With the recent purchase of a new urban bachelor pad, I needed to furnish and decorate an entire house. Welcome West Elm, launched in 2002 as part of the Williams-Sonoma chain to provide "unique furniture and accessories for modern living." With an empty house and a deadline looming, I set out to order furniture for the bedroom, living room and loft while reviewing a Web site in the process.
Customer experience/usability
Aside from the search function on WestElm.com, there is only one way to shop: by general category. By limiting the ways in which its visitors can shop, the company could be missing out on sales. One of the most important elements needed to succeed in e-commerce is the ability to please different types of shoppers; this means offering different ways to shop on a Web site.
Popular ways to shop include by price, top-selling products, size, or something custom-tailored to your site's products or industry, such as style. By offering multiple ways to shop, you're broadening the range of visitors that you're going to please when they come to your site, resulting in increased conversions and a more pleasurable shopping experience.
West Elm recently has done a good job improving its images so it reflects the refreshingly vibrant tones of its retail print catalog. Print catalogs and their respective Web sites have the ability to strongly complement each other and drive high conversions and increased sales. If there's a connection between the two, the transition from print to Web and vice versa certainly will be seamless. Going from the rich, vibrant pages of the catalog to the dull grays of the Web site might discourage a visitor expecting the qualities of the catalog to shine through in the Web site.
Previously, WestElm.com had a monochromatic tone throughout, and that had a negative impact on its usability. Although the company recently has made its site more vibrant in general, its calls to action still lack the appearance of standing out as the most obvious action to take. When West Elm used such a strict color tone throughout, it lost its ability to draw customer's attention to one part of the site or another. Now the site has gained this, but it still has more ground to cover when it comes to calls to action.
Product presentation
A product image says a thousand words. In the case of WestElm.com, its images do a great job of holding true to this saying. One all-important aspect of product images that many e-tailers miss is the fact that your images should tell a story -- show them in use, not on a warehouse floor, and certainly don't use a boring manufacturer's stock image.
By showing the items in use, WestElm.com does a great job of stirring up product-inspired ideas and emotions. Visitors immediately connect the story told in the image to one of their own.
Internal site search
Type a term into the search box on WestElm.com and you'll be pleasantly surprised with the results, which include images, pricing and the product name with a link to the product page.
However, the real benefit of WestElm.com's site search is in the drill-downs present in the left column of the results page. They show the number of products within a given category and also serve to narrow down the original search results. The ability to better find what you're looking for through search -- whether it be a general category or a specific product -- adds greatly to the site's usability.
