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Posts with e-book Tag

Navigation: The Art of Good Usability

Posted by Christina StublereCommerce, Navigation, User Experience

NavTips_Email_Body_400x200Well-designed site navigation leads shoppers straight to the items they want, much like a well-designed satellite navigation system directs drivers to their destinations.

Great site navigation helps visitors avoid wrong turns and dead ends, but poorly designed navigation has the opposite effect: Shoppers lose their way and their patience, causing them to abandon the path to purchase before the journey even begins.

As an e-commerce retailer, you don’t want your visitors to fall into even a second of frustration, or they could be lost. A staggering 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience (Econsultancy).

One challenge of creating intuitive site navigation is accounting for different shoppers’ preferences. Some visitors are familiar with your site and others are new. Some will start at your home page, while others enter your site through a product page or landing page. Certain users always start at the search box, while others strictly navigate or use a mix of search and navigation. No matter the path, all visitors want you to bring them to the exact products or information they are looking for as quickly as possible.

The design of great site navigation is both an art and a science. After more than 14 years of helping the world’s leading e-commerce retailers turn shoppers into buyers, experts at SLI Systems have gathered an array of best practices to speed the path to purchase for shoppers in every industry, which we share in our “Big Book” series.

Our newest release of “The Big Book of Navigation Tips” includes more than 50 site navigation tips to help you lead your shoppers straight to their desired destinations.

Topics include best practices for:

  • Overall site design
  • Integration with ratings and reviews
  • Refinement display
  • SEO
  • Merchandising
  • Smartphones and tablets

Download your copy today and stay tuned to this blog for more articles about site navigation in e-commerce.

Learn to Entice Shoppers with Great Content

Posted by Dawn MortenseneCommerce, Site Search, Site Search Tips, Success Stories

Want to drive e-commerce sales, plus bring customers to your site instead of going to competitors’ sites or Amazon? Think content. The creative use of content can give your customers a unique and memorable shopping experience – one that creates powerful brand loyalty and moves customers along the path to purchase.

ContentWPscreengrabIn our new e-book, “Use Creative Content to Convince Online Shoppers to Buy,” you’ll learn how e-commerce sites can increase conversions by creating remarkable content – social media posts, videos, blogs, infographics and more – and then bringing that content into their search results.

As I explain in today’s post on Ecommerce Outtakes, some online shopping decisions are easy, like finding a new water filter using the replacement number. But many online purchasing decisions – buying clothes, shoes, electronics, toys, etc. – are made through closer scrutiny of product details and non-product content, like Instagram photos of real product users or a how-to video showing what can be done with the product.

Such content can really help convince a browser to click the “Add to Cart” button. Consider this sampling of advice from the e-book:

  • Always add photos to your blog or social media post to catch readers’ attention through visuals as well as content.
  • If you’re an online retailer that sells any kind of food or kitchen product, it is a no-brainer to add a recipe section to your e-commerce site.
  • A standout site search is especially critical for retailers with products that don’t lend themselves to very specific searches.

The new e-book features many more tips, along with success stories of companies who have used content to increase conversions, including e.l.f. Cosmetics, FTD, King Arthur Flour, Kidrobot and others. Click here for a free download.