differentiators or shopping

criteria? 3. What are you expecting to sell the most of? 4. Can you make lower-priority categories less intrusive? 5. What can you do to make the next click more obvious?

Thanks for Coming This Far

I hope you found this deck helpful. Remember that you can always make your site better. Nothing shown here is especially complex. In fact, a lot of it can be done with a small bit of editing to template files or a few clicks in your store admin. You can find many of these options in add-ons for Magento, ATG, WebSphere or WooCommerce. Custom platforms can find scripts to help you get started by searching phrases like “faceted navigation” , “sorted navigation” or “dynamic navigation”.



A Bit About Me: I’m a marketing consultant and digital project manager that focuses on finding high-leverage solutions, and answers for the problems of ecommerce stores and niche publishers. I always try to improve on what you‘ve got rather before suggesting something new and shiny. I still believe that the web is for everyone. That means that small shops can beat Goliaths, and big gains can be made with small, smart moves.

Visit My Website

http://chrisboulanger.com/