Your Home Page Is Your Window Display

http://www.wilsonweb.com/art/ecomm/window-display.htm

For online retailers, your home page corresponds to the sidewalk "window display" of a brick-and-mortar store. The main goal of your home page is to get the visitor to dig deeper, become engaged with some interest or product, and enter deep into your store. If you don't catch visitors to your home page in the second or so that they spend viewing your "window display," they'll be gone.

The authors of MarketingSherpa's recent Ecommerce Benchmark Guide 2006, surveyed 100 e-commerce websites in February and March 2006. What they observe about e-retailers' homepages shouldn't be considered normative, but rather the accumulated wisdom of successful online stores that have been doing this for awhile now.

The authors described the "lead" on the home page, which they defined as anything that dominated the middle of the home page, "above the fold." (This is an expression from newspapers, which, when applied to websites and e-mail messages, refers what you see on the screen before you scroll down). This "lead" is the message, image, or set images intended to catch the attention of visitors.

MarketingSherpa finds that by far the most stores led with current sales (21%), followed by single product specials (12%), special offers (9%), and an emblematic image for products with a brand-product connection (7%). When you add together themes (9%), and current sales occasions -- Presidents' Day sales (5%) and Valentines themed offers (5%), 19% of the retailers included themed sales and offers on their home page.

Home page visual approach of retailersHow were these images arranged? MarketingSherpa finds that most online retailers and virtually all mass merchants use multiple images on their home pages (53%), putting a broad range of products in front of the visitors. Even if the visitor doesn't see something that interests her immediately, she gets the impression that "we've got everything." A single central image is used by 13% to convey brand and capture attention, while 34% use several prominent images, usually people and thematic images.

The point here is not to "follow the leader," but to give serious thought to how you are using your home page as a "window display." I still recall a quote from Rob Snell's book Starting a Yahoo! Business for Dummies that I reviewed last month: "99% of Yahoo! Store merchandising is taking your best-selling products and slapping them up on your front page where everyone can see 'em. That's it. Trust me. It's better than free money" (page 197). To summarize: keep your "window display" fresh, seasonally relevant, and eye-catching -- with profitability in mind -- so that returning visitors will look at what's new, take new interest, dig deeper, and hopefully make a purchase.

http://www.wilsonweb.com/afd/sherpa_ecomm_bench.htm

Ecommerce Benchmark Guide 2006

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