Easy to buy E-commerce site design Tips

Nadja Vol. Ochs
February 15, 1998
The most important thing to remember when designing an E-commerce site is to make it easy for your customers to buy. When I write this article I am designing an E-commerce site, I have learned some skills, can help you in the E-commerce site design success.

Tip 1: Make it easy to buy

This technique may seem vague and ambiguous, but it is indeed the most important suggestion. You need to put yourself in the customer's shoes to test your design. List the issues that may hinder the user's successful purchase. Ask yourself questions, just like the following:

How many pages and how many clicks does it take to complete a purchase?
How much information does the customer initially need to fill in relative to the second purchase?
Can you complete the quick purchase directly on the homepage?
How does the site provide clear instructions for storing options before the transaction is completed?
How does the site communicate well with the user?
Can the site confirm the user's behavior and provide clear, concise feedback for the user's purchase behavior?
Can a user collect multiple entries before committing?
Tip 2: Make a strong first impression

E-commerce must make a strong first impression. This is the focus of your company contacting users and persuading them to start buying. Offering your store's logo is the first and most important thing. Second, it is important to provide a clear and vivid definition of the type or category of your store. All of this can be done with tabs or in the navigation bar.
The features of the lookup must also be prominently placed near the company logo or at the top and bottom of almost all pages. Consider highlighting special items on the homepage to stimulate customers ' desire to buy. Provide a link to the story of your product to provide instructive information and can add to the appeal.

Tip 3: Minimize interference: Advertising is not necessarily always necessary

You can consider the entire purchase process on your homepage and elsewhere without providing any advertising. Remember that the purpose of your homepage is to encourage purchase and shopping. You don't want to block and lose them because they click on another company's ad.
If you want to advertise, add the characteristics of your own product to the customer's shopping basket in some way. Ideally, those products are linked to the customer's personal information, so customers tend to buy them, and they may find it convenient to shop on your site.

Keep your customers focused on the products your company offers unless you have complementary relationships with other companies. Recently, I noticed that http://www.expedia.com/and http://www.barnesandnoble.com/have a link to each other's storefront from their respective homepage. This is a good cross cooperative advertising strategy to encourage complementary business situations. For example, if I buy Tahiti's honeymoon ticket, I might be interested in buying books about the South Pacific. You must be as smart as possible to pick the ads you want to put on your home page, and not to display ad banners casually.

Once customers fill their baskets and want to pay their bills, it is important to exclude distractions. Eliminates extraneous buttons and navigation elements that prevent customers from completing the shopping process.

Tip 4: Personalize

Are you looking for a way to build a very harmonious relationship with your customers? You can provide personalized service to customers after they are registered as a shopper or member. Use this information to provide personalized greetings on the homepage or in different sections of the page.

Welcome, Nadja, I wish you a happy shopping.

You can also provide a private space that requires a password, where each customer can check past orders, order status, list of requirements and gift certificates, and so on.

I can't find the design information about personalization. To learn more about personalized development information, visit http://www.15seconds.com/and http://www.siteserver.com/; to get a more in-depth understanding of Microsoft Site Server personalization, read Rob Howard collated professional Site Server 3.0 Personalization and Membership (http://www.microsoft.com/sbnmember/freebies/ books.asp).

Tip 5: Avoid lengthy instructions

If you need to include a long speech to illustrate how to use a site and make a purchase, it's time to redesign. Users need to rely on the fewest instructions to complete a quick purchase without even having to explain. Most customers will not read long descriptions and will turn away in confusion.

The http://www.urbandecay.com/website uses a unique interface program to depict images and representations of their products. I like this site, only to find a need to improve the place. Site administrators may want to consider how to remove lengthy instructions for adding items to a shopping basket. When I first used this site, I did not read the instructions, click the image below is not obvious:



Add items to the shopping basket, and the following methods are more effective.
Add to Shopping basket

Tip 6: Provide a visual clue to the location

For a few different parts of the store, it is important to create a sense of a different location. You can do this by changing the color of the navigation bar or background page by using text or graphics to provide different headings.

The http://www.etoys.com/site does a lot of work to provide visual clues for each section. Note the navigation bar color and the color change of the background page for each section. This is a simple visualization technique that can be easily added to a standard web design to maintain unity and distinguish between different parts of a site.

Barnesandnoble.com has a successful site for selling books, software and magazines. Note that this design places different parts at the top of the page. I suggest that they create more visual distinctions to differentiate between these parts. Currently, only the graphic titles are changing, and in addition, each part looks too similar to the other parts.

Tip 7: Display the product

If possible, provide photos for each item. Process photos with three dimensions: Min, medium and large. A minimal photo is best used for a list of several products. At the level of a single product, provide a medium sized image and click to view an enlarged version of the product image. Larger images are unnecessary, but if the details of your product are not reflected in the smallest or medium photos, it is worth considering a larger image.

The more you supply the details about your product, the better. If you have a long Web page on your product, make sure you have the option of buying or adding to your basket or cart at the top and bottom of the message body.

Tip 8: Focus on the image

One way to make each page bright is to change all of the images used for normal text to be applied to HTML text. Another approach is to reduce the size of individual product image files. Most product images are continuous-tone photographs. Therefore, the product photo should be stored as a 24-bit JPEG image. When storing JPEG files, test the quality level of your images. For example, a lower-quality setting in Photoshop will reduce file size and visual authenticity, and image quality may still be satisfying.

A small rule for e-commerce sites is to keep each page with a maximum capacity of 35k-50k. Another tip is to reuse the same graphics on different Web pages to save additional download time, increase consistency, and increase beauty. For example, you can use a minimal graphic on a Web page to represent a section, and then zoom in on that part of the page with the same graphic as the background. Or vice versa: Create a minimal image by shrinking a large image at a certain scale based on the high and wide nature of the image.

Tip 9: Stimulate the desire to buy

This can be achieved in a different way. If a product is mentioned on the homepage, place the image and details of the product next to it, sell the price and a link that can be purchased directly. In a news or feature article, directly include a link to the purchase of the product discussed in the article. Or in a column where you usually set up other company ads, create clear, focused ads for your product, and set up direct links to the product purchases that are advertised.

Tip 10: Alternating background colors in long lists

One of the best ways to make a long list more readable is to use bright background colors alternately on each line and item. If you retrieve the author name at the barnesandnoble.com site, you can see an example. The query results return a gray-and-white item background color. This technique can be written as an array in the Dynamic Server page (Active server Pages, ASP) files:

<% COLR = Array ("#FFFFFF", "#CCCCCC")%>
The array is then invoked from the table cell:
&LT;TD bgcolor= "&LT;%=COLR (x)%>" >

Tip 11: Allow users to collect items

Provide a shopping basket or a place to help customers store products before purchase. Do not allow customers to fill in lengthy payments, postings, and other forms more than once in a transaction. A link payment is provided at the product level, and a link is added to the shopping cart while the purchase continues.

A storage feature that is currently becoming popular is called a list of expectations. This feature is similar to a shopping cart, but it does not offer a purchase feature, but rather as a place to store items when you are shopping. Perhaps your list of expected products on the market when the site can inform you.

More tips

Read the beginner's column at the ecommerce site Mary Haggard, including its article on usability sure, you Built it-but They Have to use it (http://www.microsoft.com/workshop/ essentials/forstarters/starts092598.asp).