It’s a fairly universal guideline that helping customers quickly & easily find the products they are looking for is the best way to keep them on your site and increase the chances to capture a sale.¬† Oftentimes, what’s overlooked is the “how” to make this happen.
This month, FastPivot assisted in the launching of a re-designed and re-engineered www.coffeeam.com, bringing a whole new level of user interface to their site. One of the highlights is a dynamic and interactive “product categorizer,” based on roast profiles, and built in a way that screams “a Yahoo! Store can do that?!”
Before the custom site re-design, CoffeeAM was like the majority of e-commerce sites, in that they were challenged to find the best way to manually create and organize their special feature categories to provide the navigation structure for visitors to browse the site and find the products that interest them. CoffeeAm wanted specialized categories to be created and populated dynamically to feature specific products.
FastPivot was more than eager to get started on this request… and the results speak for themselves. Instead of wading through page after page of products to find and compare different brands of coffee that have the same roast profile, visitors are now able to use an interactive “selector” to determine what type of coffee roast is best suited for their tastes. As they move their mouse over the “gauge” area, an informational window displays a brief description of the roast profile. Once a suitable roast is found, they simply click on the button and are taken to the corresponding Roast Profile Page, where all of the products that fall under that category are automatically found and displayed.
No longer is it necessary for store owners to go through the tedious task of determining and adding the appropriate products to a specialized category, or to go through the contents list to find the correct page id to remove. By setting up specialized parameters, the custom programming handles all of the “dirty work” based on the criteria specified. This type of advanced feature can be modified to fit any number of specifications, such as grouping products by price, brand, size, color, etc. The best part is the minimal maintenance work. Depending on the parameters, store owners simply populate one or two additional variables for their items, which can easily be accommodated by means of a CSV data upload.
This is just one example of how FastPivot, an e-commerce and Yahoo! Store design and development company, can take a normal online store and, from the inspiration of a client’s inquiries, transform it into a site that people will want to come back to over and over again.
Have an idea of your own? Don’t hesitate to contact FastPivot to discuss the possibilities of making that little idea a big turnaround success for your Yahoo! Store.
