Gone is the enormous site map in the footer replaced with a neater version. Navigation is cleaner and the ‘value’ bright green is replaced with a more elegant textured brown and olive green.

In the details of particular note are the areas on the introductory slideshow where icons give the viewer the option to click and see more information. In the bricks and mortar world, this ‘getting to know the store’ time is called a decompression zone, here on a website this type of interaction as well as the other tabbed layouts beneath the slideshow create a lot of interest on the home page. Also of note is that these longer home pages look good on a vertical iPad. Starting to see more websites that make better use of the lower half of a vertical screen.

For posterity, below is the old Waitrose website. Here’s the new one www.waitrose.com

Three examples here but the full set from the original source on Fuel Your Creativity. Incidentally isn’t this a beautiful colour palette?

Of particular note is the immensely long home page, scroll all the way down to read a huge amount of information. We’re still getting comments regularly about designing ‘above the fold’ so it’s refreshing to see a client that understands that scrolling is probably easier than clicking through and keeps customers on the home page longer before they make their choice to enter the store. Think of it as the decompression zone that we build into stores in the offline world so customers can get used to crossing the threshold before deciding where to head.

Also worth noting is the launch. A particular time and date backed up by a twitter campaign (the more tweets the greater the discount) Lucky 10 to get the ball rolling on launch day.

Finally, retail design is all about the details. Nice to see a message about free shipping right there in the checkout button which you can see when you hover over the Shopping Bag button.

Gap and Zara have very different approaches. The Gap model is pretty standard while Zara goes for the big centre stage image route as well as a lot more readable content and options for iPhone, iPad as well as Lookbook, Magazine (coming soon) and video.

Links:

www.apple.com

www.gap.eu

www.zara.com

Also worth a read is Econsultacy’s review of the new Gap website

1. Why do you want an ecommerce website?
2. What has lead you to this decision?
3. What are your expectations of having an online store? (turnover/profit, life change, more spare time/less spare time)
4. What is your USP?
5. Are you competing on price?
6. Who are your competitors?
7. Who are your current customers? (age, demographic, socioeconomic)
8. What is you average basket spend?
9. Where do they live?
10. How/who will you drive traffic to it?
11. What is your turnover/profit now?
12. What do you expect the turnover/profit of the online store to be in year 2? (probably rule out year 1 making any profit)
13. Where will you be advertising?
14. Do you have a your social media strategy (beyond writing stuff to drive traffic)?
15. Do you have a (permission based) customer database that you can email market to?
16. Do you have an EPOS system, if so what data do you have, what can you export in what format?
17. Does your EPOS provider offer a an ecommerce website development service of some sort?
18. Does your EPOS provider offer website design and development? (Check their case studies, is the quality of their design up to scratch?)
19. What accounting package do you use?
20. Would you expect to be able to download sales data to integrate with your accounting package?
21. How many SKUs do you hold?
22. How many SKUs per product on average?
23. Will you offer your whole product range/a subset or a restricted range?
24. Do you want to have a search form on the website?
25. Who will be responsible when a product is sold out for updating the site to unpublish the product (potentially out of normal working hours)?
26. Do you have an established product/SKU coding scheme?
27. Do you have a set of store policies/procedures that you can carry over to the website, e.g. reporting structure, daily sales etc?
28. Do you offer warranties and guarantees?
29. Do you want to offer promotion codes? with what sort of discounts?
30. Do you want to show featured products on the home page?
31. What countries will you be selling to?
32. How will you fulfil orders?
33. Who will fulfil orders?
34. What carrier will you use?
35. How will the products be packaged?
36. Are you insured for losses in transit?
37. What promises will you make, e.g. 24 hour delivery, free returns etc.?
38. Will you use a different telephone number to your current one, e.g. an 0800 freephone number?
39. Will your shipping be based on weight, cost or size?
40. Is the delivery charge built into your cost or is it added at checkout? Will you offer free delivery above a certain amount?
41. Who will be responsible for running and maintaining the online store on a daily basis (including after hours and weekends)?
42. Who will write your content?
43. Who will provide product photography? or do you have a decent enough camera and are proficient enough to take quality product photography?
44. Do you have any software that you can use to crop and resize images before you upload them?
45. Do you use a PC or a Mac?
46. Who will provide product categories, descriptions and prices?
47. Who do you expect to upload your initial content including products, us or you?
48. How will product photography be provided?
49. When you have a new product that needs photographing, who will do it and what is their turnaround?
50. What other websites do you like and why?
51. If you have a current identity do you want to keep it and if so do you have artwork and guidelines for its use?
52. How do you expect customers to pay?
53. Do you want to use PayPal or do you want to go directly to your bank account via a merchant account?
54. Do you have a business PayPal account or alternatively an ecommerce merchant account with your bank?
55. Do you understand the advantage/disadvantage of using PayPal versus a payment gateway that connects to your ecommerce merchant account?
56. Who do you bank with? (this is important if you’re going to use a payment gateway as not all shopping cart software is compatible with all banks ‘out of the box’)
57. Have you discussed this site with your bank?
58. Do you want customers to have to register on your site?
59. How many pages other than product pages will you need (e.g. about us, location etc)?
60. How many products do you want to put on your site to start with?
61. What are the categories for your products?
62. Do you have a sitemap or navigation plan drawn up?
63. Sites we build include weekly database back up, who is responsible for storing this (it’s sent by email every week)?
64. Do you want your products to appear in Google Merchant Center?
65. Do you want to send your products to price comparison websites?
66. Do you intend your site to carry advertising of any sort?
67. Do you have a domain?
68. Where is your domain hosted?
69. Do you want to continue with your current hosting set up?
70. Have you bought an SSL certificate (necessary for secure transactions)?
71. Do you have other online presences that need integrating into or setting up for the site e.g. twitter, flickr, facebook etc.
72. Will you want a blog/news/updates page?
73. How will you launch the site? quietly to one person at a time, with a party, or somewhere in between?
74. What media routes do you use that will be useful to publicise your new website?
75. What’s your budget?
76. Why did you decide on that figure?
77. How much have you budgeted for ongoing updates/marketing/maintenance etc.?
78. Who will maintain and administer your website (inhouse, external, level of expertise etc)?
79. Does your business need to be VAT registered? (Current threshold is £70,000)
80. If your business will need to be VAT registered in the future have you included VAT (at January 2011 rates, i.e. 20%) in your cashflow projections?

Here’s a link from Out-law.com to help in writing those all important terms & conditions. Also much more useful ecommerce set up information on the site.

Also worth looking at his flickr group of the café. The Rapha website’s not too shabby either and a nice video on Monocle.

These days there’s no reason not to have a shop, a pop up shop, a twitter, a facebook page, a van, go to festivals, write a book, a photo essay, a magazine, have a loyalty card, a website, a microsite, a tumblr, a flavors.me, print a t-shirt the list goes on. Brands that market themselves as authentic and have an idea win. Those that buy off the shelf and stick their logo on, fail.

Update: just came across another piece about Rapha here on everydaylife.style loads more to explore on there too.

Originally spotted (and more info) on the very fine Design Milk.

More on the Square website and follow them on twitter @Square could be interesting.

Five main areas are covered (with room for expansion) and the opportunity to submit your own stats.

Originally from Read Write Web via twitter