Several eye tracking studies have shown that shoppers are not looking for bells and whistles on ecommerce web sites. Rather, they seem to focus on navigation aids such as the search box and navigation bars.

To prove the validity of these findings, MarketingSherpa conducted a study on a sample of retailer home pages, asking consumers what they do when they visit an ecommerce site. Below are a few tips from this research that can be used by wholesalers and retailers.

Shoppers Want to Cut to the Chase

The first thing shoppers do upon arriving at a retail site is to use the site search box (43 percent) and/or click on useful navigation bars (39 percent). Add these together, and you’ve got 82 percent of your shoppers wanting to cut to the chase to find what they’re looking for. They’re not in the mood to browse.

Usually, only men shop this way. Upon entering the mall, they go into a store on a mission to buy and ignore everything else along the way. Most men will buy an item quickly without much shopping around, get in the checkout line and leave the store. They don’t like to shop and you see very few of them sitting in a chair, waiting for the little woman to try on clothes these days. For men, shopping is a task to done quickly and avoided if possible.

Women, on the other hand, linger at every counter that attracts their attention. Looking over clothing, handling the merchandise and trying on dozens of outfits, women can spend hours in a store without buying a thing. In fact, some women work the department stores and boutiques with no particular goal in mind — shopping is a recreational activity. When it comes to window shopping, this is where the urge to buy can start. That’s why the brands spend so much time on displays, to tempt women who are just looking around.

However, this type of browsing activity just doesn’t happen online, even for women. Maybe it’s because the displays aren’t real, or perhaps the retailers have not yet learned how to design sites that are a pleasure to browse. At any rate, following are some actions that can be taken by retailers to entice more online browsing.

Shoppers Like Easy Navigation

Improve your home page navigation to be functional, accurate and enticing. Make sure your pages load quickly. Label your nav buttons correctly.

Don’t make the mistake of showcasing your brand and corporate image on the home page, that’s the last thing an online shopper is interested in. Shoppers want to find the specific merchandise that is first and foremost on their mind. So if you want sales, design your site with your visitor’s interests in mind, not those of the corporate boardroom.

Give some thought to where your navigational elements are placed. Don’t put them on the edge of the screen or at the bottom of the page. By now, most people will look for nav elements at the top of the page. Make them easily visible and accessible in various places on your home page and category pages. Besides nav bars, you can use hyperlinks on key items throughout the text on the page, bringing visitors to hot merchandise. Talk about the items du jour on your home page and provide a link right in the midst of your content. Make your home page more like a site map with attractive content to increase your conversions.

Shoppers Use Site Search

Site search on a wholesale or retail site is vital. You can’t just put in search functionality and leave it at that. You need to test your landing pages, and when you do, you’ll not only be able to serve your customers better, you can use the customer behavior data to improve your site performance.

Here’s one thing to look out for when you’re testing. Many shoppers make typos or use different nomenclature when searching for merchandise. They might type in coat when they mean blazer or make a typo like blzer. You need to provide links for all possible answers to these searches. Nothing turns shoppers off more than “zero results.”

Entice Shoppers With Category Pages

Category pages are those where shoppers land when they type in a general search term or if they click on a main navigation bar or link. These pages are critical because they can lead to a sale, or not.

While marketers typically concentrate on the design of individual product pages, not many focus attention on the category pages that drive the traffic there. Sometimes category pages are created by default, and the layout is something generic that was never tested for functionality.

So don’t make that mistake and treat your category pages the same as your home page. Concentrate on how to make your category pages easy to navigate. Have as many clickable elements as possible, such as sale hotlinks and dedicated search boxes.

Improve Your Site Conversions

So there you have it, a few simple tips that can help wholesalers and retailers improve site conversions. The heavy lifting was done for you so you don’t have to start testing from scratch and go through trial and error. Just implement some of the above changes and watch your bottom line improve.