Common Mistakes in Ecommerce Design

[billbenson]

Steve, 3 layers deep and I could still have 100 products in a category. Thats why I'm leaning to categories that make the most money.

PSC, products are thousands of dollars and can be hundreds of pounds. The taking a photo option isn't really viable.

[vangogh]

Right, but when it comes to navigation you can't really put links to all those products on the home page. What I'm saying is think about how they can be categorized. Find 5 - 10 main categories and build a section of your site for each. On the home page have your main navigation link to the main section page for each category.

On the home page you could also show featured products or something similar to link to the money makers. Link directly to those products, but keep the navigational links to a minimum. I'm mostly thinking of the typical shopping cart that has 50 - 100 links down the left side and then throws in another 50 - 100 links down the right side, thinking it'll help people get to products quicker. It doesn't. It just makes any single product that much harder to find.

You could also add better search functionality to get people to specific products quicker.

[billbenson]

The products are just to extensive, Steve, to put the navigation as you suggest. At best I could put 20 categories. Some would have a few subcategories, but most would have to be nested several categories deep to find the product. A good site map makes sense, but the site visitors won't go there. The site visitors are looking for a "product". They aren't generally computer literate. They won't dig for the information. They don't know that product x is a subcategory of product group y. They only know that they need product x.

Because of the computer literacy issue, search doesn't work very well. I can be talking with someone on the phone and say put product x in the search box in the right column. They put it in the address bar and get a redirect.

The real thing that has worked is making my phone number prominent.

Just increased my adwords bid on several products. It's early, but it seems to have tripled my phone calls.

[vangogh]

I'm not buying that. You can always find a way to group things. If you're not seeing a way it's because you've become too familiar with the product to see it any other way. There's also no reason why you have to nest many levels deep.

Look at all your products and find 5 - 10 different possible categories. Then place all the products in one of those categories. You don't need to go any deeper if you don't want, though there's nothing wrong with going 3 levels deep.

Send me a PM with a link to the site. I guarantee I can come up with a handful of top level categories.

[billbenson]

Alright, I'll send you a pm.

[billbenson]

I think what I'm going to do, VG, is make a static index page. I believe the one that is there is static. I'll link to a site map that has all the categories and items under those categories on it. That gives me a whole page to dedicate to navigation. I'll put a wp directory and a catalog directory under that. I'll use the wp for product information. Since catalog is already in a subdirectory, I should be able to keep uri's from changing so I don't need to make a bunch of changes to my adwords campaign.

Make sense?

[vangogh]

It makes sense to create a sitemap page. Good for search engines too. You can make that page in WordPress if you want. You have to create a new page template and call it whatever you like and then create a page in the WordPress admin that uses that template. If you know the tags you can have WordPress create the sitemap page and I'm pretty sure there are a few plugins that will do it for you.