On the Web: Secrets of Profitable Navigation Exposed

For successful navigation to lead to higher conversion rates, you must provide shoppers several different ways to shop your site. It's a paradigm shift for merchandisers accustomed to organizing a store or catalog by the type of product, which is the kind of one-dimensional navigation that will hinder your success online.

So let's look at all the options OfficeMax gives shoppers on its homepage (pictured). It does a great job offering many different ways to enter the site without cluttering the homepage.

1. Order by Number is ideal for shoppers who already know the product numbers of the items they're looking for and want to order quickly. It's also useful for customers who place frequent orders for consumable products, like office supplies, as well as mail order catalog orders.

2. Weekly Ad provides a clickable replica of the weekly flier with specials. This makes it easy for web shoppers to buy products from that ad.

3. My Favorites allows shoppers to create lists of items they want to order or, more typically, reorder in the future. A continuity offer is a great addition to your favorites section.

4. Shop by Product Type is the most common form of navigation, and its placement is where shoppers expect to find it — at the top of the page.

5. Search is what most shoppers use when a site's navigation fails to help them find the products they're looking for. It's best to place the search box in the upper right corner, as OfficeMax does. Most shoppers read a site from the top, down the left side, across the bottom, then up the right side. The upper right is the last place shoppers look before leaving a page or site. If the navigation hasn't helped, a search box offers the last chance for shoppers to find what they're looking for before leaving.

6. Rotating Banners provide an area to feature store specials, displaying them like an electronic billboard. It's a very effective use of space on the homepage and provides some useful motion.

7. The Big Deal is another way to capture shoppers before they leave the site. Place a popular item at a great price in the upper right corner, which, again, is the last place an eye moves to before leaving the page.

8. Seasonal Specials or Popular Categories are the equivalent of the seasonal or specials' aisles in retail stores.

9. A Popular Products section provides pictures of best-selling products that can act as a visual navigation cue to draw shoppers into a site.

10. Find a Store gives shoppers the ability to locate a storefront location for merchandise pickups or to purchase from local ads. OfficeMax also uses this space for immediate navigation to special program offers.

11. Shop by Brand is a way for small retailers to use a vendor's brand equity. OfficeMax underplays this a bit, because it has a strong brand of its own.

Other Pages
Only about 40 percent to 45 percent of shoppers begin navigating at the homepage. Links from search, email, affiliates and comparative shopping engines usually land shoppers on internal pages, which offer other opportunities for shopper-friendly navigation, including the following:

• Products and Categories Previously Viewed allows merchants to provide quick links back to pages that interested shoppers by simply keeping track of where shoppers have visited. Use a cookie to display these links from a previous visit when those shoppers return.
• Collaborative Filtering is a fancy way of saying "People who bought this also bought these other items."
• Complete the Look, mostly used in fashion, allows shoppers to buy several pieces of an outfit shown in a photo with a single click.
• Recommendation Engines go far beyond collaborative filtering and can become almost personalized navigation.

Is It Working?
While profitability is the ultimate measure for an e-commerce site, you can get a sense of the effectiveness of your navigation by tracking the following metrics over time.

• Track the percentage of shoppers who start carts. If shoppers aren't starting carts, that usually means your navigation or merchandising is off. A "good" number here varies tremendously depending on the nature of your site and the type of traffic it attracts.
  Track this metric over time for different sources of traffic and types of shoppers, particularly direct visitors, paid and organic search-driven visitors, and first-time and repeat visitors. Use it to find opportunities to optimize navigation, product selection and presentation.
• Landing page bounce rate is the percentage of shoppers leaving your site after viewing only one page. As with carts started, a good number for this metric varies tremendously by the type of shopper. In general, a rate below 25 percent for first-time shoppers indicates you're doing well, while repeat visitors should be below 15 percent.
• The percentage of shoppers using site search reflects the effectiveness of your navigation. You're probably thinking, "What an idiot. The shoppers who use site search are among my highest converting. I want more shoppers to use site search."
  The problem is that many people never even use search, opting to leave a site if the navigation fails. If your search rate is creeping up, you're probably losing cruise ship-loads of shoppers who aren't bothering to attempt to search for a product.

Larry Kavanagh is founder and CEO of multichannel solutions provider DMinSite (lkavanagh@dminsite.com).