Good Ecommerce Design

[jeffg]

Hi There
Im managing a new ecommerce site project. Just want to get your feedback on a design issue.

Do you feel that featured products on the homepage should be in a 2-3 tier level listed horizontally or should they be vertical along the right hand column? What is the standard here? Best practice?
Thanks!

[roban]

I don't know of any best practice for that. I have mine listed horizontally 4 across and 3 tiers high. I would guess that it depends on the design of your site and upon whether the text in the boxes is read when the site is spidered.

[InfoSourcing]

Hi,

Truly it is a design issue, however in ecommerce sceanrio you ideally have your left side for category navigation and if you are designing for 800 resolution or 100% resolution, you could have your listings of featured items in 2/3 column on each row.

While designing your template, you make that choice based on how much content you show for featured items... and whether it is cluttering or appealing based on such factors you buiild your website...

[autoecart]

I would think if you are going to have maybe 3 - 5 featured items place them on the right hand side but if you will be having more than that place them in tiers on the page so your right side column doesn't grow to long.

[mbhaila]

Hi,

There are some very nice E-comm sites selling various niche artices.
As a starter, I would like to start promoting Clickbank products thru
my website, however I can't think of any good templates or software
to design a good E-comm site for me.

Do you know any methods of getting or building such a website?

Thx

-Monty

[toniaxp]

Build your site from scratch which may take a little longer but will be more original than a template site.

[JPnyc]

But it's also more expensive.

[cubeshark]

Who knows what the standards are... in any project, you need to test it. Every site has different users, so each site must test for these... *hint: A/B Testing...

[Christine8]

Just make sure your shopping cart software is open source and not something that makes you a slave to the licensing or support of a single company!

[mbhaila]

The osCommerce shopping cart feature comes as free add-on
with many web hosting providers.
Though its nice, I found it quite complicated to install and
configure.

Nevertheless, it's FREE so, its worth trying out.

http://www.oscommerce.com/