Retail Websites

Characteristics of Retail Websites

When a shopper enters a brick-and-mortar store, she reacts to the environment, the layout of the store and the product display to make her buying decision. If she’s online and lands on a website, she’s looking for a list of functions and qualities that are not unlike those we’ve already talked about . . . they’re built into the ecommerce platform to help the shoppers understand the type of product they’re going to get at this site, find what she’s looking for (and a whole lot more), and see examples of how she can use the products you offer.

An appealing retail website isn’t about looks, it’s about shoppability. Here are some of the qualities that make an ecommerce site shoppable.

• Ease of Use. This is the number one thing shoppers are looking for in an ecommerce site: they want it to be easy to use.
• Hi-res photos. Shoppers are looking for multiple views of an item in hi-res, so they can see every detail. And we should mention that those hi-res pictures should not take a long time to load. Adobe reports that 39% of consumers will drop off if the photos take too long to load.^[1]
• Mobile-formatted site. An ecommerce site is more successful if it’s friendly to the mobile device user. In fact, Google lowered the boom on sites that aren’t mobile friendly in 2017, and they don’t get the same SEO (search engine optimization) considerations that mobile friendly sites do. That means that your site won’t come up near the top in a Google search.
• Free shipping. Is it worth it? Customers love free shipping so much that they’ll spend 30% more on average if free shipping is offered.
• User reviews. When shoppers buy a product they haven’t been able to touch and engage with, they want to hear how other users like it. Encouraging users to give reviews and featuring them prominently is important.
• Secure payment options. Not only should there be secure payment options, there should be cutting edge payment options. PayPal is passé . . . perhaps ACH, WePay and Skrill are options you want to offer. Customers are always looking for ways to keep their money and identity safe.

Yes, it should be eye-catching and visually attractive, too. For example, consider these two websites.

Which one is more inviting and easier to navigate?

These features listed above are what make the website “shoppable” and you can think of the webpage as the “store layout” of the ecommerce platform. Without good websites, your customer may not stay and shop.

Online Store Design

Layout, traffic flow and environment are an important part of the online shopping experience, and a web retailer must leverage those features of a site in order to maximize conversions.

An appealing landing page

This is like the front of the store. A good page doesn’t sell the shopper anything just yet—she’s in the “transition zone” where she’s still orienting herself. There’s no ‘add to cart’ here . . . but maybe a 25% off sign to tease her to click more.

Apple’s home page is a nice example. It has a clean look, a single product highlighted using some crisp, eye-catching colors. A tag line at the top is enough of a draw to make the shopper click more, and she does so by using a very simple top navigation menu. This is a good “entryway” for the shopper, a nice “transition zone” that orients the shopper to the upcoming experience and helps her understand what she’s going to find with the next click.

Enticing product pages

Now that you’ve “entered the store” and gotten a feel for the environment, it’s time to get a look at the store layout.

The top menu will show you what the store contains, and its layout will make the product easy to find . . . or not. Nordstrom does an excellent job of electronically “laying out” its ecommerce store for you. Here, we’ve clicked on products for women. This is anything from clothing to accessories, and you can see all those categories in one glance. A menu to the left points out new arrivals and trends like a sales person might.

It’s important to note here that the brick-and-mortar visual merchandising rule of “provide good choices but not too many” doesn’t necessarily apply to ecommerce platforms. Shoppers go online to shop when they’re looking for more choices, knowing that they can narrow them down to find just the right thing. Part of the online experience is trying to find the right pink tee shirt while narrowing the selection down from every pink tee shirt available in the world.

Now that we’ve seen all the aisles and gotten the store’s “lay of the land,” let’s go down an aisle and interact with the product:

Here we’ve decided to shop backpacks. Right now, we have all 465 items in front of us, like a great big shelf of backpacks. But we can narrow that down using the side menu to the left – breaking it down by size, material, price, color and more. Pretty soon, we’ll have a clear picture of just one or two backpacks to review.

Can we “touch” the backpack and learn more about it?

By clicking on the photo, we can take a much closer look at the backpack, getting several different views of it in the pictures to the left. Paging down a little further, you get size, weight and other details. Further down, we can read customer reviews to understand how others enjoyed and used the product.

These click-through features provide us with that in-aisle experience, where we look at, study and handle the product before we make the purchase. Here on the ecommerce platform we have to do that virtually, but the experience is mimicked well, making the shopper’s experience a memorable one.

What about other sales opportunities that go along with this Gucci bag? Can we bundle it with other items to show how it goes with the whole outfit? Nordstrom has thought of that, too, featuring this set of photos halfway down the page:

What happens when you mouse over one of the items that interests you? This:

Bundled displays, this time electronically, are aiming for increased sales conversions.

When you’re purchasing an item on Amazon, you might notice a list of items on display when you add it to your cart. Those items are titled “Customers also bought.” This is the website’s way of attempting a complementary grouping. Imagine if you bought a dozen eggs on Amazon, and then you saw a picture of bacon and, written above it, “Customers also bought . . .” Sometimes the Amazon suggestions don’t make as much sense as eggs and bacon, but it’s working on an algorithm written to share the shopping habits of people just like you.

Visual display techniques can definitely be leveraged when crafting a retail website, and they lead to higher sales conversions . . . which mean more profits for the retailer.

User Experience

The shopping experience. Brick-and-mortar retail stores are reinventing themselves to provide better, more engaging experiences for their shoppers, knowing that the physical shopping experience is what differentiates them from the crushing trends of online shopping. At the same time, ecommerce platforms are looking to up the ante on the shopping experiences they provide. Right now, most ecommerce is a bunch of pictures and a check out process that requires a credit card and a shipping address. How does it get more exciting? How does ecommerce platform A steal share from ecommerce platform B by being a little different?

User experience, or UX, is defined as the overall experience of a person using a product such as a website or computer application, especially in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use. Ecommerce platforms are looking at new ways to enhance UX to attract new customers and entice them to spend more.

Users have certain expectations when they visit a website, and those expectations should be served if a site is to be successful. Users expect that a site will:

• Load quickly
• Be easy to navigate
• Have good photos
• Have a good search feature
• Have concise but excellent product descriptions
• Offer live chat or some form of instant customer service
• Have a quick and secure checkout option

Those website UX features need to be in place if a retail ecommerce platform is going to be successful.

Of course, UX will need to reach beyond the basics in order to keep shoppers engaged with their products. Adding the clever, easy-to-understand visual display features like what we saw on the Nordstrom site is a great next step. Then, here are some new techniques being tested to enhance UX:

• Recognizing that shopping is becoming an omnichannel experience. “Omnichannel” refers to a multichannel approach to sales that seeks to provide the customer with a seamless shopping experience whether the customer is shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, by telephone or in a brick- and-mortar store. As shoppers look to purchase online and pick up in store, or shop in store and order products online while they’re there, retailers are responding by adapting to the non-linear shopping trend. Today, if a shopper walks up to the makeup counter at Macy’s and they don’t have the product she wants, they offer to place and order and ship it to her home for free. Lowe’s offers a buy-online-pick-up-in-store option that allows customers to shorten their shopping trip by purchasing online, and yet they’re still there for add-on sales in the point of sale area when they pick up their merchandise.
• Voice-activated shopping experiences. Pet specialty chains like PetSmart and Petco have something to worry about, because dog food is the number one item ordered on Amazon’s Alexa. Voice-activated shopping experiences are taking off quickly, and grocery store pantry items and pet specialty items are among the first to take a hit as people look to this easy solution.
• Subscription shopping. Dog owners love Barkbox.com, where a package of fabulous doggie treats arrives at the door monthly to dazzle the canine member of the household. Similarly, the lady of the house looks forward to her monthly delivery of StitchFix, an online retailer that offers personal stylists who build outfits for their customers based on information in an online profile. Ecommerce platforms make it easy to offer monthly, even weekly, interactions with customers that surprise and delight. Ask any Hello Fresh subscriber how easy their family dinners have become if you don’t believe me.

Retailers will continue to innovate around UX to achieve higher levels of engagement and conversion. Expect to see new and fascinating trends popping up everywhere.

Pros and Cons of an Online Store

Online, brick-and-mortar, or both? There are advantages and disadvantages to both:

Brick-and-mortar only

The advantages of a brick-and-mortar store are pretty clear. The shopper can have an entirely immersive shopping experience, where you control everything from the product he sees to the music he hears while he views it. The visual display opportunities only end with your imagination, and add on sales are easy while you have a captive audience.

The disadvantages of brick-and-mortar only are also pretty clear. Shoppers are short on time and stingy about where they spend it. If 51% of all shopping is done online, your brick-and-mortar store is capturing its tiny piece of the other 49%. Online shopping has grown every year. That means that brick-and-mortar’s piece could get smaller every year, until it evens out somewhere in our future.

Online only

The advantages of having an online store only start with capturing that 51% of all shopping. Trends favor ecommerce right now and that’s not likely to change anytime soon. Have a site that’s easy to find, easy to use, and you have conversions.

You also don’t need a large sales staff to run an online site. There are no “store hours” requiring two or three employees. And there’s no need for a building, carpeting, lighting, fixtures . . . overhead costs are pretty low, which means your profit is bigger and your start-up costs are lower.

The disadvantage of online shopping is attention span. Your shopper has little or none, unfortunately. While a customer can linger in a brick-and-mortar store for hours, allowing a retailer to leverage visual display to increase conversion, an online shopper can be on your site for a minute or less. That’s not much time to increase the ticket.

If you offer perks like free shipping, which online shoppers now look for and expect, you can also damage your margin. Large products, like bags of dog food or furniture, can be expensive to ship and if you’re assuming that cost, you’re losing money. It’s because of this that, in many areas of retail, online customers are just not as profitable as brick-and-mortar customers.

Online and brick-and-mortar together

The advantage of having both a brick-and-mortar retail location and an online store is the ability to appeal to your customer through both channels. As was mentioned earlier, shoppers are increasingly engaged in omnichannel options. They may shop online or in the store, and the more seamless you can make the shopper’s experience as they bounce between the channels, the more successful your retail business will be.

Operating online and in brick-and-mortar also allow you to appeal to a larger variety of shoppers by offering them different ways to shop your merchandise. Some customers will resist purchasing items online, preferring a personal experience. Other customers will avoid brick-and-mortar and defer online most of the time. You can capture both these audiences with both offerings.

Your website can also act as your window display. If your window display attracts customers into your store from outside on the street, your website can attract shoppers into your store while they’re sitting on their couches at home.

The disadvantage of both is that brick-and-mortar is an area of retail that’s adjusting to online trends, and retailers are finding themselves in a position where they have to shrink their store footprint to continue to be profitable. Online allows you to grab some of that business that’s being sucked out of your brick-and-mortar location, but at the same time it can be distracting. Also, your online business may attract loyal brick-and-mortar customers away, converting profitable shoppers into less profitable shoppers.