One such company who realised this early on, decided to completely change the shopping experience to cater for the busy lifestyle women now have and it's paying dividends in increased sales and customer satisfaction.



Lets take a look at how they achieved this:

Feature 1: All products are displayed in a grid view (an easy AND fast way to browse through the many products). Most sites are stuck in the dark ages here and still show 5 products on 1 page before having the user hit the next button.

Here all the products can be seen in the smallest possible amount of clicks. Clicking on a thumbnail takes you directly to the product details page. If you hover over the image, a short description of the product will pop-up.

Feature 2: Products can be shown by price, colour, brand and type, thus providing a convenient way of filtering down to subsections of products in a very quick way. Maybe you just want a specific colour to match your outfit?. Maybe you only have 30 pounds to spend?. Are you loyal to a specific brand such as the bright cool designs by Claudia Canova?.

Whatever you want to do, there is great choice and the results are sent back almost instantly due to the new technology used in creating the site.

Feature 3: You will notice that there are no shopping carts.? A first?, we'll maybe. They also realised that women who are ready to buy, come to a shopping site with a very specific purpose, and that's usually to buy one specific item. They do not want to be continually pushed to buy more items they may not need and so there is 1 page with the item and 1 easy way to purchase.

2 clicks are all that are needed. 1 to choose shipping and 1 to click buy. It's probably the fastest way to shop online right now. There are two of the most popular methods of paying provided (Google Checkout or Paypal) and both methods allow anyone to pay with a credit card even if you don't have an account. In the shipping selection option, there are choices for UK, Europe and the USA and the price is updated instantly on the same page without the need to refresh the page.

Feature 4: Women also like to think in groups and look to what everyone else is wearing and that's another feature of the grid view where all items are displayed in order of popularity. Want to know what's the most popular product? Then simply look at the items which appear first in the grid. This also works when you filter down to the other categories or options.

No matter where you are within the site, the most popular options are shown first. On the item detail pages, you can also see other suggestions on the right hand side which other shoppers have shown an interest in.

Feature 5: How often are you on a site and cannot find any way to contact the store? Well just have a look at the contact us page on their site. There are multiple ways to contact them. Via E-mail, an online form, a physical store, by phone. The buying process has been simplified to the absolute minimum.

What about men you might ask? We'll in today's world 75% of all shopping is done by women and they rule the checkout. It's usually the women who buy for their men. Design your store for women and the men will naturally follow.

So next time you're wondering why your sales are down, think about your customer and how difficult you are making it for them to buy. Think about how many doors your customers have to walk through to give you their hard earned cash? Don't make it hard for them or they'll vote with their feet.