Marks and Spencer has reported a big drop in online sales after its move to a new website platform hit trading.
Sales at the website were down 8.1% in the 13 weeks to 28 June, with M&S chief executive Marc Bolland admitting the new site had “an impact on sales”. BBC
Google recently did some testing on e-commerce sites and their performance. They found that designs which feel familiar work best.
Simple layouts are easier for people to understand, and it is probably good if visitors are presented with limited decisions – Amazon’s design has never been a graphic design prize winner really, but they sell, well, quite a lot of stuff. Even more interesting is that it really has not changed dramatically since its early days.
Amazon 2014 (last major change was about 2006/7, I think) the home page and individual product pages have lost the sidebars, but they persist with cleaner styling on the rest of the site.
The product pages are quite simple, while there are lots of options down the page, the top area basically presents one option. BUY or not buy.
Everyone knows that big friendly yellow buy button.
Whilst the overall concept has stayed very much the same, it is important to keep in mind -in the background every single detail of every page is being constantly examined, evaluated and tweaked to improve sales. The changes are never earthshaking, never likely to frighten the customers.
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