The holiday season can bring about something of a curious change in customer behavior:

Shoppers that might usually wait patiently for deliveries become frantic with delays. Out of stock notifications do not go down well. And your inbox might get some surprises!

The holidays also change the way shoppers navigate your store. If someone knows exactly what they want, they’ll probably turn to site search — but holiday shoppers are more likely to use your menus, widgets, footer, and other navigational options to browse.

If your store’s navigation isn’t useful for holiday shoppers, it can lead to them ditching you for a competitor. Shoppers just don’t have the time or the patience to struggle with confusing menus or missing pages this time of year… which means that your mistakes here could be costly.

Here are a few things navigational things to consider for best-serving busy holiday shoppers.

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If you look online for advice on improving your store or increasing sales, what you read is likely to range from design tips to general marketing ideas and strategies.

But rarely is the answer to the question of “how do I make my store better?” simple. Nor is it a matter of trying out marketing methods until you find one that sticks. Sometimes the reason your store isn’t effective has less to do with marketing and more to do with the decisions you made at the very beginning of its lifespan.

The categories, tags, and attributes you use in conjunction with your products have a profound effect on the success of your store, believe it or not. If you weren’t intentionally thoughtful about the taxonomy you created and applied during the setup of your store, you could be seeing the results now — that is, frustration, confusion, or a reduction in sales.

Let’s take a look at how you can rework your store’s taxonomy to improve the overall performance of your store, making it easier for customers to use (and, as a result, more likely to lead to purchases).

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There’s a lot to think about when you create a new store. You can’t just throw something together in five minutes and call it a day — that’s a guaranteed recipe for disaster.

Navigation is one element of a store’s design that requires careful consideration, experimentation, and likely even future updates. You could create your navigation in five minutes based on what feels right… or you could use advice and insight to make smarter decisions.

Today, we’re going to explain how you can set up your store’s navigation to work well for shoppers. These tips should help you answer any questions you have so you can get every link placed properly (rather than quickly).

Let’s start by taking a closer look at why navigation options like menus matter so much in the first place.

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There are a number of ways you can convert more of your store’s visitors into paying customers. You can update your store’s design, convince them with compelling copywriting, experiment with in-cart messages, try coupons… the sky’s not even the limit.

But sometimes we overlook the simple things when we’re thinking about ways to boost sales. And your store’s navigation — the menus and links that visitors use to get from place to place — is a really simple element that has an enormous amount of potential.

Small updates to your online store’s navigation can have a huge impact on your ability to convince visitors to make a purchase. Whether it’s making the path to your shopping cart easier or using basic psychology to motivate conversions, even tiny tweaks or five minute fixes can sometimes deliver amazing results.

Keen for some ideas? Let’s take a look at how you might be able to increase your own store’s sales with some updates to your navigation.

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When you’re building an online store, you should never settle for just one web design. Instead, you can keep improving appearance just like you’d strive to keep improving products and services.

One way to do this is to continually make incremental changes that improve your design and the most effective way to do this is through A/B testing.

Most online marketers know the importance of A/B testing but today we’re going to talk about how it can be applied to the navigation menu, extremely important in directing the flow of traffic where you want it to go and well worth testing as meticulously as you would any other page.

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