Fresh

A few weeks ago a bunch of us from eROI went to see Jared Spool present “Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon”. It was a fantastic presentation about some key learnings about e-commerce design from experiments on Amazon.com. One tid-bit really especially struck a chord with me: Jared went in-depth about Amazon’s review system and conjectured that to amass 20 reviews for a product online one must have had 26,000 sales (on average one out of 1,300 purchasers will write a review.) Assuming the site has a 2% conversion rate (a typical rate for e-comm) the product needs to have 1.3 Million hits to reach 20 reviews.

What!? Only one in 1,300 purchasers will write a review?? That seems like a depressing statistic for people hoping to use user reviews as a means to help sell their products online! Another drawback is that customers are also a lot more likely to go back to a site to write a bad review versus a positive review (if the product is just as they expected, the user goes on living their life. If it isn’t, they want to tell someone about it.)

Fear not, there are some creative ways we can overcome the challenges!

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Today I’m going to look at three e-commerce sites that are inspiring us over here at eROI. They’re all fashion related but feature totally different aesthetics. They’ve all done a great job usability-wise, but what really impresses me is how well each of them engage the user in the brand and lifestyle for a holistic and fun shopping experience.

Kate Spade

The current home page is hot! Wow. You’ve got to go see it because the Flash is really well done. It has a 50’s paradise vacation vibe going on (they’ve got a trip to Bali contest currently running that speaks directly to the design). The background color — currently teal — is a custom element that changes frequently to match the design’s style; the last time I looked it was hot pink.

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After spending some time working with Magento (an open-source ecommerce platform that’s been on the development scene for a few years now), I have determined that what their documentation really needs is a WordPress-esque “Template Tags” area.

When you’re just starting out with a new platform, documentation is invaluable, and the documentation for Magento seems woefully lacking in terms of front-end development. (If you have a favorite resource, I’d love to hear about it!)

Here are some tips / shortcuts / code snippets I’ve found useful; maybe they’ll be helpful to new Magento developers as well.

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Alima Pure is a Portland Oregon based mineral cosmetics brand with a world-wide following. Recently, we completed a super project with them. It was great for a couple reasons; not only is Alima Pure a marvelous brand to work with from a design perspective (which is always nice!), but we were able to get creative with testing.

The primary objectives for the project were to update the current website with a fresh color palette, refine the typography (using our new AutoTTF WordPress plugin!) and most importantly, re-design the home page to feature more shopping avenues for the user. Projects like these are challenging though, because the homepage was already successful for a number of reasons; it didn’t require a lot of change.

Original Home Page Design

The first thing that we knew we wanted to create was a large photography-based area (similar to what was there already) but that featured current products and promotions with clear calls to action. Second, bringing in flexible product areas to feature what is most popular, new or interesting.

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In this years’ election the Internet played a new, critical role in politics that gave us a glimpse at what’s to come and the future of the World Wide Web as a multi-functional tool that has already been used to accomplish everything from organizing grass-roots campaign efforts, raising campaign funds, creating discussion boards, inspiring countless blogs to becoming the constant face of a whole campaign.

The key word here is constant. Anyone at anytime could go to a candidates website and learn their views on the issues and how they plan to deal with them. They were taking advantage of higher bandwidths to show video and audio clips of rallies, speeches and even supporters’ home videos.

They were also taking full advantage of the e-commerce aspects of the web by not only offering sections to donate to the campaigns but also pages to buy t-shirts, buttons, coffee mugs and signs. The Obama-Biden site even has selected products for sale directly on the home page.

A major difference in their e-commerce sections was the user experience. Once in the McCain-Palin store each section takes you to a different looking third party e-com site that doesn’t even attempt to carry over any design or feel from the home site. This is in stark contrast to the Obama-Biden store experience that was fluid and consistent with no disconnect as the store carries every aspect of the design into their e-commerce interface.

Obama’s Store Page               Mccain’s Store Page

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I love horizontal-oriented/scrolling sites. When well done, they feel so intuitive to navigate. It’s akin to reading a book. I like the change of pace that it offers, too; we’re so conditioned to seeing vertically oriented sites, it’s nice to see something unexpected. The examples I am about to show are all fashion oriented (some full e-commerce experiences).

1. Pull and Bear (thanks FWA!)
Navigate into the “showroom” section of Pull and Bear to see a lovely example of navigating horizontally. I usually find music to be way too distracting, but for some reason it works for me here.

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