Looking for examples of GREAT product detail pages on ecommerce sites...

February 2, 2006 3:03 PM

Looking for examples of GREAT product detail pages on ecommerce sites...

I'm designing my first ecommerce site and I'm on the lookout for examples of great product detail pages. (start backwards!) Not so much amazon, ebay, more defunker.com, threadless.com, 2modern.

Web 2.0 is slow to catch up with ecommerce and it seems like so many sites hide the important stuff, "price" "add to cart", have small product images, etc. WHY?!

posted by rschroed to computers & internet (8 comments total)

EddieBauer.com -- options to see all different colors, sizes, zoomed views of each, images of the clothing on a model, etc.
posted by frogan at 4:09 PM on February 2, 2006

what are you selling?

clothing? REI is a classic of good design.

consumer electronics? then look at future shop for detailed product descriptions, opinions, etc

or you could go to Jakob Nielsen's web site and learn about best practices and the sites that use them
posted by seawallrunner at 4:28 PM on February 2, 2006

Smith+Noble does a great job presenting some pretty complicated and option-laden products (window treatments).
posted by staggernation at 5:30 PM on February 2, 2006

It's selling designer Pillows (think thomas paul), Art Prints, Paper goods, etc. So there won't be a lot of size/color options, etc.

Several of the above mentioned site have pretty good IA but they're all UGLY (aren't they?) And "add to cart" is still pretty hard to find. Although, to be fair, with clothing they want to to select color & size first...
posted by rschroed at 6:01 PM on February 2, 2006

freshdirect has what I would consider to be one of the best-designed e-commerce sites on the web. It's the site that I always point to when people ask me to show them a well-designed site.
posted by Afroblanco at 7:46 PM on February 2, 2006

Please, for the love of god, don't make it entirely flash-based like the sites listed in your question.
posted by alby at 4:14 AM on February 3, 2006

The sites you listed suck. If I was shopping, I would have left them immediately, barring an incredible deal.

A good product page does not involve flash without good reason (i.e. not unless you have a product clip/360 degree view to show), includes plenty of structured information on the product, clear multi-angle pictures of the product, technical specs (this can apply to anything), and of course conspicuously shows the full real price you would pay for it, site navigation, cart and account controls (this also goes for title pages and all other pages on the site). The sites you listed above consistently fail these criteria.

I can't think of better product pages than newegg's and amazon's. There's plenty to learn from those.
posted by azazello at 4:38 AM on February 3, 2006

Oh don't worry, I'm not using flash at all. (although, perhaps it shuold be noted that there people in this world that are less flash-phobic than this crowd.

And there are people that don't buy on price alone, esp. the products I'm designing for.

I agree that amazon's the best, though a *totally* different animal than what I'm dealing with. Newegg though?!
posted by rschroed at 12:21 PM on February 3, 2006