Ecommerce Design Best Practices Series – Back to Basics

Ok, time to fess up.  I have done a bunch of shopping lately.  All sorts of birthdays, an au pair arriving and a corresponding need to outfit a new bedroom, vacation prep, lots to buy. (Yes economy, you should be thanking me.)  My shopping has brought me face to face with all sorts of new ecommerce sites.  Well, some of the sites are new and some are new to me.  Looking at all of these sites has been a good reminder that while lots of sites are doing ecommerce functional design very, very well many still aren’t doing it right.

The world “right” in the last sentence indicates that there is a correct and an incorrect way to layout an ecommerce site.  That is intentional.  I get the concept that there are no right answers in design, but I respectfully disagree. When it comes to designing a transactional site where you want to convert visitors to customers, there are rules and conventions and you need to adhere to.

So, starting later this week, I am going to kick off an ecommerce back to basics series.  I will break the website into different sections and discuss basics for functional design.  You don’t have to be Amazon to get this right (as a matter of fact, I will risk shocking my masses into silence by saying that Amazon does some stuff pretty wrong.)

So, first up later this week… the ecommerce site front page.  Stay tuned.

Erika