Best Practices for Manufacturer Ecommerce Sites

Jason Poole, Acro Commerce’s Chief Experience Officer, or CXO, gives us his top tips for manufacturers who want to ensure they offer the right user experience when they build a commerce website.

Display a broad range of products on the homepage

Many first-time visitors use the homepage content to assess the type of site they’ve landed on and the diversity of the products. Strive to represent a broad range of available products. Having visitors underestimate or misinterpret your site’s product range is a missed opportunity. Clearly displayed categories with text, photos, or icons is a great way to achieve this!

Clear-as-day categories

Speaking of categories, a common mistake is for companies to display logical categories from an internal perspective, but they may not be aligned with their customer's mindsets. For example, a computer manufacturer might categorize their products by processor type, operating system or storage capacity; while some tech-savvy shoppers may think this way, more regular consumers would find a thematic or guided category system more helpful, such as gaming, work, school or every day.

Get carousel interactions right

Carousels are a great way to promote offers, features and popular products. The large image area makes for a high-impact visual, and the autorotation displays a variety of content without taking up a lot of extra space. But, carousels that are difficult to use might cause your visitors to miss important content. A common issue is panels that autorotate too quickly or are hard to control manually. Additionally, the autorotation should pause if the visitor's mouse hovers over the carousel and stop completely if the visitor interacts with the carousel — such as by clicking forward or back. And, of course, the manual controls should be clearly visible.

Let’s see those wizards

A wizard is an interactive tool that guides visitors to an ideal product (or range of products). They can be very useful for visitors who aren’t sure of exactly what they need. They typically require custom development and can be easily overlooked as they are not that common, and visitors may not actively seek them out. Actively promoting your wizard is crucial in letting people know it exists; one of the most effective methods is to embed the wizard's first step (or first couple of steps) on the homepage to engage visitors and gracefully start them on their magical journey to product enlightenment.

Using geotargeting

If you sell in multiple countries, there are some key elements to establish once a visitor hits your site, notably region and language. The region typically affects currency, price, inventory and shipping options; if this is inaccurate, your customers may have a frustrating shopping experience.

The two main methods to establish region/language is by a dedicated overlay that allows the visitor to select their region and language or auto-detecting via IP geotargeting. The latter is less obtrusive but might set the wrong location if the visitor uses a virtual private network (VPN) or similar technology. An overlay guarantees the visitor selects what is most appropriate to them. Make sure that the modal design is simple and clear. Consider using flags to represent regions and languages, and avoid any promotional calls to action or anything that might distract the visitor. Finally, make sure the selection is clearly visible in the header (and consider duplicating it in the footer as well).

Ready to tackle online commerce for manufacturers?

Check out our Manufacturing page for more information, or reach out to our team of experts to talk about your project, even if it isn't quite a project yet.

About the author / Note from the editor

Freya is the founder of CollectingCents - a website that teaches readers how to better manage their finances. She is a quoted contributor in several online publications, including Business Insider, Fox Business, Yahoo Finance, the Huffington Post, BankRate, and GoBankingRates.

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