The second post in our ÜberTip series (read/download the full guide) is an important attitude for any e-commerce site — keep it simple!  Drupal can be prey to "open buffet syndrome" on modules and features.  All that exciting functionality is there at your fingertips, an enabled block away!  But when you’re trying to encourage your customers to part with their hard-earned money on what you’re selling, you don’t want to distract them from that primary goal.

Dealing with Drupal’s defaults

Unless you’re running a social networking site with chat functionality, do customers really need to know who else is logged in?  For that matter, Drupal’s default Navigation and User Login blocks are unnecessary for most e-commerce sites.  Disable whatever blocks aren’t absolutely necessary, especially once the user gets to the checkout pages.

Focus on essential information

Beyond blocks, consider the content of individual pages. Ruthlessly cut words and graphics that don’t serve your purpose. That’s no easy task, as was illustrated by the writer Edgar Allen Poe when he turned in a novel on deadline: "Here it is, at 400 pages. I could have made it 300 pages if you’d given me more time."

Make the buying process obvious

Assuming that your purpose is to sell products, make sure that customers are never more than a click away from buying — and make that button big, unambiguous, and attractive.

Übercart does some of the work for you by providing a Shopping Cart block that you can (and should) make visible on every page, but you can do more by emphasizing the "Add to cart" button on product pages.

You can make your own adjustments by tweaking a theme’s CSS according to these instructions.

Minimize fields that appear on product pages

You can edit this at example.com/admin/store/settings/products/edit/fields. Übercart makes nine fields available for display on product pages, and the defaults are pretty good — with two exceptions. There’s a good chance you don’t need to show the SKU to customers, as it’s a "stock-keeping unit" that’s mostly of use to retailers. And the "Sell price" is the same as the display price, but in a less-prominent format. For a less-distracting product display, uncheck both of these fields. (The information is still in Übercart, it’s just hidden from customers in that place.)

Minimize information that appears on catalog pages

As with product pages, Übercart lets you add and remove fields from catalog pages through the settings at example.com/admin/store/settings/catalog/edit/grid — you’ll need to first check "Display products in grid".

Remove Author & Date information from "product" and "product kit" nodes

On example.com/admin/build/themes/settings, uncheck the boxes for these content types.  This will remove that unnecessary information from your products, unless it’s important that your customers know when a product was entered into your catalog.

Our Drupal themes go a step further by allowing you to set whether to display just author or date independently on each content type by changing settings at example.com/admin/build/themes/settings/[theme name].

Further reading

Two resources we’ve found extremely valuable for improving your e-commerce site and checkout process are:

Web Design for ROI - this is a fantastic book filled with real examples, screenshots, and tips to improve customer experience and conversion rate on your site

Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog - if you want to learn more about landing page optimization, split testing, best practices for customer emails, add to cart forms, analytics, social marketing, and many other details that will help you increase the value of your e-commerce site, this site is regularly updated and a must-read!

Coming up next… the face of your product — images!