What should be above the fold on an e-commerce site? | Blog | Ec As a number of usability studies have shown recently, the fold on a webpage doesn't have to be a barrier to users, and people are willing to scroll down to see more. However, the area above the fold is the first thing visitors to your website will see, so what should be above the fold? Here are a few suggestions, with e-commerce sites in mind... According to this insightful article from cxpartners, having watched more than 800 user testing sessions, the fold was only seen to be a barrier in three of them, which is a pretty convincing statistic. Of the three cases where the fold was seen to be a barrier, a strong horizontal lines across the page, roughly around the fold area, was the culprit. It's clear that the majority of web users are used to scrolling to see more content. Why is the area above the fold still important? This is what new visitors will see the first time they arrive at your website, and will have an influence on whether they decide to explore further or not. Homepages
Magento Feature Analysis Series, Part 1: Analytics and Reporting | Blue Parabola, LLC The new kid on the PHP e-commerce block, Magento , has gotten a good amount of attention leading up to and since its initial release. I was recently entasked with doing an analysis of its features and thought it might make for an interesting series of blog posts. This first one will cover the Analytics and Reporting feature set. If you're not familiar with Magento, this series won't assume much prior knowledge. If you need to get familiar with Magento, this series might help you, but I recommend checking out the Resources area of the main web site, the Guide to Programming with Magento book available from php|architect, or their official Magento training course . Administrator Action Logging Some time after the initial release, Varien began offering an Enterprise Edition of Magento. In the case of Analytics and Reporting, this restriction applies to logging of administrator actions. Google Analytics Integration Admin Dashboard for Report Overview RSS Feeds Accounting Reports Wrap Up
Increasing Online Sales: Simple Usability Problems To Avoid « Sm Advertisement When designing an online store, you have to consider many different types of customers: repeat customers, first-timers, people in a rush, etc. One thing that would help all of them is optimum usability. You can achieve this in a variety of ways, starting with eliminating the most common usability problems from your website. 1. A solid information architecture can do wonders for people who enjoy browsing, but some customers just want to find what they’re looking for, buy it and get out. A great example of a prominent search box is the one on Overstock.com. Imagine stopping at a grocery store on your way home from work to pick up some pine nuts for your world-famous pesto sauce. Get Satisfaction has a prominent search box with a hardly usable drop-down menu. Also, make sure that the user can actually use the search functionality and will not be confused or irritated by design elements surrounding the search box. How to Fix It 2. This dovetails with the last point. 3. 4. 5. or
Magento-News The 37 things I want to see on a product page | Blog | Econsulta I’ve been working on a new community-orientated startup lately, which also has an e-commerce / marketplace element to it. As such it needs some beautiful product pages. Product pages are absolutely crucial to the success of your website. They often double up as a landing page, and they must tick all of the right boxes to boost conversions (and reduce bounce rates). However, product pages on a community-powered websites need to go the extra mile. They must help convert visitors into customers, but they must also engage and drive interaction. For my new site the thinking is very much along the lines of 80% community / 20% marketplace, and I believe that viral functionality (and related information) on product pages is essential. Perhaps we should start by figuring out what the essentials are. Product pages must include shipping details, yet many online retailers hide this information in the checkout. So what needs to be on the product page? Who loves ya baby?
Search Til You Drop: Google Launches Hosted Commerce Search For Searching retail sites can be frustrating at times. While many retailers try to present product search in a visually appealing way, search can often be slow or difficult to refine. Tonight, Google is making a huge play in retail space with the launch of Commerce Search, a hosted enterprise search product to power online retail stores and e-commerce websites. Google offers a general hosted search product that is used by organizations that want to add customized Google search functionality to their websites. Google is now entering the vertical space, by the first tailor-made enterprise product, with retail optimized space. Speed: Google promises “ultra-fast speed and accuracy” by leveraging Google’s search technology to provide sub-second response time to customer searches on retail sites. One of my bones to pick with Google Commerce was that it’s interface may be to simple for retail sites like Saks, Bloomingdales or others who tend to display products in a more visually appealing way.
23 Excellent Examples of How to Design Online Stores - Inspect E 3rd August, 2009 Tom Kenny Articles Online stores can often be confusing and hard to use which can turn potential customers away. There are some very simple things you can do to keep your users focused on your site. CafePress Good use of top navigation, highlighting the relevant section that the user is currently viewing. The Mozilla Store The Mozilla Store creates a fun, creative feel to their online store with related sketches in the header and clear navigation on the left makes it easy to find products. HMV’s store almost jumps out at you due to the shadows either side of the content. Nerve Music Store Nerve uses an unconventional method of dragging items to the shopping cart on the right but a big ‘Drag Stuff Here’ button above the cart instructs users what to do. Taste Book Taste Book gets across the message of what it is very clearly on the homepage followed by a big distinctive button indicating that it’s free to join. Blooming Gorgeous Flowers General Robots Bambino Direct Blooming Direct
Could Your Multichannel Marketing Do More? Today, while many retailers conduct business in multiple channels—brick-and-mortar stores, Websites, catalogs and call centers—few are adept at coordinating the various channels. That is their loss—literally. In the early days of online shopping, the big retail chains were slow to invest in an e-commerce channel because they thought it would cannibalize their store sales. Multichannel retailers (with retail chains or catalog/call centers) accounted for 56% of the Web sales generated by the Internet Retailer Top 500 Websites, and the magazine estimated that the sales of the 500 largest Websites represented 74% of total sales by online retailers in 2008. Shop.org and Forrester Research also reported that multichannel retailers outperformed Web-only merchants in growing online sales, with 68% of multichannel retailers showing Web sales growth in Q1 2009 over the year before, versus only 39% of Web-only retailers. “Of all the different types of cross-channel shopping behaviors,” says Mr.
CHART OF THE DAY: Amazon Runs Away With Retailing Japan’s Rakuten: Can The Biggest E-Commerce Site You Never Heard The term “e-commerce” still lacks a universally valid definition, but even if you just bundle B2B and B2C transactions under it, it’s a multi-trillion dollar business globally. Last year, Nielsen found [PDF] 86% of the global web population made an online purchase already (North America: 92%). For the US alone, B2C sales are expected to grow from $130 billion this year to over $200 billion by 2013 (excluding travel). In North America, Amazon is the 800-pound gorilla in the B2C arena – by very, very far. Amazon is active in Japan for a good reason: In its last report [JP, PDF], the Japanese government said the country’s online B2C sector grew by 21.7% to over $55 billion in 2007 on a year-on-year basis. Now it seems Rakuten wants to take its global plans (laid out numerous times in the past) to the next level, with CEO Hiroshi Mikitani saying just this weekend he wants to see his company generating $1 million in daily sales outside Japan by the end of this year. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Monetization for the Masses from PutACart, a Shopping Cart for t Sometimes, all you need is a MySpace profile and a dream. And a shopping cart. For casual Internet users who are all over the social web but don't have the knowledge, resources, or desire to set up and market full online storefronts, there's PutACart, which democratizes the long tail of e-commerce, allowing users to peddle their wares from a plethora of the most popular social destinations online. The PutACart setup is simple. Here's what the carts look like on Facebook, MySpace, and WordPress, respectively: Since this is for casual social-web users, Paypal is the only payment method for both buyers and sellers. Mostly, though, it's a great idea with a kind of bad interface. Also, the message sent out after a Paypal purchase is confirmed should without question be customizable. Also, this is a test store, so please don't try to buy anything I've posted!
ToldYa’s Social Media Storefronts: Sell on Facebook, MySpace and Online shopping and selling is just plain popular. There is a reason why so many people prefer to sell on eBay or Amazon. It's easy and it's simple. Yet the time and resources needed to open up stores on these online destinations can be extensive. In the world of social media, this makes no sense. Setting up a ToldYa store Please don't buy anything - this store is not really selling anything Creating a store in ToldYa is relatively simple, especially when compared to the alternatives. Once the store is set-up, it's all about distribution. Within 10 minutes or so, you could be selling your old clothes on your Facebook profile. The social media storefront The idea is genius, and the execution is streamlined and simple. It's not free to run a store, though. Overall though, the social widget store is an idea whose time has come.