Best Home Page

The homepage of an eCommerce website is a lot like prime-time television slot. Every sitcom is vying to be there, but only the very best gets the slot. The homepage is the store front, the entry-point of your site. This is where you allure, mesmerize, convince, coax or seduce the visitor down the funnel. How you welcome your visitors here will decide whether they bounce off or make it to the checkout stage.

Here are 21 tips on how you can make your eCommerce homepage a conversion magnet.

1) Give Them an Ever-present Search Box

This is how the search box looks when the page has not been scrolled down The search box squeezes itself in the navigation bar upon scrolling the page down

Make your search bar omnipresent. Make it unashamedly tag along the visitors as they explore the hidden corners of your homepage. If they are at the bottom of your page, don’t make them scroll all the way up to find the search box. Feed them with a spoon the way Flipkart does above. If you don’t have enough space to give prominent display to the search box, take a cue from allrecipes.com. When a visitor clicks the site search box on their homepage, it dynamically becomes bigger.

2) Organize the Navigation Bar

Suppose you go to a shop to buy a 34-waist slim-fit blue denim for men. You head to the male section, stand in front of the 34-size counter but are told that denims of all fits have been stacked together. What will you do? Painstakingly segregate the slim-fits or head to the adjacent shop? Most probably the latter.

Online shoppers don’t behave any differently. One of the major reasons for high bounce rate is poor navigation. Make sure your visitors easily find their way around your website. Place the navigation bar at the standard positions where visitors expect to find them – horizontally on top and vertically on left. You could also make your navigation bar persistent like Kipling did here.