5 Ecommerce Navigation Enhancements for Customer Experience & Sales

5

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

Chris Boulanger, Online Marketing Consultant & Digital Project Manager
chrisboulanger.com / @chrisboulanger
© Copyright Chris Boulanger, 2014

We Base Navigation on What We Carry…
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.


But This Ignores 2 Key Truths of Our Stores.

1.

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

2.

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


What’s #2 About?
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)


This Principle Applies to Your Site & Customers
% of Ecommerce Sales

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.

Everythi
ng Else,
20.30%

Top 10
Cats,
79.70%

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.

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 subcategories.



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


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