Less Shoppers Going Home

In Web design news, a study of 500 connected consumers conducted by the digital ad group Avenue A/Razorfish shows that home pages are becoming less important because customers searching for products are often taken directly to those product pages within a site. This means e-tailers need to start treating product pages like home pages, according to the report, by including search and other functions. It also means home pages are becoming less important as search drives those visitors deeper into a site, meaning marketers need to treat product pages like home pages, adding navigation and sharing functions. An underlying theme of the report is the importance of designing online experiences, rather than Web sites alone. To illustrate that point, the 100-page report provides recommendations from the study and explains how marketers can engage with consumers through a variety of emerging technologies such as RSS feeds, widgets, interactive video, mobile media, 3-D functionality and social shopping.Social commerce as a trend is also supported by the findings, with more than 85 percent of those surveyed using “most popular” links on sites to decide what to look at and more than 55 percent making purchasing decisions based on user reviews.

[Source: ecommerce-guide.com - Oct 2007]