We are pleased to re-print here an article (which appeared in Catalogues & Ebusiness) which sets out some easy-to-implement principles about how to organise the products on your website and what mechanics you can employ to help your visitor find them.

Getting visitors around an online shop is surely one of the biggest challenges of an e-commerce website. It is up there with customer acquisition (getting visitors there in the first instance) and conversion (getting them to buy). With overall bounce rates (the % of visitors who exit on the first page) at 30% those landing and follow-on pages in the “customer journey” need to be carefully planned. Between the 70% of visitors who arrive on a shopping site and, say, the 3% who actually make a purchase, that’s 67% of all visitors who are traipsing through 7-8 pages of a website then exiting, bored or frustrated.

Read the full article about e-commerce navigation here.