Niche stores that focus on a small range of products have a luxury of often being able to limit their top-level categories to a few choices. An old rule of thumb was to aim for seven choices in any navigation menu, based on Miller's Law, which states that the human mind can only remember 7 (plus or minus 2) items in a list. Although usability expert Jakob Nielsen refuted this idea back in 2009, there's still a limit on the number of entries your site should have in its main navigation...if nothing else, the choices must be limited by the size of the customer's computer screen!

So how do larger stores manage to display their breadth of navigation choices while still having a usable website? Let's take a look at some examples.

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Once you've gotten a shopper to add a product or two to their cart, you have a reasonable chance of converting them into a buyer. The process of moving them from the cart or basket page through the checkout steps to the final receipt page is known as the checkout process. There are a number of usability best practices for checkout screens. We recently performed a cleanup of the checkout screens for one of our clients that followed these guidelines, and I want to present some of these ideas with screenshots from the redesign. Read on to find out what we did and the results we've seen.

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If you've read this blog for awhile, ever talked to me, know what I do for a living, or have anything else to do with me in any other way, you probably know that I eat, sleep, and breathe e-commerce...and that my usual platform of choice is Miva Merchant. I've used other systems on occasion, for fun and for work, to various degrees, but Miva is where I started and where I spend most of my time.

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Cisco Adler, in his new eBook "The Landing Page Bible", offers an answer to the "Internet age"-old question of who controls a company's website: IT or Marketing. Rather than involve technical resources and attempt to revamp a section of the corporate website (or the entire thing!), Cisco suggests companies focus online marketing initiatives on landing pages, which can be more agile than a company's main website.

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On the web, transparency often equals trust. This is a world where credit cards are often used for fraud, where dollars are lost every day, and where identities are stolen. Smart shoppers are wary shoppers, and they don't want to do business with faceless entities online. They want to know who's behind the company they purchase from. Here are eight ways to increase your transparency online. Follow these tips, and you'll increase the level of trust that your customers have in your business. Read more