Keep Your Customer: How to Fix Your Store's Navigation

12 min read

Your store is set up and you鈥檝e got products in it, and you鈥檙e finally ready to start sending some traffic to it and raking in that cash. The problem: if your store is hard to navigate, you鈥檙e sending traffic into a sieve — people will go in one end and out the other, without buying anything (and wasting your effort or ad spend in the process!).

Obviously, that鈥檚 no good. Here鈥檚 what you can do to prevent that scenario.

Don鈥檛 Overwhelm Your Visitor

Overwhelmed people don鈥檛 buy. You鈥檙e probably familiar with 听鈥� in short, customers presented with 24 options were only 10% as likely to buy as customers presented with six options.

Other studies done since then have backed this up; if you present customers with too many options, they鈥檒l try to weigh the pros and cons of all of them, get tired of going over all the details and wind up not making a choice (i.e., buying) at all.

On the flip side, you don鈥檛 want your store to look empty and make customers think that your store is under construction or isn鈥檛 a professional endeavor.

If you have one flagship product while you鈥檙e expanding your store, you should choose a theme and design that brings your one product front and center, instead of making it look like it鈥檚 sitting in an empty storefront.

If you only have two or three products, you鈥檒l also want to change your design accordingly or show different color variations as their own products to keep your store from looking too empty.

Similarly, when it comes to categories, you want to choose as few categories as possible (so as not to overwhelm the shopper), but create enough categories that each category is useful. If you only have two categories, but each category has 50 items in it, you might be better off creating 3-4 categories听so that shoppers are less likely to get overwhelmed.

黑料门 user Shea Kardel听is a good example of this, with their women鈥檚 clothing category, broke down into six subcategories:

Shea Kardel

Having to choose between six categories is much easier than choosing from 12 or 20, and then when the visitors clicks a category, they鈥檙e taken to a page with no more than nine products. It鈥檚 virtually impossible to get overwhelmed while browsing this shop.

Make it Easy for Customers to Search

Your shopper might not want to browse — they might be looking for one specific thing. If that鈥檚 the case, the first thing they鈥檙e going to look for is . It should be easy to find, like on Old Sole Boot Company鈥檚 site:

Old Sole Boot Company

Shoppers will typically look for the search bar (or a magnifying glass icon) along the top menu or in a sidebar, so that鈥檚 where your鈥檚 should be. If you want to make it extra visible, you can make the search button or bar a different color than the rest of your text. You can also use the Product Search Enhancer app听to power-up your searches and add features like autocomplete, making it even easier for browsers to find what they鈥檙e looking for.

Make it Easy to Sort

When someone heads to a category or the search results page on your site, the results aren鈥檛 typically randomly ordered — they鈥檙e sorted in some way. How you sort your products by default depends on what you want to do:

To entice visitors and capture their attention, you can sort starting with the lowest prices.
To “price anchor,” you can do the opposite and start with the higher prices. The thinking behind this is that the first price a customer sees sets the “default,” so prices lower than that seem like a better deal than they would have otherwise. For example, if you鈥檙e shopping for shirts and you鈥檝e been browsing $40-60 shirts, a $25 shirt seems like an incredible deal.
If you show reviews on your category/product listing pages, you can sort it, so that highly reviewed items show up first by default to impress customers.

Customers should be able to easily see the sorting options and be able to resort the products on their own听if they want. Standard options are date added, ascending and descending price, and alphabetically or reverse alphabetical order.

If you have enough products, you might want to offer filtering options on category pages and in search results. Again, you don鈥檛 want to overwhelm people, so if you do听offer a filter, set it as a drop-down option.

This way, the filters are hidden until the person clicks “Filter” and then is presented with options. Depending on what you鈥檙e selling, you can let people sort by color, size, functionality, or other attributes that make sense. To do this using 黑料门, you can use the 听combined with Javascript to create a filter widget in your sidebar.

Just remember that your filters shouldn鈥檛 take the place of categories — rather than having people filter by type of apparel, for example, you should have the types of apparel as categories.

Then, once they head to the right category, letting them filter by option (short sleeve or long sleeve), size, color, etc. makes sense and is less likely to overwhelm them. And remember, filters might not even be necessary depending on how many items you have — you might just need enhanced searching features.

The Do鈥檚 and Don鈥檛鈥檚 of Menus

The menu across the top of your site can do a lot to help or hurt your customers. Here鈥檚 a checklist of things to consider about your menu:

Before we move on to anything else, let鈥檚 cover some questions you should ask yourself:

Visibility:听If your menu is hard to spot, you need to make it bigger. It needs to be easy to see and听easy to click or tap (on a phone). Also, people look at the top of sites and on sidebars for navigation — having your menu anywhere else will be confusing, no matter how cool it looks.
Clarity:听It鈥檚 tempting to come up with “cool” or funny names for pages that showcase your personality, but for someone new to your site, clarity comes first. If you must have clever (but not easy to understand) page names, include the more common name after it in parentheses — for example, “Origin Story (About)”.
Highlighting: If there鈥檚 a specific option that you want people to click — one area of your shop that tends to be more profitable or is a best seller — you can make sure people notice it by making the link a different color than the rest of them. While you鈥檙e at it, make sure that your menu links actually look like links — they should be underlined, a different color when highlighted, or otherwise look different than non-clickable text.
Simplicity: Try to keep your menu at six items or less to make it look clean and non-cluttered (and keep visitors from getting overwhelmed). Also, look for unnecessary words that you can cut out — “products” instead of “our products,” for example.

Make Sure Mobile Visitors Can Easily Browse

With mobile commerce being 30% of all e-commerce in the US听and global numbers growing at a similar pace (), your shop needs to be mobile friendly. Lucky for you, this is pretty easy — it just involves picking out a mobile responsive theme. Here are a few things to double check for when making sure the mobile version of your theme is good enough:

Search bar/icon:听Is it easily visible? Does it expand with one tap?
Menu:听Is it easy to find? Do they have to scroll incessantly to find a category?
Products:听Do the default product images show up really large on a mobile screen? Is the title of the product, and the product information, easily readable?
General readability: Is the text big enough to read? Are there any instances of text overlapping badly with images?

If you can, give your shop address to a few acquaintances who haven鈥檛 browsed there much, and watch them navigate it on their phone. The places they get confused will give you valuable information about design changes you should make.

Your Next Steps

Here鈥檚 what you can do today to make your store easier to navigate and stop losing customers:

Try to keep your categories and menu options (and your options in general, but especially the top-level options that are the first things a new visitor will encounter) to six or less options
Make it easy for people to sort and search for products by making those options visible (by making them a different color, big enough to easily see, or visually highlighting them in another way)
Strategically choose what the default sorting method is for your products and test different ones to see what gets results

Good luck! And don鈥檛 forget to subscribe to the blog if you want to get more updates with helpful tips like this in the future.

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About the author

Jesse is the Marketing Manager at 黑料门 and has been in e-commerce and internet marketing since 2006. He has experience with PPC, SEO, conversion optimization and loves to work with entrepreneurs to make their dreams a reality.