Hot answers tagged e-commerce
206
No, it's not a good idea.
You want to make purchasing from your website as easy as possible. Forcing a user to give out an email address before they're even able to see what you're selling is not a good approach. This will most probably push a big part of your customers away from the site rather than forming a commitment to it.
You should read the $300 ...
79
Usability aside, there are also some technical points against your strategy:
Basically, you are sending spam to your users.
The content of your site is hidden behind a login page - that makes it unsearchable. In many sites, the absolute majority of traffic comes from search results and price comparison sites (like Google Shopping).
Similarly, the content ...
39
Etsy spent quite some time developing and testing infinite scroll in their search listings. They noticed fewer clicks on results and fewer items favourited from the infinite results page, and users stopped using the search interface to find products. They reverted back to traditional pagination. There's a good article about it here: ...
36
(See the comments for a lively debate about this idea!)
I disagree with the other answers here. (There are 5 at the moment.)
Like all good design answers: it depends. In 99% of cases, you'll want to put off on gathering information for as long as possible. But there are a few very good reasons you would want to collect information first. It all depends on ...
33
No. Forcing the user to enter an email address before they can view your products will more than likely drive them away, for the following reasons:
Increased barrier to entry to your site - resulting in a dramatic reduction of "eyes on the prize".
It's suspicious. The user will wonder why you're asking for their email address to just see your website.
...
31
The question that was not asked directly:
Should we hide the main navigation in the checkout process?
Yes, we should hide it.
A merchant wants to hide the main navigation mainly because of the conversion rate (ratio between people entering the checkout process and the ones actually finishing it). For average users the checkout process can still be ...
25
This kind of UI elements exists and is used in many applications even if differently.
Facebook events
Google calendar
If well designed they are even more affordant than the usual radio buttons.
The thing is, because of this affordance they seem "auto selected" so there is no need of a validation like in your example. Therefore I would say radio ...
20
A single button should perform an action, and not act as a radio button. If you want buttons to act as radio buttons, you should use a segmented button.
There is established precedent for this in both mobile and web UI, so people are likely to already understand what they do. Additionally the design of segmented buttons shows that the buttons are ...
19
An example of this claim can be found in Smashing UX Design: Foundations for Designing Online User Experiences - page 300, point 2. It says that an odd number of products:
can be easier to scan,
makes the choice easier to make,
keeps the eye moving across a row because the items cannot be grouped easily.
It suggests that this might be backed up by the ...
17
This is a tricky interaction, mostly because it has to be super intuitive since the end users are not computer savy. I know it because I´ve had to deal with it in the past :)
I had the same problem while working in the UX team at 11870.com (a recomendations website similar to Yelp), this is the way we handled it, might not be the ideal solution but it ...
16
I think it can better to make a visual support for such input, that will allow to enter not only breaks, but also days off. Input can look like this:
Clicking on row or cell header (with hour or day) should turn on/off all days or hours. Also you can add popular variants at top of table to select them faster — «24x7», «All days without weekends» etc.
...
15
I think that treating the current price as 0% would be much more intuitive to a larger section of your users.
If you treat your base price as 100% and display relative prices as 120% or 80%, a user might have to visualize the result as 120-100=20% increase or 80-100=20% decrease.
The point is that this cognitive strain can be avoided by doing the ...
15
Booking.com experimented with it, conversion dropped immensely. Everything they do there is A/B-tested. I wish I could share statistics, but those are documented internally so you'll just have to take this anecdotal evidence for what it is: something a guy on the internet posted.
That said, the reason no large e-commerce websites use it means that it ...
14
It's explained in Amazon's website, in this page Why don't we show the price?:
Retailers like Amazon have the legal right to set their own prices
independently, but some manufacturers place restrictions on how those
prices may be communicated. Because our price on this item is lower
than the manufacturer's "minimum advertised price," the ...
14
I can see no real functional reason to clear a basket automatically.
Basket should have a function to clear old(er) items. A "select all" on the list of items in the basket and "remove from basket" action would suffice for that.
Other than that there should be warnings on price changes as Amazon does. And of course there should be a warning when an item in ...
13
I would expect payment information to be demanded only once I've been presented with the absolute grand total, so that I know exactly how much I'm going to be charged.
One of the common steps in a checkout process is choosing from delivery options, which often have different charges associated with them. Another example is gift wrapping, which usually ...
11
This is tricky, because you have a variety of different scenarios for when automatically clearing items is a great idea and probably just as many for when it’s not. Personally I agree that it shouldn’t be cleared. I’ve been surprised when visiting the same site again to find items in my cart that I didn’t remove by myself. But that’s just me — and the ...
9
I am going to break this response into three parts:
Is using the back button non intuitive to the user ?
I would disagree with this. The back button is one of the most commonly used elements in the web browser and users know how to use it and finding that it doesnt work can actually be a really frustrating experience as they will have to initiate the ...
9
Users are used to pagination and don't mind flicking through pages. Almost like a shop catalogue. Users in real life do it (i.e. Argos), users do it in virtual life (i.e. Amazon).
Some of the advantages of using pagination are:
Pagination gives the user a sense of how far along they are
Pagination makes it easy to remember where they saw something they ...
8
It's not even studies or evidence. It's one of the main principles of good UX: the fewer the screens a person needs to see to accomplish a task the better the experience is and the least frustration s/he feels.
Fewer screens mean fewer steps, fewer opportunities to make a mistake, less time spent getting familiar with the content of the screen (even if it's ...
8
I think the best way for users to input data is through a form - Everyone knows how to use them, and you can easily split lots of data into small, manageable chunks. Here's my solution:
This gives them enough control that they can input anything they need, but doesn't overwhelm them with a barrage of questions.
Clicking on "This schedule only applies to ...
8
Though the number of steps you defined looks fine to me, This is going to be really hard question to answer unless you show screenshots of the pages in question since there are single page checkouts as well which handle the information density well and guide the user well.
But to answer your question, there is no right or wrong number of checkout steps as ...
8
As mentioned in Smashing UX Design by Jesmond Allen and James Chudley of cxpartners, who have many years of experience with high profile retail website, they recommend using tabs in this way with caution as in usability testing they find that people don't always see the tabs.
Tabs typically differentiate unconnected groups of items. Compartmentalizing items ...
7
I think your question depends on how you word the label. If the label says percentage increase/decrease then you should show the % change (i.e. 10%) but if the label suggests the % is a % of the total price then 110% is correct. I think the latter will confuse people as I can't think of a plain-English name for the label. Most people will expect the 10% ...
6
Compared to horizontal top-of-page menus, vertical left-side navigation has been found to yield faster navigation and greater user satisfaction. This may be simply due to vertical navigation bars being so common that users are used to them, but it may also be due to it being easier to scan down a menu than across. Interestingly, it appears you can combine a ...
6
"Massive" amounts of traffic is a subjective term. Split testing doesn't necessarily need the traffic volumes of Google or Amazon to be effective. The key question is statistical significance, which you can achieve with low amounts of traffic provided the difference in results is great enough.
I built a quick and dirty split-testing calculator a while ago ...
6
Thought about this a while back for a restaurant related website and Sacha's newsletter problem resurfaced this for me. There are many many different types of opening hours that restaurants can have, so the solution has to be flexible enough to encompass the different variants, yet simple enough that it's not intimidating for restauranteurs (who may not be ...
6
Free shipping is known to be one of the most effective marketing tools e-commerce sites have.
Shipping fees can affect the number of items a customer purchases, and they can decrease how frequently a customer makes purchases from the site:
With fees, shoppers will make fewer shopping trips and purchase more goods at a time -- not unlike shoppers who ...
5
I think there is no way to answer this question other than by user testing. It would really depend on your audience which way of representation would be preferred. I would think that the -10%, +10%, 0% (considder changing for "recommended price" or "no change" or something like that in that case).
However, is there anyone stopping you from showing both ...
5
With desktops, The question you need to answer here is the effective use of real estate or screen space. Though most computers have pretty high resolutions now,providing a full sized calender does take up a lot of space and might not be effective in terms of best use of the available screen space. However if your calender is a critical part of your design ...
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