There’s always a lot of browsing at an online sports shop. The equipment and clothes that you buy there must be extra comfortable and customized perfectly to your needs. Thus, an active customer has to feel safe using your equipment. For that reason, especially sports shops have to have a lot of searching and filtering tools at their customers’ disposal. At least this is something that the best online sports shops have. To illustrate, I’ve chosen three of such eshops from the IMRG/Hitwise Hotshops List Top 100: May 2011 .
1. jdsports.com
What I like about this eshop is that you basically can’t get lost there. The categories are well-plannedcut for all sports fans, there’s even a separate division for each of the popular football team. That means that not only can you choose price range, color, size and gender for your products but also you don’t have to get angry when browsing through the products with the logo of a team that you obviously hate.
The filtering options are one of the most important things together with the visible return policy and delivery. Don’t let yourself be led astray, once a client is not sure where to find what he’s looking for and how to return it just in case, he won’t stay and try to figure it out. He’ll most certainly change an eshop to the one that dispels his fears more efficiently.
Basic rules of good usability are often being ignored, leading to increasing frustration amongst consumers trying to find, view and pay for merchandise. Hidden delivery costs, confusing check-out procedures and repeated error pages are contributing towards a poor customer experience online.
I believe this speaks for itself and jdsports.com is successful thanks to good searching options, comprehensible categories and visible policy.
Image source: jdsports.com
Looking at the screenshot you also find a great tool, which is ‘most wanted’ and ‘others bought’ tabs. Jdsports.com is really involved with creating the real-life shopping experience, thus humans are herd animals and like to compare their choices with other people’s purchases.
Apart from that jdsports.com seems to be really all about pleasing their customers by interesting Facebook competitions and interesting video campaign on youtube.
Image source: jdsports.com Facebook fan page
2. jjbsports.com
This eshop here can be also proud of its searching options and the usability of their website in general. But not to describe the same things over again, I’ll just mention what are the outstanding features of this webshop.
Image source: jjbsports.com
Here you can see a strong encouragement to sign up and get an offer to your email. It’s extremely visible and just asks to be done. Moreover jjbsporsts.com emphasizes the popular brands that you can find in their offer. That’s extremely convenient, I myself know a lot of people who are attached to certain brand and will only look for that brand’s logo at an online shop.
The other thing visible here is the tab ‘other links’ redirecting you to pages of a typical sports fan interest. That is not harming the eshop at all, on the contrary it shows involvement and a face of an expert in the field of sport.
Now, the best of the best, the “track your order” tab, jjdsports.com is reassuring and comforting. Ordering here means that you can easily check where your parcel is without the need to look it up through the delivery company’s website.
Image source: jjbsports.com
“Hurry, only 5 left” is what I literary fell in love with. Usually, at any other webshop I can see “a few left” or something even less precise or just nothing at all. Here you get an exact number which gives you the right push to buy.
3. Sportsdirect.com
Image source: sposrtsdirect.com
This here drew my attention at sportsdirect.com immediately. Once you get to the shop you know straight away if you can make a purchase without any obstacles and if you happen not to use any of the payments accepted you can always browse and decide whether considering one is worth it.
What’s more sportsdirect.com also uses your social tendencies by presenting you the product bought by other clients.
Image source: sportsdirect.com
Having this you provide your customer with a great tool and remind him of what else he needs to buy in order to go skiing or camping.
Finally, there’s something about the upcoming Christmas.
Image source: sportsdirect.com
That’s right: a Christmas Gift Guide. Almost everyone has a hard time picking up the dream presents for friends and family and here it is a perfect solution. The eshop helps customers by limiting their time spent on the website. The clients are happier because they made up their minds faster and the eshop earned some money, a win-win situation!
How about searching tools at your eshop? And are enough call to action elements? Is everything visible and how does this visibility reflect in your sales?
