YES size does matter! In many aspects of life but DEFINITELY when it comes to your e-commerce. Building anything in the online world is a very “abstract” procedure. To help you build your e-commerce store, the best thing is to imagine it like a real brick and mortar store, keeping in mind the following points:
Inventory. There is no point in selling anything online if you don’t have anything to sell. Your inventory is your gold and the larger your inventory the heavier that gold will be. Start with delivery. To be able to promise delivering anything that you sell online you need to have it in your physical inventory. Your storage bill might get to be astronomical or your spouse leaves you for having a thousand t-shirts laying around the house. Lets say what you sell is digital, here you still pay for server space based on the size of the digital file that you are selling. Also many online shopping carts like volusion or bigcartel have fees based on how many items you sell, so think twice before offering too many items on your online store.
Browsing and Searching. I love going to vintage stores to find a one-of-a-kind but I hate going to vintage stores because you have to browse all the racks one by one. In majority of these stores there is no actual merchandise layout. Everything is kind of hanging around for you to browser through. If your online store is merchandised like a vintage store you bet your viewer will turn away if they have to search your site one page at a time to find what they want.
Product Options. When you go to a department store, most of the time they will have a beautiful display of items in every different color. Different sizes will be on the racks in size order and matching articles of clothing will most likely be hanging on the rack next to it. With an online store, if the color options, size options and recommended items to buy are not laid out in an intuitive way on the page then you might miss a sale because your viewer can’t find their favorite color, size or see that great belt that matches those pants.
Checking Out. One of the many reasons I avoid shopping on the weekends or after work is because of the long lines at the checkout. Thankfully online stores don’t have a virtual line but they do have a checkout process. If your sites checkout process is long and confusing you might get hit with an “abandon shopping cart”. Every nonessential step in your checkout process adds friction while likely resulting in a lost sales.
Store Front. You might consider yourself a smart shopper but the truth is we all like to be bedazzled. Like a physical storefront, when you don’t make the layout inviting, highlight what is new or on sale and you don’t change it up often, many consumers will just “click” on by.
Keep it simple. Real simple for two reasons. Take for example just about every Apple product. As high tech-y and futuristic as all apple products are they seem to always come in three sizes, small, medium and large in terms of their screen size or memory from a ipad to a mac. Keeping your product items and options simple lets the customer understand the full breadth of your product line therefore not missing an opportunity for a sale. Second reason is mobile. When designing an ecommerce site for mobile access, accounting for screen size is key. The typical screen size of most mobile phones is usually less than 4 inches, so when it comes to building your retail app, you must maximize the limited screen area by removing the clutter.
With over $1.25 billion spent on cyber monday 2011, the competition for online retail will get fiercer. So remember your ecommerce size does matter in competing for the next sale, sometimes its not a bad thing to be small and fast.