Tips for building an online shopping mall
Friday, February 01, 2008
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Select a good architect: Like an online shopping mall, before building an eCommerce website you have to consider important factors that always matter in an online shopping mall. Let me tell you about the differences between online shopping mall and a local shopping mall located in a famous place. In a local shopping mall, consumers have access of different accelerators to reach in different floors and particular shops. Below are the key factors that make your online shopping store more usable and accessible for the end users:
Technology: One of the most important parts of any eCommerce website is its technology. Before proceeding you must consider the pros and cons of that particular technology. May be in initial phase you just want to add few features in your portal but later on you can enhance it very well. Technology is one of the critical factors that you have to consider, because your overall infrastructure of eCommerce site is dependent on it.
Different category and its structure: You must decide the top parent category and proper elaborated structure of the website even if you want to start with few products only. That will help you in future to enhance your website in proper way. If something goes wrong initially then you have to change entire structure of your online shopping mall. Now you can just imagine if this will happen with a local physical shopping mall. Can you imagine the losses? So the base structure should be decided by a good experienced person who has in depth knowledge of usability and search marketing.
Product depth (Number of clicks from home page): Your product should be reachable from different navigation. Top selling products should be available in single clicks. The more number of clicks users will do the more chances are there to loose consumers.
ECommerce site Navigation: Like an accelerator in physical shopping mall your navigation should also strong. Through easy navigation system users can easily reach to the actual product pages. You can use different drop down menu or other navigational elements but it should be clear not confusing. Make your navigation hierarchy very clear and simple. CSS based drop downs and navigation is friendly to search engines as well. Use breadcrumb navigation to tell users where he/she is present and how to quickly navigate to its parent categories.
Site Usability: Ecommerce site usability is one of the most important factors to make site successful or failure. How easily a consumer can access your different section and make purchase. Information flow architecture of the site should be clear and easy to understand. So that common users never face any issue. Site should have sufficient help information regarding online purchasing and other facilities available in the website.
- Technology
- Different category and its structure
- Product depth (Number of clicks from home page)
- eCommerce site navigation
- Site usability
Technology: One of the most important parts of any eCommerce website is its technology. Before proceeding you must consider the pros and cons of that particular technology. May be in initial phase you just want to add few features in your portal but later on you can enhance it very well. Technology is one of the critical factors that you have to consider, because your overall infrastructure of eCommerce site is dependent on it.
Different category and its structure: You must decide the top parent category and proper elaborated structure of the website even if you want to start with few products only. That will help you in future to enhance your website in proper way. If something goes wrong initially then you have to change entire structure of your online shopping mall. Now you can just imagine if this will happen with a local physical shopping mall. Can you imagine the losses? So the base structure should be decided by a good experienced person who has in depth knowledge of usability and search marketing.
Product depth (Number of clicks from home page): Your product should be reachable from different navigation. Top selling products should be available in single clicks. The more number of clicks users will do the more chances are there to loose consumers.
ECommerce site Navigation: Like an accelerator in physical shopping mall your navigation should also strong. Through easy navigation system users can easily reach to the actual product pages. You can use different drop down menu or other navigational elements but it should be clear not confusing. Make your navigation hierarchy very clear and simple. CSS based drop downs and navigation is friendly to search engines as well. Use breadcrumb navigation to tell users where he/she is present and how to quickly navigate to its parent categories.
Site Usability: Ecommerce site usability is one of the most important factors to make site successful or failure. How easily a consumer can access your different section and make purchase. Information flow architecture of the site should be clear and easy to understand. So that common users never face any issue. Site should have sufficient help information regarding online purchasing and other facilities available in the website.
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