Ecommerce changes rapidly each year, so consumers will be expecting more from online merchants in 2011. The 10 strategies below can help accelerate your ecommerce efforts throughout next year so that you can not just meet but also surpass those expectations—and increase revenue as a result.
1) Dynamic personalization (aka collective intelligence). Your site is collecting analytics data from thousands of visitors every day, and has been for years. How much of these data are you using? Dynamic personalization puts them to use, immediately and with surgical precision. When a customer visits your site—without even logging in—his persona is defined within a few interactions, and business rules are applied to serve him relevant content and functionality.
2) Social network integration. Social networking isn't exactly new, but social shopping imperatives are constantly evolving. At the most basic level, integrating a "share" button that enables users to share your content to their favorite social networking destinations is a good first step, as is integrating Facebook "like" button functionality. At a slightly higher level of customization and effort, there are login and review/ratings integration tools such as Facebook Connect.
3) Mobile sites. During the past year, we have seen massive increases in traffic and transactions completed at client mobile sites. The age of the mobile site is truly upon us. Mobile consumers have different needs than users browsing on the desktop, and mobile devices have their own set of capabilities and limitations. A dedicated mobile site experience is a must for progressive ecommerce retailers.
4) Location-based tie-ins. The GPS capabilities of mobile devices usher in a new era of exciting location-based cross-channel promotion capabilities. Examples include promoting products that were shopped for online when the shopper is in proximity to a physical store, pushing promotions available at nearby physical locations, and providing interactive directions and pickup and availability notifications for previously viewed items. Apps such as Foursquare allow you to extend your reach by pushing promotions and specials and rewarding repeat shopping.
5) Experiential user interface. Beyond simply being easy to use, modern ecommerce sites for innovative brands can be experiential and immersive, transforming shoppers into brand loyalists by evoking an emotional reaction. For example, Lowe's Sunnyville provides a game-based metaphor for shopping for lawn and garden products and project planning.
6) Contextual visualization. Shoppers increasingly expect to visualize how a product will fit into their life and style. Retailers that allow shoppers to visualize how products look on them and match with other products they are shopping for or already own will have a significant leg up in the ecommerce marketplace.
7) Dynamic grid expansion and liquid layouts. Ecommerce sites are typically designed to work in 1024x768 resolution in order to support users with older technology. Trapping your product display in this fixed width doesn't cater well to the increasingly larger percentage of users who browse your site at resolutions of 1280, 1440, or 1600. Use liquid layouts to automatically size your product display based on the shoppers' resolution. Alternatives include showing more images at once, and dynamically scaling to larger images on both category listing and product detail pages.
We have found that the "view all" link is the most clicked link on most ecommerce category listing pages. Shoppers don't want to page through screens of products— they want to see all of them at once. Consider an infinite scroll metaphor in order to display large sets of products in a scrollable list, rather than asking shoppers to jump page to page.
8) Minimize user-interface cruft. Shoppers come to your site to see your products, not your fancy navigation systems. Yet most ecommerce sites spend a majority of screen real estate dedicated to navigation and ancillary functionality, and a minority of real estate dedicated to product. Modern ecommerce Websites will reverse the trend and dedicate 75% of screen real estate to show product, with 25% for supporting navigation, not the other way around.
9) Rich DHTML and Ajax. Dynamic HTML and Ajax technologies have been a boon to shoppers the world over. Instead of having to reload a page every time the shopper clicks, these technologies enable a world of rich interactions that are nearly instantaneous. Though these technologies are not new, most sites are still just scratching the surface of how to use them in a robust manner. Here are some examples of how to take your DHTML into the modern era:
* mega dropdowns—large panels that are easy to access, break navigation choices into logical groupings, and can feature dynamic or interactive content.
* robust wizards and comparison tools—guiding shoppers to products that are relevant to them based on their needs and providing detailed, interactive comparisons between products can be taken to the next level using DHTML and Ajax.
* one-page checkout—why make your shoppers click through multiple page reloads when you can let them complete their purchase all on one page?
* product option selection—showing product availability in different option combinations (for example, colors and sizes) is a common user-interface problem.
* DHTML kung fu—individually, DHTML techniques such as promo carousels, tabs, scrollers, and other DHTML widgets can be powerful merchandising tools individually. Combined, they can allow you to take your site to new heights.
10) Get textual. Designers have been limited to a handful of "Web safe" fonts since the dawn of the Internet and have had to hardcode anything else into images, slowing downloads and making custom messaging and personalization difficult and time-consuming. Not anymore. With the advent of HTML5 and font-serving technologies such as Typekit, the Web designer's typographic palette has been opened up as never before. This isn't merely a design nicety but rather a critical innovation that will allow savvy companies to deliver targeted, personalized messages in brand-consistent ways for the first time. The impact doesn't stop there; not having to use images for any custom fonts leads to faster page downloads and great accessibility of type to search engines and disabled users.
Michael Piastro is user experience director at agency Alexander Interactive.
