Spunlogic Blog

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Ecommerce 2.0- A Navigation Odyssey

By Julia Patterson on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007

You can direct a user experience with your vanilla left nav menu and breadcrumb trail, but are you ballsy enough to manipulate the user experience web 2.0 style? Enter Etsy.com, an unlikely frontrunner in the cojones contest of innovative ecommerce and navigation. The site is “your place to buy and sell things handmade”, a marketplace for the “You” generation of the web. Fueled by the DIY craft movement, Etsy has become a quick success story as an ecommerce portal because of two things: (1) focus on relationships and social networking, and (2) the user experience.

Unlike many other “social” sites, the experience for the user is painless – sublime even. Apps with names like the “time machine” and “geolocator”, well, you know you’re in for something different. Based on seller profiles and time stamp information in Etsy’s database, they have made creative visual navigation based on the ways that people sort data.

Sure, you could have a search box that returns a list of sellers in Atlantic City – but why do that when you can dazzle them with a diagram of seller profile pictures that generates when they click New Jersey on a map of the world? Their concept mapping navigation system helps users find goods efficiently in a vast sea of sellers. Yes, you can still navigate the old fashioned way by doing a search of item tags, but it is a slower way surf and not nearly as delightful.

What does this mean for your site? Depending on your average user persona, it may not mean much. (I don’t expect to see walmart.com implementing this style of navigation anytime soon.) But for larger sites, like the Amazons or eBays of the world, it could mean rethinking how people interact with the site altogether. When you get right down to it, it’s just all about what makes sense for your user. If that’s breadcrumbs, good for you.

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Posted in User Experience, E-commerce

6 Responses to “Ecommerce 2.0- A Navigation Odyssey”

February 21st, 2007 - Jeff Hilimire Says:

That’s a great example of an e-commerce website that bucks the trend and a great response to Raghu’s last post! Hopefully more of the big internet retailers can move in this direction…
February 22nd, 2007 - TS Says:

That site definitely offers some interesting UI options. I would love to know how much testing they did before deciding that this UI made sense for their users. It would also be cool to see what kind of analytics they are running to see how effective their UI choices are in helping them achieve their goals.

I wonder if their typical vendor sells products on other sites as well. If they do, their opinions and satisfaction with this site compared to others that they use would be great input to hear also.

And to get to Raghu’s post that Jeff mentioned - is their goal to have a more fun shopping experience, to sell more goods, or both?

Thanks for the link!
February 22nd, 2007 - bob Says:

i think the navigation is really annoying…im sure if amazone were to implement this type of navigation for purchasing items you would probably see amazons stock drop
February 22nd, 2007 - Donovan Says:

There are certainly some interesting concepts going on here. Some of the functionality seems to mimick Flikr and it has that new Web 2.0 feel. It is definitely conducive to the business model of multiple purveyors of crafts selling on a central website.

But some of the features really make no sense at all. I’m not sure how the Time Machine, for example meets a user need as opposed to it being some “neat” idea generated in a brainstorming session. Even if the idea of the Time Machine had value to users, the execution of it from a User Experience standpoint is horrid.
March 16th, 2007 - Tara Long Lawner Says:

I heartily agree with Bob and Donovan. The lack of basic navigation and drill-down is surprising. The flash widgets are cute, and it seems they are trying to emphasize the sexy web2.0 community marketplace aspect of their site.

As a buyer I’m simply unwilling to sift through over 1000 pages of paintings to find what I want. Instead of top level widgets, how about allowing me to drill down at every level by price max? canvas size? color? How about RSS for every category and subcategory?

I wonder if there was any testing - the poor navigation is probably losing money for their sellers ultimately. As a buger, I went straight back to ebay, where the product choices are less cool, but I have a better opportunity to sift through it to find what I want..
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