Structuring an
Online Store 101

The most important web pages of an e-commerce site that naturally comes in everyone’s mind are the homepage, category and product page, shop cart and checkout page. With our vast experience of working on setting up the Magento online stores, we have found these web pages needs some special attention while designing and developing them. So, we wrote this article to focus on how to structure an online store. If you have not gone through our blog on how and why of eStore development time and cost, we strongly suggest you go through it.

i95Dev just does not work on fixing the online store by changing the look and feel, it also looks at your business growth. Our Magento professional does more than a simple relay on replacing your online store with a new look. We have business analysts who analyze your business and customers and we have graphic designers who analyze the suitable designing trends for you. Altogether, we come up with those B2B and B2C strategies that will not only enhance your ability to sell more. However, you can grow as a market leader.

Now that you made the decision to step up an e-commerce store, the structure serves as a blueprint for you. Let us first show you, an ideal blueprint for an online store with must-have webpages as shown below.  You probably know this, but sometimes the poor navigation acts as a deterrent to customers.

Later, you find the best practices to follow for structuring an online store and the need to follow that structure.

Importance of structuring your online store

Website being your first salesperson, your sales pitch should give information that is essential and must be presented it to your customers in a way they can consume. This article shares the most recommended structure to set up your online store. Adapt them to your business needs.

When your site shows appeals to your visitors, they are more likely to buy the product. When your site shows the relative content and what your end users are searching for, the likelihood of your site ranking high increases. The bottom-line is you need to show information to visitor and search engines quickly and easily.

The best practices for structuring online store

To help search engines to crawl faster and easier, you need a website structure that relies on the content which is contextually written and linked. When the crawler reads the website, this structure helps the bot to build the contextual internal links. Ideal online store structure for better SEO rankings is shown below.

Some of the best practices are as follows:

• More competitive terms on top pages
• Long-tailed terms on deeper pages

A top-level structure which helps reinforce the keywords on your website so that the search engines know to look deeper than the homepage.

• Link authoritative pages to those pages you want to rank.
• Link Homepage sitemaps to the internal pages ( category and subcategory)
• Segment HTML sitemaps with their taxonomy to index the pages.

To help your customers find the information easier, you need a clear navigation

Customers ability to find what they are looking for largely depends on what you show them at the very minute when they landed on your homepage. Start at the beginning of the website with what information are you providing to them and where and how are you providing.

Use a top-level category structure that would probably separate with their kind defined. This makes it easy for customers to know which path they need to take. It clarifies what information you are providing on your website.

Funnel down your details more at the specifics. You need to guide further to navigate deeply into the specific information. Be it a product or service, let them drive into the details separately. Reduce the number of images to display on the homepage. Let your customer navigate to product specific page and then you provide them with descriptions, specifications etc.  Reduce the fatigue of scrolling the page with minimum sessions on the page.

Ask what they want to do with the information. It is important for you to drive them to the end of the sales funnel and meet your business objective. Inline action calls and directs them to take an action. Ask questions choice-appealing questions. “Do you like to… “ “Want to talk to…”  kind of CTA works well.

Your online store requires to impress your customers with design and structurally organized information for them to navigate. You provide a right way for them to look for information so that you find a right way to reach your customers.

On a side note, are you sure of your Magento agency partner? If not, make sure to read our blog on myths and realities of an online store development service provider.