21 E-Commerce Store Homepages That Are Ready For Spring

Found in: Inspiration
Wednesday
March 30, 2011
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As the northern hemisphere rolls into Spring and we look forward to Summer, I thought that I would do a survey of e-commerce homepages to see who has ditched the winter blues for the greens of Spring. Gone are the bulky sweaters, snow, and being indoors- ’tis the season where we start thinking about shorts, swimwear, outdoor furniture, lawn care, and beach parties.

For your reference (and inspiration), here are twenty one retailers that are actively calling out Spring (and some Summer) on their e-commerce store homepages.

(If you like this post- consider visiting ecommr, which is a gallery website showing the best (and sometimes worst) in e-commerce interface design.)

(Click on each screenshot for a larger view.)



  • American Eagle



  • Aeropostale



  • Athleta

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A Study of 21 E-Commerce “View Your Gift Card Balance” Forms

Found in: Inspiration
Tuesday
March 15, 2011
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I found gift cards from last Christmas- or maybe it was the Christmas before- I forget. Time to look up the balances and spend some money online. But this simple task- looking up the balance of my gift card- got me thinking about under unsexy, yet entirely importantly page of (almost) every e-commerce store: View Your Gift Card Balance.

I decided to view a few retailers and see how these pages are laid out and how easy it is to access the information, as a customer. I’m not concerned with what information is returned, because I don’t have a card number to test on all of these sites. I’m going to assume that the information returned is accurate, so I’m more concerned with the entry screen: how easy it is to find the “View Your Gift Card Balance” entry form and how is the form, itself, displayed and organized?

First, some notes, thoughts, and general comments:

  • 10 of the 20 retailers with check gift card balance functionality has catchas in place. While slightly annoying to the user (who likes captchas?), it’s a simple way to prevent a brute force hack that aims to find valid gift card numbers. Surprised the use of catpchas is only 50% here.
  • Several retailers, including Walmart and Amazon, will allow you to add the gift card balance to your account. Once you are logged in, you don’t need to worry about remembering the gift card number on a future visit- as long as you have a balance left, you can apply it to your order.
  • Couldn’t find a way to check an Amazon balance without logging in- noticed that several retailers had this (none of them are pictured here since I wasn’t creating an account for them!) I find this annoying, as a user, since I often have gift cards for stores that I shop at infrequently and don’t have accounts for. I’d rather check the balance so that I can use the gift card in store.
  • Zumiez is the only retailer that I saw that had the functionality to combine multiple gift card balances onto one card. This is a great way to avoid the awkward cash wrap conversation of “use this one first, it has $3.35 on it”. I expect more retailers will have this functionality in 2011.
  • Sports Authority is included in this list, even though their “Check your gift card balance” page is just a note to call a toll free number.
  • Most retailers have a prominent link to the gift card section- which includes both buying of new cards and checking the balance of existing cards. Some bury it under the customer service section, which doesn’t seem completely intuitive.
  • On what is usually a very good, highly usable store- it took 5 clicks to get to the “View Gift Card Balance” page in the Coach store. Gift card balance is under the gift card purchace page which is buried under “Gift Services” in the customer service section.
  • The most usable gift card sections were found on Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, Home Depot, and Lowes. I think this is interesting since coffee houses are going to thrive on gift card purchases, fueling the small, repeat transactions while home improvement stores want to make sure that you are spending all of the gift cards you got from a major life milestone (wedding, buying a house, etc). That’s not to say that other retailers are doing it bad, but I’m not surprised that coffee and home improvement are doing it so well.
  • Coach doesn’t deserve all flack- since J.Crew’s gift card balance page was even harder to find. Eventually I gave up and had to resort to Google. (More details on this below.)

Now, here’s 20 or 21 retailers “View Your Gift Card Balance” subsections:

(Click on each screenshot for a larger view.)



  • American Eagle
    Probably one of the most plain-looking gadgets that you will find on the American Eagle site, but at least the form is clean and the information is easy to find on their store (clearly described link in the global site footer).



  • Abercrombie and Fitch
    Of the retailers with captchas, the only one with an “audio” option to speak the code. Kudos to Abercrombie for making this part of the site even more accessible.



  • Bloomingdale’s

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Over 50% Of Top E-Commerce Stores are running jQuery

Found in: Development
Friday
December 10, 2010
2 Comments

Here’s what I do for fun: I wrote a script to parse the content of websites and tell me if the site is running one of the major Javascript libraries (jQuery, Dojo, Prototype, Mootools, or YUI). The script loads the URL, parses the contents, queries for specific references to the Javascript libraries and returns a list of which libraries are being loaded.

To see what Javascript library usage looks like among the major e-commerce stores, I ran this script against (most of) the first 100 entries in Internet Retailer’s Top 500 list. Specifically, I hit the homepages of these stores to see what libraries are loaded when the user first accesses the site. The results are interesting (to me), although not unexpected.

Here are the results of that script, in pretty pie chart form:

As you can see, jQuery is extremely popular and has nearly three times the market share of any other single library.

A few of the retailers in this list have already announced plans to re-platform or upgrade their existing e-commerce stores in 2011. It will be interesting to see where these numbers lie in a year.

A few more interesting data points:
- I did run the query to look for usage of Scriptaculous but did not include this as a separate line item since it is built on top of and requires Prototype. For what it is worth, about half the sites that are running Prototype are also running Scriptaculous.
- 10 stores are running two Javascript libraries. Neiman Marcus actually loads jQuery, Prototype, and YUI when the user first hits the homepage.

A sample of some of the stores running each library:
- jQuery: Amazon, Dell, Staples, Costco, Victoria’s Secret, Buy.com, Kohl’s, J.Crew, Blue Nile
- Dojo: Apple, Graingier, Williams Sonoma, Home Depot, NutriSystem, Disney
- Prototype: Officemax, Sony Style, Toys R Us, Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Drugstore.com, Ralph Lauren
- Mootools: QVC, HP, Walgreens, Build.com
- YUI: Neiman Marcus, CSN Stores, School Specialty

A couple of notes about the list of URLs that I ran this script against: I did not include Blockbuster, Netflix, or Freshdirect in my script even though they are in the Top 100. Reason for this is because the e-commerce components of their sites are behind subscription login pages. Also, for companies with large e-commerce networks (multiple sites), I picked one URL that I felt was representative of their online presence. For example, in the case of Gap Inc., I ran my query against gap.com, assuming that oldnavy.com and bananarepublic.com would produce similar results.

Nice Out of Stock Image, Costco

Found in: Inspiration
Tuesday
October 26, 2010
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Interesting out of stock image from the Costco store. Nice pallet:

I am not quite sure why Costco decides to turn their product images off on out of stock products, but I see this same image on a few different products. I think it is more helpful to have a “Sold Out” overlay on top of the original product image. Otherwise, if the product isn’t going to come back in stock, it should be yanked from the catalog.

Overstock.com Adds GoodRelations + RDFa to all Product Pages (and why other retailers should care)

Found in: Development, Industry News
Monday
October 18, 2010
1 Comment

Last week, Overstock.com added GoodRelations rich meta-data in RDFa to all of their product pages. If you are unfamiliar with GoodRelations, they give a better intro/overview than I can, on their own site:

GoodRelations is a standardized vocabulary for product, price, and company data that (1) can be embedded into existing static and dynamic Web pages and that (2) can be processed by other computers. This increases the visibility of your products and services in the latest generation of search engines, recommender systems, and novel mobile or social applications.

The announcement about the implementation, from Martin Hepp, can be found on the Linking Open Data project mailing list. A fairly technical, but thorough, discussion of the implementation follows in the thread. If you are working on the technical side of implementing RDFa/GoodRelations in e-commerce stores, I recommend reading through that entire discussion.

What this means: a customer has long been able to look at a product detail page and visually discern the details they need to know about a product: price, description, availability, and features. With GoodRelations + RDFa in place, computers (read: search engines or other applications) can now parse that page and use that same data. This means increased visibility of product pages and, in turn, more potential traffic to your e-commerce store.

Overstock appears to benefit greatly from the inclusion of GoodRelations on top of what is already good, clean, semantic HTML. Their product detail pages are marked up (coded) very well, allowing for search engines and spiders to dissect the information quickly. Because of that markup, Overstock typically has high rankings in search engine results for specific product names. These search results also include current data about the product (price, reviews, availability). The markup of the of these pages makes this data easily accessible for the search engines. Having this information present in the search result must lead to increased click through rates on these items.

An example of this display can be found in a Google search for “Skullcandy Full Metal Jacket Silver 11 mm Earbuds“. Here’s a screenshot, showing Overstock as the #2 search result, including the pricing, availability, and customer review data from the product detail page:

A little further down the page, you see other retailers:

This result is fairly typical: breadcrumbs, description, and product name. But, it doesn’t have the reviews, price, or availability data that it could have. Ranking aside, which type of result do you think is going to have the higher click through rate?

As the e-commerce industry continues to get more competitive, structuring the markup of product detail pages properly will become even more important. Last year, Best Buy revealed that, after implementing RDFa + GoodRelations on their product pages, they saw increased rank in search engine results (with new pages out ranking legacy pages) and their stores pages received a 30% increase in traffic.
need to look at the example being set by Best Buy and Overstock.

Retailers, that are looking to increase the visibility of their products, need to look to the example that is being set by Best Buy and Overstock. Semantic HTML coupled with technology like GoodRelations + RDFa will only benefit product details pages.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention one other, but there is on other very important example of the search benefits of RDFa + GoodRelations. Since 2008, Yahoo has been using RDFa data to enhance their search results. In the above post, I showed how well Overstock product names return on Google, but I should have also shown how the same search looks on Yahoo. A search for Skullcandy Full Metal Jacket Silver 11 mm Earbuds on Yahoo has Overstock.com outranking their Amazon.com counterparts. (I can’t believe I neglected to put this in the original post. Thanks to @kidehen for pointing this out.)