One of the most important elements of any successful ecommerce website is ease of use. Website visitors are very task oriented. They must be able to find what they are looking for quickly and easily. This holds true whether your customers know exactly what they are looking for or not. For example, a shopper might want to buy a gift for a business colleague but they don’t know what they want to buy or what options are available. On the other hand, your shopper might be looking specifically for “black rain boots”. In either case, your products must be easy to find or your potential customer will move on to the next website.
- Integrate site search features. Website keyword search is a great feature no ecommerce website can do without. This is a quick way to locate products by keyword and used most often by customers who have some idea of what they are looking for and want an easy way to jump right to it. Note: When entering your product descriptions, make sure you think about what words people might use to search for that particular product and include those words in the product title and descriptions.
- Make sure your products and product categories are clear and unambiguous. The category labels should be general enough to encompass what they contain but specific enough so customers are not left guessing about what they will find there.
- Consider using subcategories if you have a large number of products in your top-most category. Subcategories are a great way to further organize products and help visitors drill down and narrow their search.
- Minimize the number of products in a single category or subcategory. When you reach the product listings themselves after drilling down the category hierarchy, you should have not more than 20 – 50 products listed. If you have more than that, consider refining your list with additional subcategories or find a better way to organize your top level menu items.
- Think about your categories and subcategories as file folders. The information needs to be intuitive with an easy to understand naming system. As you click through the subcategories to narrow your search, the number and types of products should be smaller and more specific.
- Consider organizing your products in multiple ways. For example, you can have categories for specific Brands or Sale/Clearance items in addition to traditional product categories by type.
- Use your keywords in your product category and product names to make it easy for search engines to find and index your products.