Minimizing "Click Through" to Purchase

I tried to post this before and believe an error occured, so if there's a duplicate post somewhere forgive me.

I'm interested in minimizing the number of clicks a customer has to make to purchase my product from the home page (just good web marketing right?!). I'm running into some trouble implementing this strategy in ZenCart and would like some ideas or pointers to things I'm missing.

The trouble has to do with the fact that a Product Option has to be applied to a Product Category.

This fact means that to apply an option to my product, it has be buried deep inside several layers of Product Categories, and each time you add a category the potential customer has to click one layer deeper before he can see the "configure option" box, and thereafter "Add to cart."

Essentially, I would like a page similar to "All Products," except where all options are shown and "Add to Cart" is available (without clicking deep into other pages).

Can someone clear up my vision or provide an idea for a solution? Thanks!

Alex

I'm not quite sure what you are talking about, but I think you are misunderstanding some of the category/product/attribute structure.

First off, product options are never applied to categories, they are applied to products as attributes. Attributes are not applied in layers, but all at the same level in the product page.

You can make the category tree as wide and shallow as you want, though there is a balance between immediate access to all products and speed and ease of navigating through logical groupings without being overwhelmed by too many choices at once.

About how many products do you have? How many logical basic groups do they fall into? How many logical subdivisions do those groups fall into? Or do some of them naturally go directly to a group of products without subdivisions? Do some products have varieties or options to choose from? (A t-shirt of one design in five different colors is logically one product with a choice of colors and sizes.)

So: home > top cat > subcat > product (attribute choices) > add to cart can be as few as four page clicks from arrival to product in cart (I don't think attribute clicks matter, as they do not reload the page.)

Thanks for your response - I'll look at the Attribute vs. Category issue tonight as it seems I have made a mistake. I had to retype this quickly and I probably didn't dig into ZC enough the second time to be clear.

To answer some of your questions now though, I'll have say..

home
top category (2-4 of these)
sub category (about 2 of these)
Product with options (2-6 or so)

My end goal is still to minimize clicks, and I have few enough that I think one page per "top category" would be sufficient.

That is to say I would like to show all the sub categories, products with their options, and Add to Cart on the sub category page. Is something like this possible? I can make a crude picture and upload somewhere of something if you think it would help.

Thanks, I do appreciate it. My partner is wondering why this ZenCart thing is taking so long - I think it's going to be pretty scalable and worth it in the long run but we're both anxious to get it to the point we can start driving customers to our site.

It sounds like you're looking at about 4-12 products per top cat - I would think that is few enough that you don't need any subcats.

As for the product listing page, you can have multiple add to cart functionality there, but only for products without attributes. Anything with attributes can only be handled on the product info page. It would be possible to add the form handling for attributes to the products in the listing, but would require major coding changes, not safe to attempt without advanced PHP & MySQL knowledge.

Thanks Glenn. I was about to post a screenshot but I'll hold off until I read through your information carefully and try a few things to understand what you're saying.

Alex

Configuration > Product Listing >
Display Product Add to Cart Button (0=off; 1=on; 2=on with Qty Box per Product) 1
Display Multiple Products Qty Box Status and Set Button Location 3

Glenn,

I did try that and indeed it does put Add to Cart links on those pages thanks. I'm not sure that will get me all the way where I want to go though, as most of my products will have attributes and that problem seems to supersede the Add to Cart location problem.

Looking at this screenshot you can see one of my category pages. I would be ok with this format as I'm only two levels deep (C30 Connector Assembly >> C30 Panel Mount), except that as you can see one product has Add to Cart and the one with the attribute has "more info."

I've got to resolve this somehow, being able to buy one product from this page but not the one right below it just looks really bad - and of course I want to be able to buy from the "higher" page in the tree and not the lower. Have I explained that well enough?

Since I have that screen shot up, I guess the second question on this is... how can I better control the formatting of that text? It doesn't seem to obey things like carriage returns, etc. Is there a way to add bullets and formatting to that description?

The formatting question is already answered peripherally in your other thread.

You won't be able to buy from the "higher" category in the tree; only one (sub)category can have its products listed at one time. To accomplish that function, you will need to eliminate the subcategories and put the parts all directly into the "C30 Connector Assembly" category.

Indeed, eliminating the two sub categories is exactly what I did and that helped a lot I think. I also think if I get your mod working this whole thing will meet my and my partner's expectations. Thanks!