Slides in an Ecommerce Site? Beautiful but Impossible

Nice slide on the home page huh? It may be pretty, but it sells less, at least on a website. ecommerce.

One usability study A survey conducted on the Siemens website to find out whether a user could perceive an offer on the site for washing machines came to the following conclusion: there is no offer for washing machines.

The reason? Let's go look at the home page of the Siemens website:

siemens-appliances-overlooked-promotion_

The £100 promotion on washing machines looks very visible doesn't it? It appears in no less than two places on the home page, on the home slide and in the sidebar.

But no, the users who browsed the site did not notice the promotion, let's try to understand why.

Guilty 1: The Banner

Consider the element indicated with arrow #1. What problems does it have? According to the Nielsen study it has 3: it is on the right, it is similar to a banner, it is written in marketichese (the native language of the marketeers).

And, again according to the Nielsen study, these 3 characteristics are detrimental because:

  •  the user focuses on the content on the left more than on the right;
  •  the user tends to ignore what is in the form of advertising banners, according to a phenomenon called "banner blindness".
  •  the user unfamiliar with the language of marketing will struggle to understand the "Rewarding.Life.Style" next to the £100 promo.

Guilty 2: The slide

Consider the element indicated with arrow #2. What problems does it have? According to the Nielsen study, 3 more: it looks like a banner, it is written in a "fancy" banner font and, above all, it auto rotates.

We have already talked about the two features: but what is the problem with the auto rotating slide? Simple, it does not allow the visitor to become aware of the promotion, regardless of whether it rotates every 5 or 30 seconds.

The firm's advice is: Accordions and carousels should show a new panel only when users ask for it. The panel should not move automatically, but only when the user wants it to. Alternatively, it can be fixed.

If you really want the slide, the advice is to limit the panels to 3-4, putting the most important information in the first ones. In fact, as you can easily guess and as confirmed by a study published in WeedyGarden: CTR decreases as slides increase.

click-through-rates slide ecommerce

Another study shows how more than half of the clicks on a slide are on the first slide.:

carousel-traffic-spread

And that by reducing the number of slides from 8 to 5, as in the study linked above, there was an increase in clicks to the site, probably due to the effect of the "paradox of choice", according to which being subjected to multiple choices paralyzes the user, who does not know which one to opt for.

Not convinced? Another study based on eye tracking (i.e. tracking eye movements on the page) confirms how the slide is completely ignored:

slider-heatmap-4-people-absolute-416x383

Not only that, according to the above studies the use of a slide in an ecommerce site:

  • slows down the loading of the page from 0.4 to 5 secondswhich can negatively affect the appearance of the SEOAccording to a Kiss Metric study, each additional second spent loading a page reduces the conversion rate by 7%.
  • is often not optimized for mobile or may load very slowly on 3G connections;

Conclusions

Slides are heavily used on ecommerce sites, but if you can't eliminate them, you can optimize them in a few simple steps:

  • by removing the automatic scrolling;
  • by reducing the slide number;
  • optimizing the loading time and making it responsive.
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