Complex Ecommerce
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- e-wo
Ahoy.
A client wishes to rebuild their online store and needs a gnarly amount of options per product. 10 product types, 170 possible colors.
Can anyone recommend a method for UI on this? Any noteworthy examples of high volume criteria?
- sisu0
Maybe group colors into categories? Neutrals, muted, bright, primary, etc. and hid them in a tooltip/dropdown?
- vwsung18t0
You mean like etsy? http://www.etsy.com/color.php?re…
- vaxorcist0
ARGH!
Option 1: you design something, client approves it.,.. then you have a 6 month trek to find somebody to implement it, lots of back and forth, lots of developer saying you have to change x, but leave y, client gets confused, this costs $$ and relationship juice...
Option 2: You plot out the possible combinations of stuff, you get a strong understanding of what really matters and what's just a cool extra, you prioritize like crazy, you understand the target, then you try to work with e-commerce smarties who know this stuff and develop or tweek a mostly existing e-commerce system and essentially lay your design on top of it and it may not be quite so cool or glam but it works and its probably not too late or massively over budget as option 1
or at least that's my experience having done this in the past....
NOTE that the combinations can be near-fucking-infinite, try to get the client to PRIORITIZE, if one or two items represent 2% of sales but 50% of complexity, DON'T WASTE TOO MUCH TIME ON IT....
sorry for the rant, but e-commerce becomes a monkey on your back... you play a game, where the client doesn't know what to do with the monkey on his back so he drops it on your back(!)
- e-wo0
Bump!
(thanks, vaxorcist - great ideas)
- detritus0
It's a bit of a fiddly pain in the arse, but Prestashop has a combinations generating feature which could account for your 10 types, and has a colour-selector attribute you can set.
You'd need to wrangle with the slightly arcane templating non-system Prestashop runs with — it's not exactly designer-friendly.
- Actually, I suppose most ecomm packages probably offer this. Sorry, non-information!detritus
- UKV0
This reminds me of merch. I would go have a look at more complicated merch interactions at places like cafepress.com or maybe nikeID. Both of them break apart the consideration and customization process into two separate activities. The latter being roughly 5 steps.
- spot130
Been using http://lemonstand.com/ for a year and love it. Awesome UI and self hosted.