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Hi there, hope you're having a great Friday!
This is Colm and Simon from CommerceGurus, with a handpicked weekly roundup of eCommerce articles.
Baymard have published a typically excellent article outlining best practices for apparel or clothing eCommerce stores. It covers:
- Provide sufficient sizing information (94% don’t)
- Combine product variations into one list item (20% don’t)
- Use buttons for each size variation (63% don’t)
- Provide images of apparel products on a human model (75% don’t)
- Ensure product images have sufficient resolution and zoom (72% don’t)
I'm pleased that our own Shoptimizer WooCommerce theme validates all five of these UX requirements.
We have a new Size Guide module coming to CommerceKit which you can now try out on our Shoptimizer demo store.
With our CommerceKit swatches module you can convert the default variations dropdowns into buttons, as suggested by Baymard.
Read about 5 UX Best Practices for Apparel eCommerce Stores
Today, every results page (SERP) feels like it’s contested by half a dozen huge brands, with long, comprehensive articles built on mountains of backlinks and backed up by rigorous on-page SEO.
How do you compete with this?
Google’s solution is straightforward: reward articles that bring new information to the table.
They suggest doing this through something they call information gain, a measurement of the new information provided by a given article, over and above the information present in other articles on the same topic.
Read about Information Gain and the New Future of SEO
Breakdance is a new page builder, currently in beta, created by the makers of Oxygen. Breakdance will be treated as an entirely new and separate product.
Similar to Oxygen, you can use Breakdance in "themeless" mode and design your entire site in Breakdance - headers, footers, templates, etc. No theme is required.
The beta release and video look decent, but between native WordPress blocks and the juggernaut that is Elementor, I don't see where Breakdance will fit in. But time will tell.
Discover the Breakdance page builder
Your website may be using more third-party services than you realize. These services use requests to external hosts (not servers you control) to deliver JS libraries, custom fonts, analytics trackers, and more.
You may have a lean, agile, responsive site design only to find it gradually loaded down with more and more “extras”.
A great way to start managing the impacts of third-party requests on your site’s user experience is to audit your site to see which and how many third-party domains and requests are being used.
With ongoing performance monitoring, you can ensure that new problems with third-party requests are identified early.
Learn more about the Performance Impact of Third Party Resource Requests
I discovered this interesting design showcase of sites which are claimed to have a low carbon footprint.
They work this out based upon performance and page weight using a service called Beacon.
I ran our own Shoptimizer theme demo site through Beacon and was pleased to see that the result stated:
Overall this web page is rated as great when it comes to its carbon footprint
Take a look at some low-carbon web design examples
Coming soon to Shoptimizer
We've been busy preparing a major update for Shoptimizer and CommerceKit and I can now show you two of the features which will soon be available.
1. Size Guides
We've built a minimal, performance-focused way to incorporate size guides to your products without needing any additional plugins.
Check out my video explainer on Twitter and you can test it out today on the Shoptimizer demo site.
2. Product Badges
We've been thinking about this one for a while. You'll soon be able to add custom labels to your items which can appear on your catalog and (optionally) on your product pages.
A separate badge type is a "New" badge which you can set to appear automatically on new items in your catalog. You can assign these labels to appear for a specific timeframe, e.g. 30 days.
See some screenshots (1) (2) (3) of this exciting feature and you can also see these in action on our theme demo!
That's it for this edition. Simply reply to this email if you have any questions or suggestions, we read every message. Have a great week and best of luck with your projects!
Colm and Simon from CommerceGurus
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