Features of a good shoe shop

Key functions of a shoe shop

Footwear, whether we talk about everyday models, luxurious and smart shoes, or sports footwear, constitute assortment with specific mail-order sale requirements. We would like to advise you on what to take care of while ordering and implementing an online shoe shop. We rely on our many years of experience. It is worth mentioning that IdoSell was created with the general aim of selling shoes. This distinguishes us from our competitors, who were often set up in order to run a particular bookstore or a computer shop. Due to the fact that we have started many years ago from shoe and clothes shop, every detail of the system was and still is created with the focus on sizes, colors, different prices for sizes or the possibility to present different photos depending on the variant.

Sizes, searching and filtering by size

Everything revolves around sizes in the online shoe shop. Apart from the shop design, sizes are the most important search parameter for customers. It is essential to provide correct sizes to all products, taking into account standards applied by different producers. A shoe shop front should give a clear and easy choice of size. A clear distinction between temporarily unavailable and available sizes is also of crucial importance. Our best graphic designers will take care of the proper arrangement.

The ability to find shoes in good size or filter the product list only to shoes in a searched size is also very important. Why? The answer is simple - a customer will not buy a pair of shoes in a wrong size, even if they look amazing. We can implement handy mechanisms and search tools in your online shoe shop, at the same time giving you advice on the appropriate configuration and the proper placement of the search tools and filters. The administration panel will allow you to divide the assortment to any number of sizes, including assigning different prices to selected sizes (for example, in case of sales of sizes which do not sell well).

Size chart, measurement guide

Different producers use different size schemes. Sometimes the same shoe size equals a different actual foot measure. The role of the seller is to properly describe the sizes, compare them to the length of a foot in centimeters and inform how to estimate the accurate size. It will increase the level of trust of a customer and allow for conscious shopping. A "size chart" function comes in handy. Our graphic department, during the implementation process, can prepare the appropriate way to display tables and information how to measure a shoe. In addition, it is worth to commission the preparation of a print scheme in a PDF format. Due to it, a customer can easily determine one's size for a particular shoe brand.

Good photos

Good photos mean primarily large photos of excellent quality, taken on a white background, showing shoe from different angles. They should reflect a true shoe color and show a customer the most important details (ornaments, places of stitching and gluing). A shop designed for a footwear industry should enable uploading any number of photos and a convenient way to view them. If you have animations depicting a shoe from each side (a so-called 360-degree view), we will adapt a shop front to support them.

Color versions

Footwear, whether smart, sports, or casual, is often produced in several colors. Sometimes it will be a different shade of leather, sometimes the color of shoe details, shoelaces or a completely different color of shoes. In such a situation customers should be informed about the available choice and be given an easy way to change the variant. Our graphic designers allow you to choose different ways of presenting multiple colors and versions. There are two main strategies of presenting the full range of colors which you should choose when providing our specialists with guidelines. The first way is to show all the colors as separate items on the product list. The second way is to show one representative shoe on a product list, together with the information about different colors of the same model. We recommend the second method which requires an appropriate design and a way of encoding your shop.

Returns

Returns constitute an indispensable element of online transactions. You can easily use this element in the footwear industry to build trust. Awareness that if a shoe does not fit it can be returned easily and free of charge, often is a decisive factor when it comes to placing an order. A good shoe shop should explicitly inform about returns and provide an easy return procedure based on ready-to-use tools. Within a selected implementation package, we will prepare a module of automatic return generation in the system by a client, the mechanism of creating a ready-to-print address label and a return form, as well as an option of a refund method selection. What is more, we will propose different options of placing information about a return in a visible place of your shop, for example in the form of a banner. We can also prepare templates of printouts (returns manual, return form) which you may put in the package sent to your client.

Intelligent product recommendations

In a business where goods are selected primarily on the basis of design and preferences, and at the same time product range is very wide, it is difficult to manually establish connections between similar products on your own and to guess what will appeal to a customer. Our intelligent recommendation system, IAI RS, can do it for you. This mechanism establishes which products are similar to each other and suggest some alternatives to a customer. Its efficiency is measurable and for the footwear industry it reaches up to 10%.

Responsiveness

Nowadays mobile devices are widely available and permanently connected to the Internet. As their popularity grows, your shop has to be accessible and friendly on tablets, smartphones, as well as on a home computer. The customers receive your e-mails, newsletters and browse special offers on their smartphones. Availability of a mobile shop allows them to add products to the cart or to favourites and to finish shopping at home on a laptop, or show the item to a partner or a friend. A good shoe shop is a complete system, where classic online shop is completed with a mobile version, a mobile application which can be installed on a customer's phone, and e-mails and newsletters which are adjusted to be read on mobile phones. Our specialists will offer you all of these solutions and advise you which elements work best in different versions of your shop. You can choose between a separate mobile and classic shop, and one responsive (RWD) shop front. In IdoSell we implement various mobile solutions depending on your needs and budget.

A brief description, parameters

Searching for dream shoes and the decision to purchase them will be much easier if you provide customers with search tools and concise information about the most important shoe characteristics. In case of sports footwear it will be, for example destination (i.e. running), colors, the name of a collection. In case of casual shoes it may be the material from which they are made, season, the name of a collection or color. It is worth to consider placing proper filters and search engines which will attractively present these information in your shop. These steps should be left to our graphic designers.

Special offers, sales, new collections

New season, a new collections and sales of old collections constitute inherent elements of a footwear industry. It is therefore necessary to implement feeds presenting special offers, discounted products, as well as new in. Apart from the special boxes displaying such goods, we also recommend preparing small but eye-catching signs next to the products shown on a product list, for example when browsing categories. This type of marking statuses, if they are not used on a very large scale, can increase sales of given shoe models, especially if they are followed by suitable price reductions.

Advertising banners

When designing a shoe store, we focus primarily on the maximum exposure of product pictures and minimalist graphic design. Graphical banners play an extremely important role in such style. Their quality is as important as the quality of shoe photos. With the help of properly prepared and attractive banners on the main page you can effectively promote some models or the entire new collection. In case of shops with a large assortment of one type, such as shoe shops, banners which are often changed, adapted to the season and marketing activities give the impression of the shop being "alive". During the implementation of the shop it is worth to immediately order banners package, with which a shop can start and it is the best to expand it with the graphics for the next few weeks and subsequent marketing campaigns.

Recommended implementation package

If you would like to include the above described features and components in your shop, we highly recommend choosing a SUPREME implementation package. You can think of reserving a part of the budget on a regular commissions for new banners advertising the latest collections and sales. We recommend setting a regular schedule to determine the availability of a graphic designer and to prepare the necessary banners, newsletters and other promotional materials.

How to prepare guidelines

While collecting guidelines for your shoe shop valuation and implementation, include decisions and preferences described below.

At first, supply us with a logo of your shop in a good quality or describe how it should look and what kind of a name it should contain. If you have preferences concerning a color of the logo and the shop, be sure to inform us about this at the very beginning.

Another basic information is to whom your products are addressed and what is the character of your shop. Is it cheap or rather luxurious footwear? Will it be a collection of popular brands and many types of footwear or products will be narrowed down, for example, to only one brand or to one type of footwear? Will the footwear be for men and women or maybe only for children? We will know which way of product exposure and navigation should be implemented in your shop.

Send us a set of photos for some products in your offer. It would be the best if you sent us photos of products of various types to be representative of the entire offer. The designer will take into account appropriate backgrounds and proportions of images and icons in design of your shop. Inform us if you have 360-degree graphical animations that enable viewing products from all sides. Designers have to develop a right solution for placing such animations.

Send us information whether the offer will include shoes in multiple colors and which presentation of such versions you prefer.

Include information about any elements outside the very shop front which you would like us to plan, for example banners, e-mail and newsletter templates, size charts, measuring instructions, etc.

Send us a sample description of a single product. Will it contain any parameters, or will it just include a plain text? Are there any important features that should be exposed, for example, material, destination, technologies used in, for example, sports footwear?