When creating a site structure, it is necessary to consider what will be a range of goods, what characteristics may interest your customer and what questions you want to answer in the process of constructing your online store website. Depending on this, you need to design an appropriate structure of your online store, which can greatly affect the quality of your site for search engines and for satisfied customers who will find the things they were looking for.
In order to understand the structure of the website of the online store, you need to know about the actions performed by customer on your site: the search for the product and its characteristics, information on availability, delivery and payment methods, etc.
Main page
When creating an online store, most newcomers focus on the main page. However, this approach is not effective enough. According to statistics, only a fifth of the customers visit the main page. The rest of them open certain sections or immediately search for the necessary goods. If the customer has entered the catalog section, it is likely that he searches for certain goods. Therefore, he needs to know where to find the product. If a visitor opened a product card, it means he was looking for a particular product and your tasks are limited to selling it or providing all the necessary characteristics.
Catalog
It is worthwhile to study the structure of the catalog from the fact that the customers search for goods and services. So, the search criteria can be different: by brand, by commodity group or subgroup, by characteristics, etc.
Example: To begin, let’s look at online clothing store that has an ineffective catalog structure.
You can select clothing by groups: sweaters, dresses, skirts, trousers, etc. In the same store the catalog is divided by brands, which are by no means are widely known. To find only dresses in this store, you need to view all the brands by selecting the desired product group.
For comparison, let’s take a look at the online store for selling tires and disks. In this case, the catalog has categories of cars in accordance with the season, and only then they are divided by brands. This is due to the fact that buyers have already decided in advance what manufacturer to choose. Therefore, such a structure assists in the search for certain tires according to a certain algorithm: winter or summer – brand – model and size.
Search
If customers are not determined with the goods, the site should have a convenient search engine. This is exactly how you should form the structure of the catalog and the search function. Another example: the auto parts store. The catalog has a completely different look: car brand – model – group of spare parts – spare part. The search has always been the most important element in the design of the site, because this part is useв by customers the most. If you put all available assortment on one page, their numbers will appear below. Such an approach is uncomfortable and it is not convenient to scroll through pages to view the available products.
Product card
For those customers who visiting the site instantly get to the card of the required product, the search is virtually irrelevant. The visitor is already on the page where he decides to purchase the item. Therefore, in this case, it is simply necessary to have a complete information about the product, about the methods of its purchase, payment methods, delivery options, and detailed additional conditions, if any.
It has been noted that it is highly efficient to place all possible links to related products on the product card, i.e. for the goods that need to be purchased in the kit. For example, most video recorder models do not have a memory card. Therefore, it needs to be purchased separately. Here, experts advise to place information about gifts for the purchased goods. And one more addition, which causes a genuine interest is a block of similar goods.
In addition, this add-on, which is suitable for SEO-optimization, will also synchronize links from the sites. It is also very productive for potential customers who can instantly evaluate the products available in your online store. And if a particular product is not suitable for some parameters, for example, by weight, after seeing a list of similar products, the visitors will be able to switch to a similar product.
