Planning E-commerce Navigation in ProductCart

The ProductCart control panel gives site administrators a number of different options for flexibly managing their website navigation and category structure. The system is so flexible, in fact, that if you start throwing navigation elements around your site without a good plan, you could overwhelm your potential customers with so much information that they might not be able to track down the products and deals you want them to find.

Here are some best practices to keep in mind when you're workikng on the navigation plan for your ProductCart website.
 

Keep Site Navigation Simple

The site navigation of an Ecommerce website is like the landing pattern at an airport. As a merchant, you want to get potential customers engaged with your products as quickly as possible - get them into the landing pattern - and then help them through the process smoothly and efficiently to land that sale. Both the initial engagement with your site (the navigation) and the sales process should be straightforward and free from elements that can cause confusion.

The stock ProductCart navigation includes several elements of general interest such as the Useful Links section and the Browse by Price feature - but the key to helping potential customers get into the landing pattern is the site's category navigation. A well-organized category structure can get customers to the products they want quickly without overwhelming them with too much information. As a general rule, try to keep the number of top-level categories to a minimum - typically, more than 7 to 10 top level categories can both strain the site design and visually overwhelm customers. 

Let sub-categories do the heavy lifting beyond the top categories. ProductCart's built-in navigation feature set allows sub-categories to be display in fly-out menus, which allows customers to drill down on products more quickly. Sub-categories require some careful planning as well - you can nest sub-categories within other sub-categories - but nesting categories too deeply (more than a couple of levels) will exceed the limits of the navigation display and cause endless confusion to potential customers.

If your store has a particularly large and complex inventory, you may want to consider working with a developer to create a custom navigation  for the site to help customers find their products quickly.

Take Advantage of Site Search

ProductCart includes powerful search features that can help your customers get where they want to go in a hurry. The basic search option is designed to be display as a simple search bar - usually located in the site header - while the advanced search feature is a separate page which allows the input of a large number of search parameters. If you use a custom design for your site, both tools should be displayed in locations where your site visitors can find them easily.

Built-in Highlight Features

ProductCart's stock functionality also gives you the ability to highlight products on the store's home page by displaying Featured Products, Best Sellers, and Recent Arrivals. These features are managed through the admin control panel. Featured products are selected by the site administrator and (depending on the number selected) displayed in a rotation. The products in Best Sellers and Recent Arrivals are selected by the feature logic based on parameters set in the control panel. All three features are handy tools for promoting your top products to site visitors and are useful suppleents to the site navigation that shouldn't be overlooked.