Getting Customers from the Front Page to the Center of Your Store

by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson
Web Commerce Today, Issue 2, September 15, 1997

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[Note: While these guidelines make perfect sense, they are not widely implemented. Print them out for future reference and reflect on how to apply them to your site.]

When I was a boy I would press my nose against the store window to see the electric train chugging out of a papier mâché tunnel into full view. "Mommy, can we go in there?" I would tug until she relented. If log files of Web visitor traffic are any indicator, getting visitors inside your front door is a chief obstacle to sales. How do you compel them to come in? Here are five guidelines for active shopping design.

Rule 1. Lure Shoppers Inside with a Provocative Front Page

Study the leading web stores and you'll see two trends. Those striving for a high class feel tend toward cool, graphics-heavy, static front pages, such as L.L. Bean, Spiegel , and Land's End.

But stores looking to sell feel slightly cluttered, alive with bright colors and flashing banners. Maybe "exciting" is the right word. While web stores don't often release sales figures, I would guess that busy is better. Take Amazon.Com, Barnes and Noble, QVC, and Wal-Mart, for example. Each requires three columns to contain the wealth of information they offer on their front page. You'll find full department links, partly to facilitate indexing by Web search engines, no doubt, but primarily so shoppers can get deep into the store without going through too many intermediate levels. They are starting to sell on their very front page -- their store window.

Rule 2. Keep Special Offers Fresh and on Top

I was strolling through the Sunrise Mall a while back, and dipped into Walden's Bookstore to check out the bargain bin placed strategically just inside the door. Once inside, I moved to bargain tables still farther back. The first step was the crucial one.

Shoppers need to see your specials right away. What's hot? Less than a week after Princess Diana's funeral, Wal-Mart was offering pre-release sales of Elton John's "Candle in the Wind 1997" CD for $2.96. Timely? You bet! If you're serious about selling on the Web you'll be an active shopkeeper. Change your specials every week if at all possible.

Consider putting your store's unique selling proposition at the top of your home page, too. Who are you? In September 1997, Amazon.comhad placed a "Lowest Everyday Prices, up to 40% off" graphic in top right corner. Not to be outdone, Barnes and Noble's "Fast Delivery" icon graced their top left corner.

Amazon.com placed a book cover at bottom center of the first screen to attract the shopper's attention, and entice her to scroll down a bit more to see the book title. Graphics are important to draw the eye. Show a small image of your special with some text under it, then hot-link the image to the page on which you sell the product. Big pictures take too much time to download, but several small pictures make the page interesting and lead the eye where you want it to go.

Rule 3. Prompt action with Animation

Remember the electric train that caught my eye? Animated GIF images do the same thing, and if designed carefully, compel your shopper to click on them, leading him deeper within the store. I visited FAO Schwarz, "the ultimate online toy store," and soon began to hear the tick-tocking of a clock. Balls bounced back and forth next to the "Shopping" link. What was that clock sound for? It kept me a bit off balance, and didn't go away until I clicked on the "Shopping" link. But I'm not supposed to relax at the front page, am I? I'm supposed to go inside.

When I landed on JCPenney's front page I was met by two animated banners flashing rapidly. "Our new fall store is open. FREE shipping and handling. Click here," one blinked. Now I tend to be annoyed by flashing things. But this one, with the word "FREE" in big letters, piqued my interest enough to click on it.

Like it or not, if your front page doesn't activate your shopper, she won't buy a thing. You've got to get her to click on something or she's gone. So animate.

Rule 4. Drive Shoppers to Your Specials Page

Last week Eddie Bauer's top left corner showed a small photo with the hyperlinked words "Men's buttondown denim shirt" underneath. Below this, a hyperlink with the words "Save 20% to 55% on Great Buys" took you to the weekly specials page.

Wal-Mart was employing a sophisticated technique, but not all that hard to implement. Their "What's Hot" menu at the top right listed four or five specials. Click on one, and you find a photo of another special at top left corner of the page. In fact, each and every product page in the entire store displays one of the four or five specials of the week, hotlinked to the page on which the special is sold.

While some shopping cart software wouldn't let this technique function, you could purchase an inexpensive rotating banner software program, such as Central Ad Pro 3.0J which would deliver selected hot-linked photos to any page on your site, without having to change the code on each page each week. You can also monitor page views and click-through rates allowing you to experiment and refine your specials placement strategy.

You could use rotating banner software to deliver selectively only sports specials to shoppers in the sports department. Use it to cross-sell. You can also use the software to rotate hyperlinked text only through specific sections of your store.

Rule 5. Provide Multiple Navigation Systems

Finally, provide multiple navigation systems for your shoppers. Amazon.Com, for example, shows specials on the front page, searches by author, title, subject, or ISBN, as well as browsing by topic.

Research into shopping patterns by ViaWeb indicates that the shoppers most inclined to purchase products come directly from searching for the product on Yahoo or AltaVista. Your best buyers know what they want and would use a search engine on your site to actively find it. Freeware search engines may be adequate for smaller stores (Matt Wright's Simple Search), as well as larger ones (Swish and Excite).

Many larger sites employ a left-side menu to provide multiple entries into the store by category, special, store philosophy. It doesn't really matter so much what your customer clicks on, so long as it gets him in the door. The more options, the more likely he is to find something which interests him. (A side bar discusses various techniques of maintaining a dynamic side menu.)

These are keys to building a front page that sells. I must confess, however, nostalgia got the better of me. Last night I went surfing for a model railroad site with a Lionel train coming out of a tunnel into full view, its whistle blowing, smokestack belching white smoke, just like the good old days. That would have got me in the door! But, no. All static, pretty staid pages. Sigh. Maybe I'll just window shop a while longer.

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