Do you have an e-commerce website? Do you want to have perfect navigation design for it? If yes, there’s no time like now to get down to some serious navigation design.

Visitors to websites don’t prefer to remain on sites with poor navigation, so it helps to make them comfortable using your site with good navigational techniques.

These days, people with e-commerce sites generally go in for filtered navigation. This helps guide customers find the products and services they seek within comprehensive data sets. They also allow you to look for products on large e-commerce sites like Amazon with many categories, each with different brands of products and in various materials.

Despite the large variety such sites put before visitors, yet this isn’t always the best choice. So, it is always better to test where to add the filtered navigation as there could be large differences between conversion rates.

Filtered navigation is the best solution for maximum conversions. You can also take the help of any of the several online resources to manage your store. To help you along, here are seven top e-commerce UX tips that have proved that they can optimize filtered navigation:

1. Position filtered navigation correctly

You need to decide on the best position for filtered navigation on your site. This is because it works differently on different sites. Often, it’s found to work well when placed on the left sidebar near the content which gives good e-commerce experience. However, on other sites, it works well to have horizontal navigation above the content. So, choose what works well for your site.

2. Indicate how many products user can get

By indicating the number of items a user can get helps him decide whether he should select items from there or not. By knowing this at the outset, he will not be disappointed. Else, he may choose a category and find lesser items than meet his expectations.

3. Show users applied filters

It’s not uncommon for users to forget their recent searches. It would therefore be very helpful to them if your site showed the applied filter with the result to enhance user experience. This will refresh your users’ memories about what they are looking for and update their searches, if found necessary.

4. Match appropriate filters

As an e-commerce site owner, it would help to know what your competition is doing, even if it means checking to see how they use their filters. The filters you use should provide the right response to customers’ queries while checking out a particular product. Commonly used filters in online stores include size, colour, cost, brand, etc.

5. Allow for navigation of product listings

When users are sure of what they want to buy, they begin to shop for it, listing pages as they go along. At this stage, you should provide them with ample choices and pages to shop at. They should be able to engage in each page and explore all the possibilities if they don’t see what’s on each page.

6. Give customers the option of choosing multiple filters

You may have some users who visit your site out of curiosity, while others are very sure of what they want to buy. This latter group of customers looks for different filters to execute their query immediately on various parameters. Therefore, it would help to offer them several filters from different groups and from similar ones.

7. Let customers use manual input means

One kind of manual input means is a checkbox, which is perfect to fetch filters. They can also manually set filter values for price fields, which also you can add in. Adding minimum and maximum costs will also help narrowing down the number of products you show.

8. Allow shoppers to delete some filter options

By allowing for visual filtering, users can alter their filter settings from the product listing without coming in contact with filters. For example, when your mouse hovers over a certain product, you can click ‘Hide this brand’ to de-select this particular brand from brand filtering. By this means, users can edit displayed products without reading through long lists of filter settings.

9. Let users decide how to enter values

Users often want to decide how they wish to enter pricing on e-commerce sites. While some want to enter the figures on their own, others wish to use a flexible slider to display a price.

10. Offer filters that customers want

Features or functionalities aren’t as important as offering users filters that they want to use–something not offered before. On the basis of user feedback, you can offer your customers new filters. By adding analytics, you can track the kind of filters commonly used.

11. Create intelligible filter groups

If you have high conversion rates, you should have filters that can help your customers make a good and sensible purchasing decision, particularly if you sell premium products. You should group filters in an easy-to-use and user-friendly manner so that the navigation is neat and easily approachable.

12. Can your filter groups be toggled?

If you’re going to offer your customers a variety of options, you should think about making your filter groups toggleable so that users can open and close all the groups you have quickly and easily. This works well on mobile screens too, as here the filtered navigation can be far too long for users.

13. Add in thematic filters

For added variety, it always helps to have thematic filters such as “sale,” “summer arrivals”, “festival discount” or “last-minute deals.” Thematic filters can also be modified to include precise filtering such as the “Tools and Home Improvement” site on Amazon has filters such as “Best Sellers,” “Deals and Savings” and “Gift Ideas.”

14. Show a product counter

Displaying a product counter means keeping your customers informed. This builds trust besides letting users know how well they have performed using the site’s filters. Usually, customers want to check out several products before making a purchasing decision. By filtering, users can make this decision faster. By providing users with a product counter, they know immediately if they had set the required number of filters or whether they need to repeat the query.

15. Keep the original text

If your shoppers can’t find what they want, they might want to conduct another search by changing the words a little. So as not to frustrate them, it would help if you leave the earlier search term in the search box so that they don’t need to retype the entire product name once more.

16. Set up a fast checkout system

Let users log in to buy from your site by using cross platform log-ins via Facebook or LinkedIn. The checkout system should be such that with a few mouse clicks your users make their purchase and are out of your site.

17. Understand your buyers’ mindset

If you can gauge the mindset of your customers when they come to your website, it will give you an advantage to convert them to buyers from mere browsers by using the correct type of navigation. This can easily be achieved by using persona types for your customers to enable them to look for certain goods. Whether they are browsers or set to buy, this feature can help them to find whatever they are looking for.

18. Home Page Navigation

When people click your site, obviously you want to help them find what they are looking for. This is also better known as category level navigation. In such a scenario, you can do the following:

• Give your visitors the most panoramic view of all that your site has to sell so that they can work their way down to the sub-categories and find the product they want.
• Let them also see your most used tools, or products bought along with or buying guides.
• Offer links to the Privacy, Customer Service, Shipping and Return Policy pages.

19. If your users are looking for add-ons, how about supplementary products?

If you don’t upsell and cross-sell, you won’t be able to offer your users options, add-ons, substitutes and accessories to the product he sees currently. When you implement these features correctly, your site’s usability also increases. Upselling and cross-selling also help in suggesting options for users in search of particular products.

20. List “Recently Viewed Items”

If visitors find it difficult to search for products they had browsed earlier, you need to come up with a solution. This is often necessary to compare prices, features or availability. By listing “recently viewed items,” users needn’t use the back button to go back as far as possible and check out previously viewed pages and products. They can now get it with just one mouse click.

21. Introduce a “What’s New” Category

Users coming to your site will always drop by your “What’s New” pages and if they can do it with the least effort, so much the better. This works for those who are particular about certain product categories or brands and have a good idea of what’s already in the market in these categories and want to update their knowledge of the latest now. So, by having a separate “What’s New” category based on filters, you can hope for returning visitors who can identify the new products that you have since their earlier visit.

Where seasonal products are concerned, the “What’s New” pages helps users know what’s currently in the market. Or, if you’re not too sure of what to buy for someone you barely know, you could check out the “New” category in a kids’ store so you know what’s on offer.

There are some people who get a kick out of being the first to buy whatever’s new in the market. For them, it helps to check out all that’s available on such pages. As a site owner, it would help you to know that having a “What’s New” filter, instead of a category is a better idea so that users can see all the new items you have within their relevant sections.

By doing this, your existing customers who are interested in a particular category will check out only the new items in that category; if a buyer is interested in seasonal products, he will look for them there and anyone looking for new gifts, will choose a section that the recipient will be interested in before choosing the item he wants to gift from there.

22. Provide feedback status to users

One good tenet of web design is to provide users with feedback the moment they take certain action. If they click a button and do not receive appropriate feedback, it can be both frightening to the user and frustrating too. This is particularly important at the shopping cart stage where errors are checked and data validated in form fields that help users complete the purchase process. Should these features be incorporated into your site, it will help reduce errors due to form data validation and help increase conversion.

Conclusion

It doesn’t matter how much time you spend on beautiful design, product images and landing page optimization; the customer’s overall eCommerce experience will falter if foundational elements such as the category taxonomy aren’t rock solid. We hope you found these 3 tactics insightful, with the aim of helping your customers find what they’re looking for, and increasing conversion.

To be a thorough professional, you can watch your customer pattern and change your filters according to their buying habits.