Maintain an Easy to Shop Navigation

Written by Suzie Livingston – SmartEtailing

With 85% of all purchases beginning with online engagement – bike shops are incentivized to have a well-merchandised and easy-to-shop website.

Ecommerce trends continue to evolve. Here are some tips for setting up your website navigation with a customer-focused mindset.

Position your most important categories on the left

The top left corner of your website gets visitors’ attention first. We encourage you to consider organizing your navigation left to right in order of importance.

When looking specifically at shopping categories in your navigation, we recommend leading with bikes on the left followed by categories like accessories, parts, or apparel.

If you’d prefer to keep your catalog within a single mega menu, place it first or farthest left in the navigation.

With half of all traffic coming from mobile devices, organizing your navigation left to right will get categories or services with the most value in front of viewers on their phones first. Items on the left will be placed at the top of your navigation on mobile.

More may not be better

We understand you have many important shopping categories but we recommend limiting the options in your navigation to what can deliver the most value to your customers.

This is particularly relevant when you consider that over half of shoppers use site search instead of navigation – so adding too much complexity to your navigation not only makes shopping potentially more challenging for website visitors but also has diminishing returns even if your work is perfect.

Take a moment to consider how your customers shop when they come into your store to inform which categories to include in your navigation. Shoppers are typically looking for a bike, accessories for their bike, or gear for their body – these are great places to start.

Don’t forget to leave room for menus in your navigation that promote your services and culture. You being a local business is a key part of what distinguishes you from pure online sellers.

Keeping the categories high level will allow your shoppers to quickly scan and find the category they’re looking for. Too many options can also cause decision fatigue, leading to visitors leaving your website before browsing your catalog or making a purchase.

If you’d like to get more granular in order to feature sub-categories like lights or helmets, that is best done in a merchandised section on your homepage or featured in the hero you maintain monthly or seasonally.

Keep accessibility top of mind

Make sure you maintain readability for everyone and that your navigation displays wells on all screens sizes. By not overloading your navigation with too many choices, you are able to keep ample space between items making them easier to read and distinguishable from each other. This will also keep your navigation in a single row on desktops.

Since you’re already turning your attention to your website navigation, let’s take this opportunity to revisit color contrast and accessibility. Proper color contrast will help more people shop your website and boost your SEO. Here are a few tools to check your website’s accessibility:

• Choose website colors with appropriate contrast ratios to help visitors distinguish between foreground and background on your website.
• Compliance tools such as WAVE Report and the Lighthouse Accessibility Tool for Chrome and Firefox are helpful for addressing accessibility. As part of this process install these tools on your browser and use them to identify and fix non-compliant elements.

Examples of bike shops with great navigation

• Norco North Shore utilizes their navigation to highlight their electric bikes. Pulling the VLT E-Bikes catalog out helps get those bikes in front of shoppers asap.

• Full Cycle updated their navigation after they joined forces with Colorado Multisport. Their new nav makes it easy for their loyal customers to shop and welcomes in their new triathlon customers from Colorado Multisport.

• Cahaba allows their customers to quickly navigate to the products they’re looking for in a clean and intuitive way. Take a moment to observe the high color contrast and ample space between items.

Want to optimize your shopping menu with the industry’s best?

Because every local bike shop has unique perspectives on how to merchandise products, SmartEtailing is here to provide you with tools and support to help you be as successful as possible. Visit the help center or reach out to their Client Success team for personalized support.