New realities of eCommerce

From groceries to furniture to pet care, no matter what the item, as those who exist in the generation of the internet it’s become almost natural for us to purchase some or all of these items on an online shopping platform. We say goodbye to the bygone era of the yesteryears where purchasing an item required one to go to a physical store, and with new technologies changing the digital shopping experience, consumer purchase behavior has also undergone extensive modification.

Let’s talk evolution

Bezos opened Amazon.com, named after the wide-reaching South American river, on July 16, 1995. If you look closely, the Slogan at bottom of the old logo is Earth’s biggest bookstore. Now, they are The Biggest Store on Earth.

Design evolution

Process of buying a book on the first e-commerce website in the world in 1995:

• The user lands at the homepage
• Clicks on search — user can either search by author or title.
• After searching, books are listed.
• The user clicks on the desired book and lands on the page with the book’s cover picture & information.
• The user adds the book to the cart and proceeds to pay.

This is exactly how you will buy a physical book today on Amazon.

The fundamental user journey on an eCommerce website is Homepage-Choose Category/Search-Product Listing-Product Page-Checkout. This has remained constant since 1995.

All the design innovation that happened on each of these pages since 1995 is to make sure the person is convinced to advance further to checkout.

Homepage — Product Listing or the Product page.
Product Listing — Product Page or Cart
Product Page — Cart or Checkout

What do I mean? When you look at the 1997 Amazon home page they started incorporating more imagery to entice people to click on featured books

Quality images can evoke powerful emotions in humans to create a…