Improve navigation for increased ecommerce sales

Overcoming visitor pain points enables an e-commerce website to increase its conversion rate and improve its online sales. Factors such as landing page optimisation, shopping cart user experience and video loading times are all important, but it is a mistake to avoid or ignore the basics. Clear, effective, and beneficial navigation, for example, can mask a lot of other pain points by ensuring that your visitors always have a system to fall back on, preventing them from becoming hideously lost in labyrinthine virtual aisles of seemingly similar products.

Below are four ways you can improve your e-commerce navigation.

Autocomplete

Most of us rely on autocomplete on sites like Google, as well as on e-commerce stores like Amazon. It negates the need to type specific product names and category labels, and it reduces the time it takes for visitors to find what they are looking for.

Think about searching on Netflix, and how it not only finds relevant titles that contain the keywords entered, but also makes suggestions according to those searches. Not only is this useful for improving user experience, but it means that viewers watch similar titles even when Netflix doesn’t have the film they are looking for.

Faceted search

When you search for products on eBay and other major e-commerce sites, you have the option to search by certain features of a product. For example, search for shoes, and you can search for relevant brands, shoe sizes, and even colours. This enables e-commerce sites to make sales even when the visitor doesn’t know specifically what they are looking for. Your navigation essentially acts as a helpful store assistant.

Cookie retargeting

Cookie retargeting offers convenience by the bundle load. If you use a site like ASOS to regularly buy men’s clothes, when you next visit, it will use cookies stored in your browser and automatically return you to the men’s clothing pages. You don’t have to search again, unless you are looking for something different, and ASOS can make some impulse sales in the process.

Search boxes – big, bold, and easy to find

The search box is basically a catch-all. If your navigation bar doesn’t provide the results that a person wants, or if they are in a rush and don’t have the time to navigate through categories, sub-categories, and individual pages, they will turn to the search bar. Ensure that yours is big, bold, easy to spot, and easy to use.

Incorporate autocomplete and faceted search and offer feature-rich search to further benefit site visitors.

If you want to learn more about improving your e-commerce navigation, get in touch with us today.