How You Shop In Stores Can Help Your eStore: Catalog Organization and Faceted Navigation in Ecommerce
The world of ecommerce has many parallels to your traditional brick and mortar retail stores. The terms cart, checkout, and customer service all have been borrowed from retail land and transported into your webstore.
In Gorilla’s experience there is one common aspect that lags behind your traditional stores’ shopping experience, catalog product organization.
I’ll take you through an example.
If you were in a sporting goods store and you wanted to buy a pair of mesh basketball shorts. You know first to go to the apparel department, bypass the ski jacket racks and go to the basketball section. Now when faced with 5 or so racks in front of you, what do you do? Do you want Nike shorts? You would search by brand and ignore the Reebok side. Do you want a color that matches your intramural team’s logo? Scan the hangers and look for Kelly green shorts. Are you on a particular budget? Start at the clearance rack and make your way around reaching for the price tags as you go.
In an ecommerce world this flow would be as simple as clicking:
Homepage>Apparel>Basketball>Shorts>Green>Less than $30 – In a matter of seconds you have completed the same process – makes sense, right?
Even though this seems like second nature to all shoppers in store, many ecommerce sites, especially those on legacy ecommerce platforms (3-10 yr old) have not thought about overhauling their catalog structure to include faceted (drilldown) navigation, or are simply limited by the platform.
Faceted navigation on ecommerce sites has been proven to:
- Increase site sales
- Decrease site bounce rates
- Increase SEO performance due to “breadcrumbs” – navigation path left behind
- Give site users a positive experience and increasing return customer rates
For more information on how to improve your site’s navigation contact sales@gorillachicago.com for a free consultation.
ecommerce faceted navigation
