How Your Local Wal-Mart Can Help Your Website Visitors Buy from You

Take a look when you first walk in to Wal-Mart or any other big store. Even if you’ve never been in that particular store before, it takes no more than a second to orient yourself.

How people locate what they want in a brick-and-mortar store
Signs above the aisles direct you toward the departments you want. Signs above the shelves tell you what to expect in each row.

Each sign is concise and clear. You won’t find any long product lists or fine detail on them. Everything is digestible at a glance.

So what can you learn from this brick-and-mortar shopping trip? Make your navigation similar to what you saw in the store.

Remember how you found your way around there? You looked for the big sign with the department name. Then you looked at the smaller signs that listed what was in each row.

How to apply brick-and-mortar navigation principles to your website
You can do the same thing with your website navigation. First, identify the links that lead to your main sections of your website. Place them in your navigation bar in a way that really makes them stand out so your visitors’ eyes will naturally be drawn to them.

Then identify the key links that lead to any subsections of those sections. Place them in your navigation under their parent sections. Make them less noticeable than your main section links so it is clear that they are subservient to your main section links.

What you want visitors to do is to scan the main section headings in your navigation and find the one that suits them best. Then you want them to the scan the subheadings to narrow their search. If you do this right, it should take your visitors two seconds to find a link to click as they move toward what they want.

But can’t my site visitors find their way on their own?
Why is it important to break things down like this? By organizing their search into easy-to-scan blocks, you build their confidence that they will find what they want quickly and easily. They could wade through a long list of links, but you might lose them before they find what they want.

Going back to the Wal-Mart analogy, the Wal-Mart greeter could hand customers a long list of all the racks and what was on them as they came in. They could count on the customers to read the list to locate what they wanted and do away with all the signs. But how many customers would get discouraged and give up before they found what they wanted?

Keep your navigation simple and easy to scan. Put it where visitors expect it to be. Don’t try to be clever. Don’t draw distinctions that match your in-house terminology but that could be confusing to visitors.

Think of your website as if it were a brick-and-mortar store. What would you do to help customers find what they want if they had to walk through a physical store? Then arrange your navigation so their eyes and their mouse can bring them to their destination with as much ease and confidence as they would if their feet were doing the walking.

Ecommerce Facts
Online spending in 2007 increased at a rate of anywhere from 18% to 21% compared against the same quarter in 2006. (http://www.census.gov/mrts/www/data/html/07Q4.html)

Fears of recession are not affecting most online marketers. A February 2008 survey showed that 43% of marketers surveyed plan to increase their online marketing budgets for 2008. 37% plan to maintain them at 2007 levels. Even in time of cutbacks, marketers are finding their customers more and more online. (http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006267&src=dp1_home)

When pressed by Wall Street to explain how his bank was preparing for the double whammy of recession and the subprime mortgage crisis, the CEO of Bankrate, Inc., outlined how his company’s strategy for search engine optimization was helping his business weather the storm. (http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3629390)