Winner: Supré
There’s no denying Australia lags behind the US when it comes to online retail. But web design agency Amblique has provided a clear example of how good Australian eCommerce can be with the website built for women’s fashion chain Supré.
Company founder Justus Wilde says designing the Supré site was a real challenge, given the brand’s popularity and dependence on such a young, web-savvy market.
“We wanted to put a focus on usability and customisation. People could find products, but we did some research and found that the target market, girls between 13-26 years, change their tastes quite frequently. So we built a customisation model based on that.”
Judge Chris Thomas of Reseo says the customisable shopping cart is a big tick in the company’s favour, with users able to search by a range of categories including colour, price and size, all of which are easily changed at any time.
“The search refinement, categories and filtering on the left hand side of categories is really strong with dynamically updating product lists when the “Price Range” selector is being used. Very clever.”
“The design of category pages is also really well done with nice big product tile top left, surrounded by smaller tiles – obviously it helps them plonk best-selling products prominently where the eye is naturally drawn to.”
Other thing Thomas liked were a loyalty points program, up-selling strategies, a wish list function and a nifty element whereby a graphic of a selected item actually moves into the shopping cart to let users know they’ve bought something.
The media here is all high quality, and a large emphasis is put on a lot of photographs being used for each item. Wilde says this is too often overlooked.
“A lot of companies don’t invest in their media. The majority of people that go onto the actual product page love playing around with the images and seeing what everything is like, but many businesses don’t actually put effort into it.”
So what advice does Wilde have for budding online retailers?
“The most important things for any eCommerce site are traffic generation and conversion. But you also need to consider what your store is actually looking like. Compare it to a bricks and mortar store outlay, how does it look? What makes it attractive?”
“I think a lot of businesses put up generic templates that are expected to sell goods. But stuff goes wrong there, you need to customise your site, add features like social networking and really sell yourself.”
