Wealth-Coaching

A great e commerce site is easily navigable.  Look at all the large e commerce sites out there for clues as to what works and what doesn’t.

Amazon
Long an major e commerce site, Amazon chooses a white background with bright colors to accent their large assortment of goods.  Their 3 column layout is easy to navigate and it gives them plenty of whitespace to allow the pictures to really pop off the pages.

eBay
Again, a white background with bright colors, but unlike Amazon, eBay has chosen a fixed width page.  Amazon’s pages adjust to fit your monitor using CSS.

Some ideas you can glean from these sites:

White backgrounds are effective for product placement, and, because most pictures may retain a white background, it’s much easier for a site that offers many different products from many different suppliers to standardize their site with a white background.

Notice these sites have other ’standard’ web features like blue hyperlinks and favicons.  These are universal features that even the web novice understands.  And, because Amazon and eBay both cater to the web savvy as well (Amazon offers APIs and eBay allows savvy sellers to personalize to a large degree), they are serving a multitude of users well. 

To learn how to really push your site to it’s fullest potential, you’ll need to look to the big players to see how they are pulling off their sales success.