Click Reduction Act
Hello all. Well, this week started like any other crazy week. Lots to do at the regular J-O-B. Phone ringing, email piling up, meetings, lots of work yet to do and a fast approaching deadline. I exchange a few casual emails with my ecommerce buddy, the crazy coffee lady from Kentucky. She tells me that it takes four clicks to get sock yarn in a cart on my site. Wow.
My first thought is that I have my site pretty organized and I don't know what on earth I could do to reduce the number of clicks. Well, I do know of one but I haven't figured out how to implement it just yet. I would like for the customer to have the ability to add product to the cart when they have the page full of product thumbnails. That will take me a few more weeks. Other than that, I'm stumped.
Ok, I don't know how you do things but I put things like this on a back burner, of sorts, in my brain. I have to be careful. The burners are usually full. Some things have been there longer than others. There are a wide variety of things brewing there. Maybe this is why I almost never get bored.
So, I plunk along my merry way, working and brewing this idea. At lunch, I visit a few sites, take a few notes. Finally, I get the obvious. On other sites there are direct links on the home page to product categories or featured products. Not on mine. Again... duh!
I spent the rest of the week sketching out a big picture for my site. My ecommerce buddy reminds me that I really need to focus on sales. This means I need to get more product out there AND make it easier to get in the cart.
I have a new and improved big picture now. I added more product but I also spent this weekend redesigning my site based on the notes I made during the week. It's only about half way there. I have other, very doable, changes to make but it will require research for me... the novice. I managed to remove at least one click from everything and two from a bunch. This was the biggest bang-for-buck change I could make in a weekend.
Since this is the first major redesign of my site, I think about the weird little yarn ball buttons I'm saying goodbye to. I remember how long it took to create those and how proud I was as a newbie. Now, the same layout looks like old matted outdated carpeting to me... weird. I archived them.
Check out the new digs. This week we'll have company at our house so I'll be entertaining and won't be allowed the luxury of an evening with my face buried in the computer. Don't worry, things are still cooking.
Till next time,
Sandy
This post is filed under By Merchants, For Merchants and has the following keyword tags: click reduction, conversion, usability.
