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View Full Version : Creative Online Store Designs



vangogh
08-10-2008, 07:56 PM
Since some of us have online shops I thought it would be fun to look at how other online stores are designed.

Design Showcase of Creative Online-Shops (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/08/06/design-showcase-of-creative-online-shops/)

There are some nice designs in there. Consider how each design is different from the usual and also note how each design aims to communicate something based on the audience of the site.

Note too how different the designs look from each other even though each site is still your basic ecommerce site.

billbenson
08-11-2008, 10:14 PM
I'll deviate a bit on this post and say some of the things you can do fairly easily with an online store that the standard packages don't provide. I won't go into great detail, but if any of these are of interest I can elaborate on them.

One of the things you need to remember with ecommerce sites is they are all database based. You can do incredible things with databases. You can follow your customers around, see what they like, see what pages are popular, extravagant searches... While it may be tempting for the newbies to use a ecommerce site builder like yahoo, you loose a lot of control and ability to do more sophisticated things in the future. Here are some of the things I do:


use the search function to build unique static pages.
modify the search page so the heading isn't "search".
use modified search pages as adwords landing pages.



edit the short product description so it contains a phrase that is used for a page heading tag.
Add a table that contains costs
Add a quote generator (enter customer quantity and part and make a quote)
generate automated emails on quoted items should they turn into orders (receipts, invoices, etc).
instant specials, price updates etc in a couple of clicks.


The world is really open to you once you have your information in a database

There are security issues, but databases open a mountain of creative and marketing things you can do. The quote generator I wrote, for example, cuts my custom quote time from at least 30 min to about 2 minutes. Thats a big deal when I need to get a quote out and the phone is ringing.

Just a couple of thoughts...