It may be shocking to some, but even in today’s high-tech Internet age, there’s a sizable chunk of consumers who can only be described as “Web-phobic.” Instead of hopping online to quickly and efficiently locate a product, they’d rather drift from store to store in hopes of stumbling upon it in person. When I asked one such shopper their rationale for avoiding online shopping, she admitted she was afraid she’d “get lost.” Ironic, given that she’d just spent hours driving in circles looking for an obscure piece of china she could have found in minutes by searching Google.
There are a variety of tools you can implement on your eCommerce site to help prevent the feeling of disorientation my friend described. Enter the breadcrumb. The online equivalent of the “You Are Here” designation on a shopping mall map, breadcrumbs provide a subtle identification factor to show shoppers where they are currently and where they’ve been. Although not nearly as important or widely used as the global navigation or the search box, breadcrumbs have nonetheless become an industry standard in ensuring the comfort level of online shoppers.
Benefits of Breadcrumbs
When utilized effectively, the well-designed breadcrumb offers some proven benefits for both you and your consumers:
- Breadcrumbs help orient the shopper, showing them the path they took to reach their current location. In a way, the breadcrumb can be thought of as a customized site map, reflecting the customer’s specific behaviors.
- If your website has a deep structure of nested categories and subcategories using four or more levels, the breadcrumb can often display more levels than the global navigation can accommodate.
- Linked breadcrumbs allow users to quickly hop back to a location they’ve recently visited.
- You don’t need to drastically alter your interface to accommodate a breadcrumb trail. Consisting of a single line of text, the breadcrumb simply displays the names of the pages the user has visited.
- Even if they’re not noticed or used, breadcrumbs are subtle enough that they won’t distract users or impede their shopping experience.
Tips for Implementing Breadcrumbs
When designing your site’s breadcrumb, keep these best-of-practice rules of thumb in mind:
- Breadcrumbs should display the hierarchy of the site, not a running history of where the user has been. Online shoppers are rampant clickers, which can result in a confusing history. With a hierarchy, a logical sequence of steps is presented. Most begin with the Home page and end with the present page. For instance, on a website selling women’s clothing, a typical breadcrumb might read Home > Women’s > Jeans.
- Include a hyperlink for every step in the breadcrumb, with the exception of the current page. This makes it easy for the user to quickly hop back to a previous page, while making it clear where they are now.
- To make breadcrumbs intuitive and easy to follow, use clear symbols to separate between each step. Common differentiators are the right arrow ( > ) or the pipe symbol ( | ).
- To give your breadcrumb more prominence on the page (and to prevent it from being missed entirely), make sure it’s close in proximity to the dominant links on the page. Many sites have had success with positioning the breadcrumb directly below the global horizontal navigation.
As a highly cost- and time-effective way of helping to reduce abandonment rates and prevent consumer disorientation, breadcrumbs are a standard navigational element on a vast majority of today’s successful eCommerce sites. Considering their ease of implementation, low impact on site design, and potentially revenue-boosting impact, the breadcrumb has become a no-brainer for online merchants.
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