Today, Web designers face lots of challenges while designing an ecommerce website. A successful ecommerce store is one that not only looks beautiful but also provides a great shopping experience to customers. There are many effective and innovative features that can help ecommerce sites deliver a great user experience.
Here is a list of some of the world's seven leading ecommerce businesses that come with their own unique attributes to offer a great shopping experience to their customers. It's important to learn from them:
The Amazon shopping experience begins on the homepage, where it offers an extensive and intuitive navigation menu on the upper left and the account/shopping cart controls on the upper right. It also provides an option for deals and offers on the homepage itself.
The best thing about purchasing an item from Amazon is its "1-Click Ordering" feature - an option to help previously registered users make online purchases with a single click. This ecommerce giant also offers an amazing gifting option which allows customers to send any item with a gift-wrap and a personalized message to friends or family.
Asos is a well-designed site which provides an excellent user experience. The category pages of this ecommerce store are designed in an outstanding way to ensure users find the products they are looking for effortlessly. When you select a particular category, it displays all the products of that category in grid style. You can also refine all the products by style, size, color, price range, material, brand etc. When you move your cursor on a particular product, it allows you to have a quick view of the product or save that product for later, without leaving the page.
Asos has placed the shopping cart at the top right of an Asos page where it is clearly visible to shoppers, thus making online shopping a pleasant and time-saving experience for them. When you go through any product page, you can zoom in the image of the product by clicking on the "Zoom+" button. On the product page, it also suggests some extra items that complement the current product you are viewing to give you that complete look.
The product page of this site is very clean, simple and attractive. One of the unique features of its product page is a "Find it Now" button which lets shoppers check stores near their area for a product. A "Size Chart" button is also given on the product page that helps them choose the correct product size.
This is another well-designed site with user-friendly navigation. The best feature of Macys.com is in its category pages; these allow visitors to view a product in different colors just by moving the cursor on the given colors. On the right hand side of the product page, there are options for adding a product to a bag or to a wish list.
The second most unique feature offered by Macy's is "Shop Macy's With Friends"; which is not available on most ecommerce sites. With this feature, Macy's allows shoppers to conduct a poll on Facebook for the products they are interested in and consult friends before buying anything.
This ecommerce store offers a highly innovative and novel concept in the ecommerce market that helps overcome one of the biggest online shopping limitations - trying a product before purchasing it. With its "Virtual Try-On" program it allows shoppers to try eye frames on photos of different models or upload their own photos to virtually wear the glasses.
To build a better online shopping experience further, this store offers a tangible, innovative, no-risk "Home Try-On" buying program that allows their online shoppers to order five frames to try at home for five days, free of charge.
Camelbak uses one of the best and most persuasive tools to attract consumers; it provides product-based videos on individual product pages for almost all of its products. These videos deliver large amounts of product information such as specifications, features and benefits of the product for the users in a highly simplified form.
It also allows shoppers to rate products and then provides these customer reviews to other buyers. Apart from reviews and average ratings for its products, it also shows the pros and cons and the best uses of the products. It is one of the most attractive features of Camelbak ecommerce.
Product comparisons on this site allow visitors to compare products of same category side-by-side, instead of having to flip through different product pages. Product comparisons not only improve the shopping experience of consumers, but it also provides information whether the product is in stock or not.
Sony does an excellent job of providing complete details about its products to shoppers and includes an additional call to action below-the-fold (add to cart), which is rare on my ecommerce sites.
Take a cue from the aforementioned features to set up your own ecommerce website and ensure it offers the best shopping experience to its customers!