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Ecommerce Navigation Examples: How Not to Get Lost on Your Website
You know the phrase time is money? Well the phrase also applies to your ecommerce website.
The more time it takes for a consumer to get around your website and find the type of product they want, the more money you’re losing. Because what if they don’t even find the product and leave your site completely?
That’s why it’s really important to organize your website design and create an easy to use online shopping experience – from drop down menu navigation to site search. All of these factors play a role in helping visitors navigate your website and successfully complete a purchase.
Below we’re covering several ecommerce navigation examples and how to prevent visitors from getting lost on your ecommerce website, leading to more transactions and more repeat customers.
Is your ecommerce SEO correct? Read the following articles to make sure:
A must for any website, and probably more important for commerce sites, is an easy to understand/use site navigation.
A standard website may have 10-20 landing pages (not including blog posts), so getting around the site isn’t too difficult. However when you have an ecomerce website with products, your page count jumps dramatically – well into the 50+ page range. A typical consumer is not going to spend time going through every page of your site to find the product they want. They’re going to find another retailer, with an organized website, and buy from them.
Here are some additional ecommerce navigation examples and best practices for organizing your menu items, navigation bar, and products:
Activate Breadcrumbs
Another ecommerce navigation example is enabling breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs help website visitors track where they are on a site. They’re very much like the same breadcrumb trail Hansel and Gretel used during their trek into the woods. (In fact, the website term breadcrumbs was inspired by the fairy tale.)
Breadcrumbs do more than just tell you where you are on a website. They also:
Help users categorize products
Improve the SEO value of your product pages via internal linking
Best Buy uses breadcrumbs to show where you are on their site and how products are categorized:
It’s very clear that these Apple AirPods are listed under headphones. And I can easily click All Headphones to see more options if I decide these aren’t the right pair for me.
Using breadcrumbs leads us to organizing and categorizing your products.
Organize and Categorize Your Products
An easy way to increase your average order size or average order amount is to add related and complementary products to your product and/or checkout pages. But you can’t get the right products to show if they aren’t organized or categorized.
You also can’t get the right products to show on main category pages if they aren’t tagged the right way.
In the backend of your ecommerce site, you can categorize products by their type, color, brand, size, and any other category type that helps customers find what they need on your website. Doing this will take some planning, as you want to make sure the parent categories make sense and aren’t overcomplicated.
REI does a good organizing their products and showing related complementary products. For example, let’s look at this tent:
Right away you can tell it’s a backpacking tent for camping and hiking from the breadcrumbs.
After reviewing details about the tent, you can scroll down and see similar backpacking tents and products that you also might need on your next hiking/camping/backpacking trap.
Without categories or tags, these Please also viewed and Complementary Items sections wouldn’t help users make a buying decision and/or increase your ecommerce sales metrics.
Use Sub Menus
Once you get all your products categorized, you can use sub menus to help visitors find and see products of the same type.
Sub menus help website visitors find what they’re looking for quickly and improve the user experience. They’re especially helpful when you only have a Shop or Products tab in the menu.
Big Chill does a great job using a mega menu to help visitors see all their products under the Shop tab.
At a glance, users can easily see all the products they offer and choose what they need. The images are a nice touch and help visualize the product before clicking into one category set.
Big Chill also takes it one step further and offers a sub menu by collection.
By offering a Collections menu, you can see the different styles of their appliances and choose what fits your decor and personal flair.
Add A Search Feature to Your Website
People are used to searching for what they need. And if they can’t find what they want on the current page, using a site’s search bar is their next step. So if you don’t have search setup on your ecommerce website, I highly recommend you implement one.
Macy’s website lists thousands of products, so sorting through a product category to find a specific item might be more time consuming than helpful. By using their search bar, I easily found all the red purses and can now sort the results by price, reviews, new arrivals, and more.
Autocomplete Search Bars
Another option when implementing search is to use autocomplete. You’re probably familiar with autocomplete when searching on Google, as it’s saved you from typing your entire phrase and gave you your results faster.
Well the same concept can be applied to your ecommerce website as well. In fact, according to Baymard Institute, 82% of the top grossing ecommerce sites offer autocomplete suggestions to their users.
Amazon does a great job using autocomplete to show all the available products that meet the searched criteria – and even adjusts as new letters appear.
Adding Search to Your Ecommerce Website
Adding search functionality to your ecommerce website is a must if you want to make it easy for users to find what they need. However, implementing search isn’t as easy as adding a plugin or tool to your website. It does take some planning and pre-organization on your part (like organizing your products by category, collection, color, size, brand, etc.).
Ecommerce websites can turn into a confusing maze if you’re not carefully organizing your pages and products. Help website users browse your store with ease by using clearly labeled menus and submenus, carefully organized products, and implementing a search tool. Hopefully the above ecommerce navigation examples we listed above will help increase sales and conversions on your website.
Are Your Ecommerce Website Visitors Getting Lost?
Do you need assistance figuring our why your ecommerce website’s users are getting lost on your website and need some professional recommendations? Contact SurgeStream, an ecommerce SEO agency, for a free strategy session, or fill out the form below, and we can help determine the bottlenecks on your website that are preventing you from achieving optimal sales.
About SurgeStream
SurgeStream is a full service digital marketing and SEO company that works with small to medium sized businesses in order to help increase their website's online visibility.
We can dig deep into your website and can usually discover digital marketing "bottlenecks" where others can't. Contact one of the digital marketing professionals at SurgeStream to request a free evaluation.
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