Effective Ecommerce Homepage Design
When it comes to your ecommerce website design, it is absolutely fundamental that you remember that you’re designing a functional, self-promoting tool for people to buy your products. It doesn’t have to be a great piece of artwork and it doesn’t have to have flash animations (although videos are shown to improve conversions). It should be clean, usable and easy to navigate – something which is easy to do along with a great design. Today I’m going to focus on the importance of effective marketing on your ecommerce homepage.
If you walk down a high street and walk past shops, you’ll very rarely see a store front without any point of sale. There’s always either a selection of products on display (usually new items), or posters promoting new/sale items, or even sometimes stickers and banners across the shop window informing passers by of great new deals. The exact same thing applies to ecommerce homepages. Think of your homepage as your storefront as this is the place where most customers are likely to start when browsing your site. You need to ensure that these people are not just passers-by…
Homepage Promotions
Including promotions on your homepage is a perfect way of not only putting your best, latest products right in front of your customer, but it is also a way of potentially generating excitement for the customer. They may have come to your site for a book, now they’ve found out you’ve got the same book brand new in paperback. Below is a diagram of where I would likely place these types of promotions in a homepage design:
A few rules that I would recommend are:
- Use promotions that are beneficial to the customer such as ‘On Sale’, ‘Bestsellers’ and ‘New Items’ – don’t put just anything on there. Show off your best and most influential products.
- Put the promotional area at the top of the page, above any text content. This is the most important thing and it’s what the customers should see first.
- Use special prices – score out the RRP or old price and actually show the customers how much they’re saving (right).
- Don’t overcrowd this area – I would recommend two rows of promotions (as above) with about 4 products on each. Any more than this and you start to dilute the products you’re promoting too much.
Free Shipping
If your website offers free shipping and you’re not shouting it from the rooftops, you’ll lose out on hundreds of potential sales. Free shipping is a big deal in ecommerce as quite often the shipping rates cancel out the online discount. Then the whole benefit of shopping online to save money crumbles to the ground. I would have it in the header AND in the sidebar somewhere (maybe even remind the user on the product page). Anything that promotes free shipping is a huge contributor to your store’s success.
Navigation Menu
Finally I’d just like to stress the importance of the navigation menu. There’s should be somewhere on the page a menu dedicated to the categories of your shop. When I say dedicated I mean dedicated. Don’t put any other links such as home, about us or contact us in there – the customer is only interested in products. It’s widely considered from a usability standpoint that a customer should be able to buy your product in under 3 or 4 clicks. From the homepage, so don’t bury your products in layers upon layers of categories and sub-categories. I would suggest about 10 top-level categories, up to 10 subcategories within these top-level categories and then products. That’s a far as it should go. The clicking process will then be like this:
- Click on top-level category
- Click on subcategory
- Click on product ‘more info’ button
- Click on ‘Add to cart’ – perfect
What I’m basically saying in a round-about way is that your ecommerce shop is a promotional tool as much as it is software for allowing online purchases. Make the best of use of the types of functionality I’ve mentioned above and make yourself an sales-optimised website. In future posts in the Magento Blog, I’ll be providing tutorials on how to set up best-selling / new products that can be manageable by the user. Thanks for reading.
I think free Shipping is always an opportunity Online Sellers should think about. But you made some good examples in your “Homepage promotions” part…also don’t forget to add quality content to your product pages! Unique content will help your product page to rank better in the search engines and will of course help your customer to find information about the product different from typical manufacturer information.