Guided navigation means more sales.
When designing an e-commerce site, retailers must consider how to get a shopper to the product she wants quickly. Site search is an important tool to accomplish this but can actually be slower because if they don’t put in the correct phrase it can show to many products.
A faster method that allows shoppers to drill down from category to features with great speed is a guided navigation tool. It can become an important element of the site experience because it gets shoppers to the products they want quicker that trying to spell Mississippi!
One strategy for improving guided navigation is to make the feature the mandatory starting point for any onsite product search. Site design and development firm Americaneagle.com Inc. has developed such a guided navigation system for Weathertech.com, a retailer of auto parts and accessories.
After navigating to the retail site, shoppers are required to enter the make, model and year of the vehicle for which they are buying accessories, or they can enter the product type. In both cases, shoppers select the required information from a pull-down menu. Shoppers that enter the make, model and year of the vehicle are shown product categories specific to that vehicle and can drill down further from that point by clicking on a category. Shoppers selecting a product are shown that product.
The change to guided navigation from open-ended site search boosted the retailer’s conversion rate from less than 6% to 10%, Americaneagle.com reports.
“The retailer wanted to improve the way shoppers search for products specific to a vehicle, as well as specific types of products, and decided that steering shoppers into guided navigation was the best way to eliminate the risk of having site search return unsatisfactory results,” says Americaneagle.com chief operating officer Mike Svanascini. “In the current economy, guiding shoppers to the products they are looking for in as few steps as possible is going to create a more satisfying shopping experience and boost conversion rates.”
based on an article from Internetretailer.com
