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When faced with overwhelming choices, 42% of consumers abandon their purchase if they can’t easily find the products they need (Baymard Institute, 2023). For footwear brands, this means that every step of the customer journey—whether it’s the navigation, homepage, product listing pages (PLPs), product detail pages (PDPs), or checkout—must be optimized to guide shoppers seamlessly toward the right product. Without strategic direction, valuable opportunities to convert can be lost.
To be successful in footwear ecommerce, crafting paths to purchase around consumer’s needs, goals, and lifestyles is paramount. CQL caters digital footwear experiences to your audience in a way that helps shoppers seamlessly navigate, understand your product offering, and feel how your products fit their lives. By optimizing paths to purchase, our footwear clients drive new business, increase conversions, and build customer loyalty.
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Taxonomy and navigation structure play an important role in ecommerce UX. It gives the user a sense of your product offering and when done well, provides meaningful paths for your key personas. When developing a navigation and taxonomy structure, your brand must consider what is most valuable to your audience. Organizing your footwear navigation by age, size, gender and lifestyle are great ways to create structure for your product catalog.
Stride Rite
Shopping for kids shoes can be daunting. Kids grow quickly, and shoppers are left guessing their child’s shoe size. Stride Rite improves product discovery by categorizing shoes by age range (crawlers, first walkers, little kid, big kid), while providing a size range for that age group. This taxonomy helps clarify the overlap in size numbers in different age ranges. Stride Rite’s navigation also allows shoppers to shop by category or top collections, or connect with visual merchandising cues in each category.
Superfeet
As a function-focused brand, Superfeet prioritizes footwear activity and performance in the navigation. To help users find the perfect insole for their lifestyle, Superfeet’s “Insole Finder” is readily accessible as the second most prominent path. To take it one step further, users are empowered to explore custom insoles made for their feet. Overall, this navigation flow is a shining example of leading with clear paths to functional products while also providing opportunity to flow users down more bespoke paths.
The homepage is your greatest asset and should always be evolving as products change and merchandising opportunities present themselves. Treat it like a brochure to the rest of the site.
SUPERFEET
One strategy with paths to purchase is consistency. Superfeet does this by modeling the home page experience off the main navigation. The homepage should act as a brochure to the key paths of the site. Superfeet follows this playbook by leading with a key promotion, followed by activity browsing. Being a function-forward brand, it is only fitting to spend time crafting an interactive technology section educating the prospective customer on the science behind Superfeet products and promoting custom 3D printed insoles.
TOMS
During the holiday season, TOMS’ homepage changes to seasonal themes. “Gifting” banners anticipate needs of shoppers, “Meaningful Cozy” collections elevate their winter footwear based on user buying behavior, “All Dressed Up” collections feature footwear for holiday parties, and “Additional Gifting” helps create easy purchase paths to top gift collections. TOMS’ front-end website was built using visual CMS Builder.io, which provides the brand flexibility of adapting their messaging quickly and merchandising based on customer buying behavior.
Builder.io gives your marketing team the ability to create unique layouts and craft custom layouts components with ease in a headless environment.
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more efficient marketing workflows
documented productivity savings
reduced site update turnaround times
Product listing pages present a plethora of micro-decisions to be made during UX design, all of which have both experiential reward and consequence. A specific example footwear brands run into frequently is the idea of “rolled up” versus “exploded out” variants in product cards. On one hand, you can empower users to see variations rolled up in a feature-rich card giving a sense of product options. Drawbacks to this approach are busier product grids and requiring more robust quickview experiences to enable users to make selections. On the flipside, you may opt to explode out variants so they are individually listed in the product grid. This approach promotes more simplistic product grid layouts and allows for the possibility to incorporate efficient quick add functionality.
FRYE
Frye chose for the “rolled up” product card option, a direction that aligns with their strategy of showcasing the brand’s iconic style names while offering premium leather options to complement the product selection. To promote product purchases at the PLP level, a robust quickview was incorporated, allowing users to make all the necessary selections as they would on a product detail page.
TOMS
TOMS takes the approach of “exploded out” product variants as separate cards. In place of color swatches, color names print out below the product title creating an elevated product branding moment. A key feature to this simplified approach is the inclusion of a unique quick add interface. Without leaving the grid experience, users can simply tap a plus icon, make a size selection and easily add to cart without leaving the page. This functionality lowers the barrier to adding products in the cart.
There is a ton of heavy lifting a product detail page can contribute to help users make a purchase. Breaking down the experience, the PDP page has two paths: the buy stack experience and the supporting content below the fold. The buy stack is everything at the top of the page. Footwear brands should clearly present the product visually, while providing concise information and interfaces which will get the user to add the product to their cart. Supporting content below the buy stack should be thought of as a means to supply any additional information and remove any doubts a user may still have about the product. Supporting content includes production specifications, reviews, technology, features, etc.
Rudis
After guiding your shoppers to a product detail page, your goal is to get them to make a product selection and add to cart. The key to a good buy stack is clear communication of product variants. Colorway and size are the two main product variants that need to be as comprehensive as possible. RUDIS does an excellent job presenting a full grid of color-specific imagery tied to the color selection. With size, they opted to pair size and width together reducing steps in a very simple UI. Another common practice is to nest extra important information just below the buy button in the form of accordions, allowing users to have all the information they need to make an informed purchase. RUDIS goes as far as presenting the inspiration and history behind their shoe design in their supporting footwear content.
Rudis
Displaying product features and technology in an engaging way below the buy stack is a critical aspect of the PDP when it comes to persuading users to add your shoe to their cart. RUDIS checks all of the boxes by presenting key performance features in engaging ways throughout the page. A “Win More” interface positions wrestling shoes into performance categories specific to wrestler styles. Products are broken out into digestible feature highlights conveying benefits of the product. Throughout this content, it is especially worth noting how RUDIS sub-branded in-house technologies within this content like that of FlexSPINE™ and PowerDRIVE™.
After you’ve optimized your navigation, home page, PLPs, and PDPs for users to find the perfect footwear to fit their lifestyle, you need to craft a good cart experience and fulfillment process. The use of a mini cart interface is one powerful way to achieve an efficient path to checkout. Beyond checkout, it is vital to have clear communication with customers to ensure trust and confidence is maintained in the post-purchase phase. Poor communication can result in cancelled orders and non-returning customers. With post-purchase customer experience platforms such as Aftership, footwear brands have the opportunity to boost sales and build loyalty with customers through branded order tracking, proactive messaging, and seamless return requests.
TOMS
There are multiple strategies to funnel users into the checkout experience. One popular approach is the use of a minicart. This is a flyout occurring when a user adds a product to their cart from anywhere on the site, typically on product listing pages and product detail pages. TOMS leveraged this strategy by incorporating a robust mini cart sidebar interface where users can see the products in their cart at a glance. TOMS also used this interface as an opportunity to present shipping offers and upsell products. This approach lowers the barrier to checkout by reducing the number of taps compared to a full page cart.
RUDIS
To make sure post-purchase touchpoints are elegantly and efficiently handled, RUDIS leaned on Aftership. With proactive shipping tracking, returns automation, warranty automation, shipping protection, and estimated delivery dates, Aftership enhances customer journeys with end-to-end order visibility and a RUDIS branded experience that fosters customer loyalty, provides clear shipping details, and ensures a smooth return and/or exchange process.
Aftership’s all-in-one platform empowers global eCommerce brands to optimize every step of the customer journey, from shipment tracking to returns and beyond.
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reduction in “where is my order” tickets
point increase in Net Promoter Score
reduction in operation costs
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