For an e-commerce site Urban Element has a set of shop parts that can be mixed and matched and customised for your specific requirements.
Fully configured the shop can stand alone as a website in its own right, bringing customers straight in to a familiar, but individually styled, shop front where they are immediately able to start browsing the catalogue and picking products for their basket.
Alternatively the shop can be integrated as part of a larger new or existing website, bringing an e-commerce capability to your online presence.
Let’s take a tour around the shop parts to get an idea of how it works and what it can do:
Categories
The underlying organisation of the shop is by main and sub categories. The main categories form the navigation menu options across the top and are the primary way for Customers to browse through the product catalogue.
If you want, each main category can then be broken down into sub-categories, in a secondary menu accompanying each main category page. As an idea you could put some new pictures in the main category, drawing customers’ attention to them, whilst the remaining items can be organised logically by sub-category for easy location.
Shop Front & Navigator
As I mentioned in the Categories section the main navigation menu options are built from the main categories, so it builds itself as you add/remove categories and order them using the WebControl interface (more on that later).
Info Boxes
Handy bits of information, hints and tips, announcements, anything you want to say really in a nice neat box on any page across the site.
Search Tool
Using customisable keywords (WebControl again) and product titles, the search tool sits prominently in the Shop Front, so it can be made available in every page should you wish. It allows customers to quickly and easily build a list of matching products across all categories, so they can throw things straight into their basket, without having to look around.
Catalogue View
To see and read about your products, the customer is presented with the catalogue view, it is responsible for delivering an attractive, paged list of items from the database depending upon the category, sub-category, search words and any filter settings applied.
When driven from the menu system Catalogue view displays a configurable length list of products, along with a navigation tree that makes it clear to the customer exactly where they are, and gives them links to navigate back up to the main category branch that they are in.
When driven from the Search Tool, Catalogue View ignores categories completely, displaying a configurable length, page able list of matching products.
Each product in the view has an “Add to Basket” button along with a quantity field, which customers can edit manually or adjust using the +/- buttons.
As well as a nice picture, a title, price and a long description of course, the Catalogue View has two more neat features:
- Class Icons: To better classify a product regardless of the category it’s in, you can configure a set of Class Icons. Along with a key elsewhere on the site, the icons give the customer easily accessible in-depth information such as those products which are “Special Offers” in an Online Shop or “Best Sellers” (or even conversely “This Season”) in a clothing store.
- Details View: Keeping the description succinct and the list of products manageable is made easier with the “in-page” details popup. This includes all the information from the Catalogue View, but with up to 3 further information sections (customisable of course) to really give the low down on that killer product.
Featured Items Catalogue
You can add a Featured Items Catalogue to any page across the site. This gives you a way of bringing customers' attention to a set of products wherever they may be located within the shop. You can manage “featured” products from WebControl of course and customers can spot them and get a detailed view and even add them to their basket without having to browse or search.
Incidentally you may have the control set to display 6 items but have many more flagged as “featured”, in that case the control cycles through, so that every product gets an airing.
Filter Control
Working alongside the Catalogue View and its Class Icons, the Filter Control is a configurable way of allowing the customer to filter the set of products they are viewing within the current category or search results.
You might set static filter options such as “Special Offers” for a furniture wholesaler or “End of Line” for a clothing store, or you might have some dynamic options like “Organic”, or “Fat Free” for a supermarket, which you could assign and re-assign to items using the WebControl interface.
Filter Control has one extra trick to help put customers and products together. “Show All Categories” works like a search, but on options rather than keywords. In the case of the meat wholesaler that “Special Offers” option could find every single special offer in the shop, regardless of what category it’s in, or what the title or keywords are. It’s a whole alternative view of your product range.
Item Basket:
Wherever they are in the shop, the customer can always see their basket. Running down the side of the page, the user can see items, quantities, and subtotals, along with a running total of what they have spent so far.
When the customer clicks “Add to Basket” in the Catalogue, it turns up immediately, or conversely they can remove individual items directly from the basket. When they are happy with their order, they can click on the “Checkout” button to proceed.
Checkout Wizard:
Arriving here the customer is presented with a comprehensive order list where they can alter quantities should they wish, or remove items and even return to the shop if needs be.
They are then guided through the process, logged in or taken through account creation if necessary (see “Account Management” below) and sent off to your chosen payment gateway to complete the secure online transaction.
Once payment has been processed the customer is returned to a (customisable of course) confirmation of order page, where they are invited back in to the shop. Meantime they (and you) are sent an order confirmation email.
Account Management:
There are those that do and those that don’t like accounts. If you anticipate customers returning periodically, such as with a food store, then accounts make a lot of sense. The customer is remembered, and can be greeted in a friendly manner when they log in. Their past orders are also remembered and with a single click they can re-order any or all of their past orders without having to run back around the shop every time. One other nice thing, when it comes to checkout there’s no need to re-enter their personal, delivery and billing address details.
On the other hand, if customers are likely to Google their way over one day and find you have just the thing they are looking for, but aren’t likely to be back regularly, you can speed along the purchase process, and earn brownie points, by dispensing with the need for them to create an account before they can simply check out, and buy the thing.
WebControl:
Once you have an attractive, intuitive and well signposted way (see “ SEO ”) for customers to reach you online, you need a crafty and all powerful way to manage all those products, arranging them on the shelves, pricing and re-pricing them, honing the descriptions and adding priceless depths of information for the details pages. WebControl makes this easy. Instead of yourshop.com you visit yourshop.com/webcontrol where you will need to log in before you can access the main menu options.
The expandable category tree gives you access to every main and sub-category where you can view a concentrated list of products. Clicking a product extends the view of it so you can see and edit all the properties, such as price, Class groups (for the Class Icons) title and description fields, price, everything.
Alternatively you search for a product directly, by product code or title and you can of course add entirely new products, upload a picture and add them to a category.