It was a good point. An avalanche of brands have indeed started selling directly to consumer both online and off. Examples include Bose, LuluLemon and Apple of course. Sure larger margins are a draw. But it does not seem to be the main one – after all, most vendors continue offering their goods via third parties, as well. But they are eager to leverage the changing nature of the shopping experience. Customers are no longer restricted to local B&M stores and their limited selection.They compare prices and features online, and quickly locate the best deals for their needs. In other words they have assumed control, and forward-looking brands realize they need to engage users directly if they want to understand evolving needs and remain successful.

What many brand manufacturers, especially smaller, specialized companies eager to sell directly online do not realize at first, is the amount of work and know-how involved when moving from a purely B2B approach to one that includes B2C. When they find out, many decide to join existing ecommerce websites that host a panoply of brands and offer all of them a similar, ready-made template along with near-instant access to the online marketplace.
Unfortunately this “easy way out” rarely yields the desired commercial results. Traffic, ticket size, conversion and consumer retention rates remain low.

At ECommerce Partners, we advocate building dedicated niche stores, or Microshops instead. These inch-wide, mile-deep ecommerce sites are custom made and optimized for a specific niche market, including targeted brand and product categories. They offer a wide selection of specialty items and a seamless web design and intuitive user interface for maximum shopping convenience.

Here are three points specialty brand manufacturers need to be particularly mindful of:

Showcase expertise. Focus on a specific product line and offer a large selection along with specialized tips, detailed information, reviews and more. This will allow you to engage with your most relevant target groups and showcase real thought and product leadership in the niche while branding your store. Examples of niche markets would include baby slings, vegan shoes or teeth whitening products. The content that you develop about your field of expertise will be rare and will attract relevant traffic to your website.

Boost loyalty. Use your niche site to develop a real relationship with your customers. Engage them in dialogue, learn about their evolving needs, and leverage valuable user information in your marketing strategies for personalized up-sells and cross-sells, as well as to develop additional products and features that closely match customer needs.

Increase margins. Analyze your sales data over a period of time to spot your real bestsellers. In most cases, the 80/20 rule applies. In other words, your top 20% products will drive 80% of sales. Once you’ve identified the prefered 20% , find ways to streamline their production maximizing efficiencies and minimizing costs to boost your bottom line.

No question: Selling directly to consumers can be a great opportunity for specialty brand manufactures. But rather than rushing to any type of online niche marketplace, plan your B2C approach carefully and systematically and evaluate all your options. More often than not, customized microshop ecommerce sites are the way to go.

We see many attempts to fulfill users’ needs by means of Q&A pages for example, or more focused information attachments to specific products. Also, the application of “Inside Information” the store gathers from its shoppers’ habits, is another creative way to help shoppers make the purchasing decision. Already widely used are features like “best-seller” and “people who bought…”, but I came across the following:

HomeFurnitureShowroom.com allow their customers to view the frequency of product return.

While not revealing any specific number, this intuitive scale gives shoppers a general indication of the rate that people have returned the product in the past. Something like that can help remove hesitation and eventually make a difference between a purchase and a non-purchase. (The data can be automatically generated by synchronizing the page with the RMA record).

Think of a scenario in a physical store, a slight remark by the vendor or something written on the product’s package can make that difference, and the same applies for e-commerce. Of course, the product support history can be more effective for some products and less for others.

Ultimately, the product detail page should simulate all aspects of shoppers’ encounters. The more relevantly informed shoppers are, the better and easier purchasing decisions they will make, thereby increasing your profit and decreasing any post-purchase service issues you will need to handle.

1. Research and Strategy

The core focus of any e-Commerce website design should be clear communications between the web development company and the client. It is very important that the designers and developers have a clear understanding of the company, the product and the industry as a whole. Discuss your target audience and brainstorm possible keywords that potential customers might use to find your company or your product. Taking this all-important first step will ensure you don’t blindly waste marketing dollars trying to reach or convert the wrong type of customer. Using this strategy virtually guarantees that your efforts to focus in on the right types of customers are well-rewarded, saving you time and money.

2. Planning

This involves setting down all the requirements for the new e-Commerce site as well as its participants. What are the requirements for users? Content? Search? Landing pages? This is the time to ask yourself crucial questions regarding how much (or how little) knowledge someone must have about your product or service to make a purchase. Are they simply aware of it or are they searching specific item numbers and names? Knowing this information will help you pinpoint exactly how your customers are finding your online store, as well as how long they’re staying and which pages they’re visiting. It can often make the difference between a broad, general information search that yields no results and a specific product name or price comparison that turns into a sale.

3. Information Architecture

Here you’ll consider the navigation and layout of the site as well as best practices for overall user experience. How easy is it for your potential customer to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily? Following best practices in information architecture is key to overall user satisfaction and a higher conversion rate. Understanding how customers browse your site is key to giving them what they’re looking for without a lot of hassle or wasted time. The sooner your e-Commerce website can resolve their needs, the more likely they will be to make a purchase and come back again.

4. Design

This will be the visual representation of your site. Often created as a Photoshop template, pieces can be moved around and adjusted during the design phase to create a professional, customer-oriented style that best captures your brand and focus. Having a professionally designed website is paramount to the all-important “first impression” a potential customer gets of your site and its credibility. If the site does not project a style that is attractive and pleasing, the customer may mistakenly infer that the products sold will not live up to their expectations. Equally as important, website design plays a key role in determining usability. Put simply, the customer experience in surfing your site and finding the products they’re looking for will have a direct impact on how many site visitors actually convert into buyers.

5. Construction

This is the “nuts and bolts” behind any solid, reliable e-Commerce website, including client and server-side applications (front end and back end programming), quality assurance testing, integration of third party tools and other solutions that will make your e-Commerce website scalable as it continues to grow. Ensuring that third party tools, backend applications and other components work seamlessly together contribute to the overall user experience and repeat purchases. Think of the website construction as the support framework of a house you’re building, and web design as the outside of the house – the siding, well-groomed yard and welcome mat that make it feel warm and inviting. Without properly constructing the framework, the house would fall apart.

6. Migration and Launch

The final step involves moving the site from a development server toward live launch. Revisit each of the aforementioned areas again for a final test to confirm that everything works, the brand message is conveyed and the navigation is seamless and properly leads someone to making a purchasing decision.

When developing an e-Commerce site plan, you can filter these steps into three main areas — Research and Strategy, Planning and Information Architecture. Ecommerce Partners has developed a very detailed outline of this plan known as the Ecommerce Requirements Specification or ERS. These are the essential “building blocks” for your website from start to finish.

An ERS, done right is the formula for a well-ranking, well-developed website that converts. Throughout the process, it should be streamlined enough to keep with best industry practices while being flexible enough to account for new developments and added growth.

By keeping these e-Commerce development points in mind when drafting your new site, you’ll be able to enjoy greater conversions at a lower cost than trying to plan-as-you-go and hoping for the best. In the end, following a well-rounded e-Commerce site development plan will ensure your new online business keeps customers (and search engines) coming back while opening the door for more expansive growth in the future as the e-tailer landscape continues to evolve.

For help with developing an ERS of your own, Contact ECommerce Partners for a free consultation and price quote at 1-866-431-6669 or email dennis[at]ecommercepartners.net.

If I had to choose the single most important attribute of a niche ecommerce business, I’d say it was trust.

Establishing trust with your customers is crucial to the success of an online business. For you, the business owner, it translates into a higher conversion rate and a lower cart abandonment rate. For your customers, it translates into the ease of mind that leads them to feel comfortable handing out their credit card information, without worrying about identity theft or number stealing. They have to believe that your ecommerce site is the front-end of a real, legitimate business that will supply what it says it will – not a scam that will take their money or their credit card number and disappear into cyperspace.

And when there are no face-to-face interactions, and everything they see is virtual (no “real” store, no “real” inventory, no salespeople), it’s absolutely essential to achieve that bond of trust with every potential customer - fast.

That’s true for any ecommerce site, but it’s especially true for specialty or vertical sites, just because niche businesses tend to look small. The whole point of a single-focus site is that it caters to a narrow range of potential customers with very specific interests, dispersed world-wide. But those customers are more inclined to trust a big business such as a chain or department store than a small operation.

Look at it from your customer’s point of view:

• There are so many fraudulent websites out there, so many cases of identity theft – why should anyone believe that your website is a bona fide ecommerce site, just because it says so?

• If they’re nervous and aren’t reassured that it’s safe to shop with you, they’ll just go somewhere else. The number of online stores available is growing daily – they don’t have to compromise.

We’re not discussing your products here. Perhaps you sell brands, perhaps it’s no-name, perhaps it’s services. Doesn’t matter. What matters is the message your customers get from your website. And that’s got nothing to do with the reliability, or reputation, of what you’re selling.

Of course I’m not the first to point this out. Ecommerce-website designers have been researching the problem of trust since the dawn of ecommerce. And what’s emerged is - let’s call it a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy of Ecommerce. You want to jump aboard? You’d better know how to behave! So here, in a nutshell, are the bare outlines of the guidebook:

• Make sure your website has a professional look-and-feel. An ecommerce website has to radiate professionalism in order to inspire confidence. That means not just the big picture (aesthetics, usability, ease of navigation, decent response time and so on) but also the details – no obsolete content; no dead links or other error messages; no spelling mistakes.Don’t trust yourself to check your website out. Ask some friends to spend a few minutes on your site and tell you if it looks like it belongs to a professional company or a mom-and-pop operation.

• Give alternative ordering methods: fax, email, regular mail. This says that you know some customers don’t want to give out their credit card numbers online. You don’t require it in order to do business with them. That alone reassures the wary that your site isn’t just a scam to grab their credit cards.

• Have a clear returns policy – on a page of its own, with a clear link to it from every product page.

• Have a clear and reassuring privacy policy – and make sure it conforms to the “industry norms” that customers expect. No, you don’t keep a record of their credit card information. Not even in an offline database. No, you don’t reveal their personal information to third parties, and most especially you don’t sell it to advertisers. And so on.

• Use security seals and third-party authentication:

  • SSL certificates from recognised providers such as VeriSign reassure customers that their sensitive personal and credit-card data is encrypted for transmission.

  • Business-identity authentication services from providers such as TRUSTe, BBB online, Web Trust, or Chamber Seal provide proofs that this site is indeed a legitimate one with a Real Business behind it.

  Remember, this is necessary but not sufficient – if your site doesn’t look like a Real Business, your customers won’t get as far as checking its authentication.

• Make sure they know who they’re dealing with. That’s the function of the “About Us” page. Who are the people behind this site? (Include some photos of them – only please, in business contexts, not a group photo in shorts and T-shirts from your recent company barbecue). What’s the business behind this site? (Include your Mission Statement, your Vision Statement, your Value Proposition. Don’t have any? Now’s the time to write them!).

• Get a toll-free number (800). Doesn’t cost much but makes you look like a “big company.” That’s reassuring because big companies are perceived as established and unlikely to disappear, as opposed to “fly by night” operations working from Gmail addresses and post-office box numbers.

• For the same reason: give your phone numbers (both regular and toll-free) and other contact information on every page. One good place is in the standard header to every page. Remember that people looking for products can land from a search engine on any page of your site, without going through the home page. Whatever page they land on, it has to reassure them that they’ve reached a reliable company. The best way to start reassuring them is to give adequate contact information, including your physical location (address) on every page.Oh yes – and that phone number should be an office line not a cellphone. Would you purchase from an online store whose only phone was wandering the galaxy? A cellular-only phone number invites the conclusion that there aren’t any premises to install a fixed line in.

• And about that “Contact Us” page: at the very least it should give your business’s full address (not just a PO box number which to many people translates as “we don’t have a real address”), phone and fax numbers, and email address(es). Preferably it should also have:

  • Names of the people responsible for various aspects of the business (e.g. sales, order fulfilment, technical help, etc.), with their email addresses and/or phone numbers. Make sure there’s a link to the “Contact Us” page from the “About Us” page too.

  • If you don’t have several available staff members, at least have multiple email addresses, such as sales@yoursite.com, customerServices@yoursite.com, info@yoursite.com, and so on. These might all be aliases pointing to your own email address – but the customer doesn’t know that. Make sure these email addresses use your business’s domain name. Nothing destroys credibility faster than a business that uses a Gmail or Hotmail or other freebie webmail address, just like a teenager.

  • How about a photo of your premises? – the office, the warehouse or fulfillment house – especially if there’s a sign with your business’s name in the foreground of the picture. Again, it helps reassure your customers that there’s a real business out there.

  • And if you’re offering a local service, consider including “directions to our office” with a link to the map from a web service such as Google Maps.

• Have a Testimonials page - let satisfied customers do the talking for you.

• If you like to go the extra mile, add a favicon to your URL, it will make your company look big and important.

For 2 good examples… go to http://hangers.com/ and www.BabySling.com.

Like I said, that’s in a nutshell. But if you’ve got all that, you’re way ahead of the crowd.

The trouble is, that many of those redesigned sites won’t be any better than the previous ones at doing what they’re meant to do – attracting potential buyers, helping them find what they need on-site, and converting them into customers. Why not? Because their owners think they’re designing a website.

If you’re selling online, you’ve got an online business. So you should be building a business, not designing a website. The website is just the tool.

Building a business is a lot more complicated than designing a website. Perhaps a better analogy is building a house. When you build a house, you work closely with the architect to make sure he knows exactly what you want. You figure out who’s going to use each room, and when, and for what, and how the orientation and design of the room will support its function and its users’ needs. And you know you need a team of specialists - an architect for the vision and the look-and-feel; an engineer for statics; an electrician, a bricklayer and others specialists for the behind-the-scenes installations; an interior designer for the details that make the house a pleasure to spend time in, and so on. And a contractor to oversee the whole project and make sure all the experts work together.

Building an ecommerce business is like that. You don’t need a “website designer” who can do it all; you need to decide what you want (and figure it out with professional help if you aren’t sure), plan everything in advance, in detail, and then have a whole team of people with different skills for execution:
• A project manager (someone who “owns the project” and acts as the contractor)
• An Ecommerce business analyst (to conduct the research, plan strategy, find out what your competitors are doing that may be worth mimicking, and find the “opportunities” that those competitors are not taking advantage of)
• A Search Engine Optimization specialist (to do the SEO development and manage all your SEO requirements)
• A copy writer who not only writes great copy for websites but also knows enough about SEO to embed the right keywords in it at the right places, the right number of times, yet end up with text that looks natural
• An Information Architect
• A user-experience specialist
• A designer
• An art director (to create the style guide and give directions to the designer)
• A programmer
• A quality Assurance specialist

Wow! – you’re probably saying. Do I really need all that? Oh yes. Anyone can design a website of sorts, but building a successful ecommerce business is highly interdisciplinary. It draws not just on computer science and information architecture, but also on mathematics and statistics, cognitive psychology, consumer behavior, social networking, human-computer interfaces (especially online usability), linguistics, marketing, retailing, and more.

You, the business owner, are mostly involved with the initial planning process. The result of it should be a detailed set of needs and requirements. This document is crucial. If you don’t get it right, your ecommerce business won’t succeed no matter how much graphics design and programming you throw at it. But most business people can’t get it right on their own – they need the equivalent of an “ecommerce business analyst” to help them consider the possibilities, see the implications, and make the right decisions. This is such an elementary need, that at Ecommerce Partners we developed a detailed methodology just for the planning stage. Just to give an idea of what’s involved; here are some of the issues it covers:

• Objectives and Expectations
• Target Audience
• Competitive Analysis
• SEO Keyword Research
• User and Functional Requirements
• Search and Content Requirements
• Technical Requirements
• SEO Requirements
• Navigation Tree
• Labeling and Thematic Architecture
• Functional Design
• User Experience Guidelines
• Creative Brief - the visual elements of the site, the brand identity, the type of audience, the “story” the site should tell, the tone and imagery that the site should take on

Complicated? Well, not really if you do have the right partner. But if the groundwork is not done properly from start, you’ll probably find yourself redesigning your website – again and again and again…

In recent years, niche online retailers have posted some of the fastest growth rates among the Internet Retailer’s Top 500 biggest web businesses (measured in annual revenue). 2007 was no exception. Among those Top 500 companies earning at least 30% growth in revenue year over year, around 3 in 4 were specialty stores or specialty store conglomerates.

In descending order:

1. Diapers.com grew its annual sales by 227.3% from $11 million in 2006 to $36 million in 2007

2. SmithCo Holdings grew 194% from $2.9 million in 2006 to $8.5 million in 2007. Among their sites are Aquasuperstore.com and ShopByTheRoom.com,

3. Cymax Stores Inc., up 159.6% from $12.5 million in 2006 to $32.5 million in 2007. Launched in 2005, Cymax is a conglomerate of 150 niche furniture & electronic web retailer sites, including BabyCribStation.com, BeanBagSelect.com, and BakersRacksCollection.com.

4. LA Police Gear Inc., up 137.5% to $19 million.

5. Designer Plumbing Outlet grew its annual sales by 126.2% from $4.2 million in 2006 to $9.5 million in 2007 with two sites focusing plumbing products, DesignerPlumbingOutlet.com and DesignerFaucetOutlet.com.

6. Select Shops, up 97% from $13 million in 2006 to $25.6 million in 2007; sites include SelectRugs.com and SelectBlinds.com.

7. CSN Stores Inc. grew its annual sales by 83.64% from $110 million in 2006 to $202 million in 2007. CSN Stores now totals 250 specialty online stores.

8. IVGstores.com, up by 79.31% from $11.6 million to $20.8 million; their 225 sites include Folding-Tables-Folding-Chairs.com, Ping-Pong-Table-Tennis.com, and PokerTableShowroom.com.

9. Hangers.com grew its annual sales by 70.3% from $5 million in 2006 to $8.6 million in 2007.

10. Ice.com Inc. grew annual sales by 70% from $49 million in 2006 to $83.4 million in 2007. The company also owns Diamond.com.

11. Kaboose Inc, up 57.45% from $4.7 million in 2006 to $7.4 million. Their sites include BabyZone.com, ParentZone.com, AmazingMoms.com, BirthdayInABox.com, and TwoPeasInABucket.com.

12. BizChair.com grew its annual sales by 57% from $24.1 million in 2006 to $38 million in 2007.

13. Shoppers Choice.com LLC, with 4 niche stores focusing on the BBQ arena, grew their annual sales by 51% from $8.9 million in 2006 up to $13.5 million. Among their sites are BBQguys.com and TheGrillStoreAndMore.com.

14. Net Shops Inc—with 230 niche stores—grew its annual sales by 50% from $115 million in 2006 to $172 million in 2007.

15. Pets United LLC grew annual sales by 41% from $34.6 million in 2006 to $48.8 million in 2007. Pets United operates Dog.com, Horse.com, Ferret.com, Bird.com, and Fish.com.

16. Online Stores Inc increased revenue by 30% from $12.3 million in 2006 to $16 million in 2007. Stores include Stroller.com, U.S.FlagStore.com, EnglishTeaStore.com, and DiscountSafetyGear.com.

A lot of wild and wonderful predictions are being made about how computer-use is going to totally transform the shopping experience. Totally transformative changes have happened already – not least the way that customers looking for goods or services now automatically turn in their masses to a search engine (usually Google) to find them. The use of the Search function is leaping upward at the phenomenal rate of 20% a year, and it’s brand-new users who mostly account for that growth. Existing users, for their part, are boosting their use by 25% year.

But when it comes to the nitty-gritty of allowing customers to make a real-world choice between specific items on offer, some of the wilder fantasies of web enthusiasts remain just that - fantasies.

On the other hand, I’ve already got some experience of letting a customer decide in a real-world kind of way on just exactly what s/he wants, when confronted with a range of similar-looking options in the virtual, on-line world. For instance the fantasy with online clothes-shopping is that in your own bedroom you could step in front of some kind of elaborate web-cam (or web-cams), and have your body-image transmitted to the online clothes-store you’re visiting, and as if by magic your 3-D image, maybe even a hologram of sorts, would be clothed in the correct size of garment, and you get to see if its color and cut really suit you or not.

Well that ideal is still some ways away. But I know already that it can work, because - employing a bit more realism and present-day practicality - I’ve helped an eyeglasses store to give its customers a highly refined form of comparison-testing.

The customers get to “try on” different choices of glasses by uploading their photo; the images of different frames and lenses are “fitted” to their face, right down to the exact placement on the bridge of the nose, or below it, depending on individual taste and comfort. And of course this all gives a highly accurate indication of just how the glasses would work in real life.

And we’re on the way to more complete visualization. Zafu.com, the niche search engine for woman’s jeans and other clothing, already asks its customers a set of detailed questions, through drop-down menus and buttons, about how much their waistbands might gape, whether they want to disguise their “saddlebags”, whether they have full or slim thighs, as well as obvious matters like general size and preferred brands of jeans, and so on. Then the store’s database is raided to produce typically a range of seven or eight suitable pairs of jeans to pick from.

Very soon we can expect Zafu, or a competitor in the same line of business, to offer a major technical advance. This will enable the customer to upload a video of herself, captured according to specific criteria – which will help her see, in a 360 degree visualization, just how a pair of jeans would fit on her own frame. It’s a tool similar to the WII Xbox application developed for gaming, but re-imagined as that ideal virtual fitting-room we’ve dreaming of. And that customer will be able to test out just which accessories (handbags, belts etc) look best on her, along with those jeans being “tried on”.

Fantastical? The province of science fiction? Not any more.

As we figure what precise keywords we should choose to draw people to our website, it makes a whole lot of sense to also get really savvy about what our competition might be doing in this field.
The great guiding principle in picking keywords is of course sheer logic. Our job, after all, is to figure out just what the customer has in mind when he or she is searching, and that is best figured out logically. But it helps, too, to know what keywords the opposition uses and finds effective — and of course what words don’t work so well.

It’s all essential intelligence (in the sense of industrial espionage) and thankfully there are a choice of spy systems for hire. The Trellian Company’s Keyword Discovery has for about four years been collecting data on keywords from a couple of hundred search engines, taking a lot further, and analyzing in more sophisticated detail, what the humbler British-owned Wordtracker has been doing for 11 years now.

Size does matter, for in any given survey Keyword Discovery will return thousands of results, compared with the hundreds that we’d previously bee used to working with. On top of that, while other programs may track daily or monthly search frequencies, Keyword Discovery will give you the yearly usage of a key word or phrase, providing a fuller basis for comparison between word-choices. It can produce a trend analysis for any given term, one that will reveal seasonal patterns over the course of a year.

The more sexily-named SpyFu (I guess) takes the espionage notion (and martial arts, it seems) a bit further, building on its developer, Velocityspace’s earlier, and free, tool called Googspy. SpyFu makes a point of offering aggressive drilling-down into your competition’s efforts, showing for instance, their estimated daily advertising budget, their total clicks per day, the average cost per click, average ad position, incoming links to their sites, and so on.

Just to confirm the overall competitive “Cold War” feel of this world, there’s also a tool that fuses the above names - KeywordSpy. But why go on? - it’s clear that focusing your effort on just the customers you want is a highly competitive business if you want to conduct it at the most efective level — and that means availing yourself of really well-captured, reliable and detailed information … lots of it.

We naturally want a website selling our goods or service to look good. That’s a no-brainer.

But striking the right balance between aesthetic attractiveness and the best kind of functionality doesn’t come easy. But it’s really important.

It’s surprising how often clients give their website designers a basic brief, and then leave matters to the “creativity” of the designer to produce a good site according to his or her own lights. Then the clients are surprised that the working results, in terms of customer behavior (and that of course means BUYING - not just visiting) turn out to be disappointing.

We - by contrast - put a lot of emphasis on our clients’ purpose and intention, over and above design. Not that design isn’t important - of course it is, and we deliberately track in great detail where, and what order, the human eyeball is drawn to visual elements on any given web page - but functionality always must come first. “What’s to be achieved here?” is the constant question. “What do we want the visitor to do, exactly?”

We experiment too, of course … tinkering with just where on the page a certain feature is placed … changing it … and then measuring the difference in visitors’ behavior.

In fact we have it down to a fine art now (or, you might prefer, science). And, though this might shock many designers who don’t share our outlook, when we’re preparing a site we draft out a kind of a wire-frame diagram, very detailed in its layout - and in its internal traffic-flow, as it were. We then hand that over to designers to make it attractive to the eye.

I don’t want to disrespect some very valuable skills of creativity … but you wouldn’t entrust the building of a house or an office-complex to a decorator, would you? We are performing the essential function of builders and engineers, with decorators contributing their own valuable role.

“Search Within” might sound to the initiated like some eastern meditation technique, but of course in online commerce it’s much more down-to-earth. Search within your online site, enabling customers to quickly find exactly what they went once they’ve arrived at your site, is hugely important. And there are ways to ensure it works well, as well as some common pitfalls that can be avoided.

The simplest ideal, of course, is that a customer should see the very product s/he wants at the very moment of arrival; in such an ideal world the product (or service) would be sitting right there on your home page.

Maybe that ideal can be achieved by really good, tightly focused creation of your online store in the first place … your store has, and only has, precisely what the search customer wants. More likely, though, s/he has used search terms on Google or another engine that bring her/him to your homepage, in the strong belief that you offer – somewhere in this store – exactly what they want. Your aim is to present the desired directly to him/her within an absolute minimum number of clicks.

Your database must be structured soundly and comprehensively, with nothing left out by chance. And your search function needs to be flexible and “forgiving”. It can’t be over-literal or hung-up on specific punctuation styles. Or too tough on spelling variations – as this cartoonist points out – after being frustrated, it seems, by an online vacation-planning site.

Indeed, nothing can be more frustrating for a customer than knowing you have what’s wanted, but it can’t be found.

Every which way to search for the desired product or service must be covered; let the customer use an item’s name, its generic title, the categories of goods or services in which it can belong, everything you can think of. Logic and common sense are your best guides, but always err toward the wider, more comprehensive end of the scale, covering every possibility.

This way - just to quote one likely instance - someone wants from your (notional) online shoe-store some yellow women’s boots, and one click of the search button will bring them just that … bright, shiny yellow boots for women … and maybe even in the right size, if the customer has thought to enter that too!

Overly literal search engines reduce usability in that they’re unable to handle typos, plurals, hyphens, and other variants of the query terms. Such search engines are particularly difficult for elderly users, but they hurt everybody.
A related problem is when search engines prioritize results purely on the basis of how many query terms they contain, rather than on each document’s importance. Much better if your search engine calls out “best bets” at the top of the list — especially for important queries, such as the names of your products.