E-commerce companies are spending huge sums of money to bring visitors to their site.\u00a0As per a study conducted by Frac.tl<\/a>, it was revealed that Amazon spent around $1.35 billion in search advertising in the year 2015, which was a whopping 97% of its marketing budget.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n When companies are spending such vast sums of money on advertising, it becomes crucial to have a site navigation that guides the user to easily complete a sale.<\/p>\n It can be safely said that navigation is one of the most critical parts of your store\u2019s design. Good navigation provides an improved user experience leading to more sales and revenue. On the other hand, a poor navigation frustrates the users leading to a higher bounce rate.<\/p>\n Baymard carried out a study<\/a>\u00a0on mobile e-commerce usability on 50 benchmarked e-commerce sites and found that the users were unable to find the items they are looking for due to poor interface. Users misunderstood that the items were not present on the site and this directly affected not only the current sales\u00a0but also the future sales because the users were unlikely to return to the site when they were looking for that type of product.<\/p>\n Each site was given a score based on 17-35 guidelines, and the below scatter plot represents the summarized score of one site. The black lines denote the benchmark average. Red dots indicate \u201cpoor\u201d usability, yellow indicates \u201cacceptable\u201d performance, and green denotes \u201cgood\u201d usability.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n It is pretty evident from the graph that most of the e-commerce sites do not have\u00a0good navigation for an impressive user experience.<\/p>\n Now, the bigger question is, which sites have the best e-commerce navigation? I have compiled a list of 11 sites that I feel have the best e-commerce navigation; you can consider which aspects could help improve your sales.<\/p>\n We all are extremely satisfied with the way Google provides Autocomplete suggestions. It helps to narrow down our search, minimize the risk of misspellings and speeds up the entire search process leading to accurate results in a lesser time. But, when we conduct a product search on an e-commerce site, the autocomplete suggestions are not that useful.<\/p>\n This is where Waterstones does an incredible job. It provides accurate and fast autocomplete suggestions that let the user find a product of their choice instantly.<\/p>\n When I entered the word \u201chow\u201d in the search box, the search returned a list of popular book titles starting with the word \u201chow.\u201d Moreover, the search results were \u201crich\u201d meaning I was able to see the book cover and the price along with the title. When you can see such complete information while looking for choices, you can make a better and much-informed decision.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Why is Autosuggest Helpful?<\/p>\n It provides a genuine boost to the conversion rates because people can search and find the exact product they need with minimal effort.<\/p>\n Users also rely on autosuggest for the correct spelling of the product, and if the e-store doesn\u2019t return the correct spelling, then the product is “not found” in the inventory, meaning the product remains unsold although the users came looking for it; this is why autosuggest plays an incredible role in e-commerce conversions.<\/p>\n Great product discovery is an essential key to conversion. You don\u2019t want your customers to browse several pages before they find the product of their choice; this is indeed a bad shopping experience. Faceted search is a great way to provide valuable information about your product in an easy to browse format which makes it easy for the shoppers to browse, filter and shop based on their specific choices.<\/p>\n Have a look at how Rollie Nation, an online shoe store has implemented faceted search in their navigation.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Customers can sort their shoe of choice by the following options:<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n In\u00a0a case study<\/a>\u00a0for BigCommerce, Rollie Nation Founder Vince Lebon highlighted the importance of using faceted search and product filtering. Building faceted search into their navigation helped them to explode their sales.<\/p>\n \u201cIn footwear, there can be up to 14 sizes and multiple options per SKU<\/em>,\u201d he said. \u201cGiven how quickly we turnover inventory, customers were previously clicking three or four styles before finding a shoe available in their size, which is a frustrating shopping experience. Once we were able to build faceted search into our navigation, sales exploded<\/em>\u201d \u2013 to the tune of 2.7% lift in average order value.<\/p>\n Why is Faceted Search Helpful?<\/strong><\/p>\n It presents your catalog in the most relevant way before your audience. This way you can turn browsing into sales.<\/p>\n Your visitors are not turned down as faceted search helps customers find what they are looking for in a faster manner, meaning the customer acquisition costs are reduced.<\/p>\n Please note:\u00a0<\/strong>With Faceted navigation, there are multiple navigational paths that your visitors can take to reach the same content. For example, in order to reach red-colored women’s t-shirts, users can choose any of the following paths depending on the structure of your site:<\/p>\n This option can cause massive duplication issues.\u00a0To fix\/avoid it, you can consider the following options:<\/p>\n In most of the cases, you need to choose a combination of the above fixes depending on your exact needs.<\/p>\n The top-level e-commerce navigation plays a decisive role in conversions. You don\u2019t need to confuse the users here. Use a bigger and visually pleasing menu option as used by Big Chill.<\/p>\n Most of the top level menu labels are simple and comprises of a single word. It is a minimalistic design that offers less scope for any distractions.<\/p>\n When I placed the cursor on the shop label, the drop down was opened, and I was amazed to see large and visually pleasing menu options.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n You can clearly see from the above screenshot that the menu items are displayed in the full-screen size, uses images to make it easier for the user to recognize and choose a category of their choice.<\/p>\n Why\u00a0Is a Bigger Menu Helpful?<\/p>\n The top-level menu is easily clickable and tappable. Users can easily recognize images without the need to read the category names leading to improved user experience.<\/p>\n Shoppers can easily scan the menu labels and move to the category of their choice; this means the user can find what they are looking for immediately.<\/p>\n Fat footers are a good way to provide a quick view of your entire site, or the most important pages on your site, to your audience. Your goal should be a better user experience for them. If your business serves multiple locations then including them in your footer is a good way to improve your chances of ranking particular pages (but there is no guarantee; don’t stuff your footer).<\/p>\n GrubHub displays each of its business locations in the footer making it a real big fat footer.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Why is a Fat Footer Helpful?<\/p>\n Fat footers are a good way to keep the users on site because it helps them find what they are looking for quickly.<\/p>\n You can also offer a boost to your SEO by linking to the important pages (either category or location) in your footer. This strategy will help in a better flow of link juice thereby increasing the importance of the inner pages. An increased importance could lead to higher rankings leading to higher traffic and more sales.<\/p>\n Please note:<\/strong>\u00a0Do not use the fat footer to spam people. Many webmasters use fat footers to gain link equity and forget about the UX. Always remember that your sole purpose of having a fat footer in your website is to improve the user experience. Hence, identify the purpose of your website and think carefully about the links you must include in the fat footer. Do not use the fat footer to overly target locations, and forget about having over-optimized\u00a0anchor\u00a0text<\/a>\u00a0for gaining SEO value because Google does not value\u00a0anchor text used in footers.<\/p>\n For example, it makes sense for an e-commerce website to have a fat footer because it helps the visitors to browse the popular categories and products on the site which otherwise are hard to find. However, the practice of\u00a0linking to each and every inner page of a website from the fat footer is not acceptable because this can be judged as spam by Google.<\/p>\n Ever thought of having duplicate subcategories? Bestbuy.com displays the same sub-category under different parent categories. The same sub-category \u201cHome Theatre Systems\u201d can be found under the categories \u201cAudio\u201d and \u201cTV and Home Theatre\u201d.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n1.\u00a0Autocomplete By Waterstones<\/h3>\n
2. Faceted Search By Rollie Nation<\/h3>\n
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3. Bigger and Visually Pleasing Navigation Menu By Big Chill<\/h3>\n
4. Fat Footer By GrubHub<\/h3>\n
5. Same Subcategory Display Under Different Parent Categories By Best Buy<\/h3>\n