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Good collection – It really helps when products in your shop are attractive as well.

“fresh and Well-designed” slow-loading, resource intensive, annoying

Most of the sites lack basic usability.

Where do i click? Calls for action?

Flash is nice, but Google killed it, especially for e-commerce.

Durrr I hate the flash b’cuz of the googlez and da usabilities r 2 confuzing… my Sitez are Good b’cuz they’re like templates and htmlz like and all the others on the interwebs.

lame. lame. and lame. Some of these like the VW one are VERY nice.

These sites look pretty, but why are they well-designed? To me, ‘well-designed’ means far more than just the looks of the site and encompasses the functionality and overall purpose of the site. Are they incredibly usable? Do they have a high-conversion percentage? If so, why? And if not, why not? If you’re interested in more on the topic, check out our series on A Checklist For Business Websites.

nice list, but what’s the shopping cart software behind these?
can we get an article comparing shopping carts?
thank you!

The word ‘Fresh’ irks me to no end. It’s the 21st century, not the 1990’s. We had a customer said her site wasn’t fresh enough, then showed us another web site that was super dull and boring, and said she liked that. The one we made was much nicer, better colors, but not so bright it was annoying…

Yes – once again well designed here is well designed as a picture, static work of art. Not necessarily well designed as a shop, or when tasks or suitability is concerned. Some of those examples had good approach on products and their presentation as well – that goes beyond having big picture of it in aesthetically drawn front page.

This is off subject, but after reading all the posts i started thinking: Does beautiful and unique design really matter when it comes to e-commerce.

I have an e-commerce website, and it took me two months to pick the right color scheme. Do customers really care if i use black or blue header? Maybe I was just designing it for myself.

Do customers look for being entertained, or they simply want to buy a pair of black socks? Could striking visual design actually distract customers? I would love to see a study on that (there must be some out there).

I would say these are all nice but not really “mainstream” … More like boutique shops. Have a look at this one. the filtering on the right hand side is fantastic. It is built usign the Shoptimized service that is going public in next month or so.

Good Collection.
Thanks Smash..

Many perfect examples where “design” is confused with “style” with terrible results.

These sites have great style, but in nearly all the cases I tried out that style actually impeded my goal as a customer. Impeding the customer’s goals is not what our clients are paying us for.

It so disappointing to see yet another design article that clearly doesn’t understand design.

I think the funy part about this article is that a handful of those “good designs” are modified templates people can buy. Very recognizable with little changes. Reaching for material?

These are some great, beautiful sites. I especially liked Siege, Madsen Cycles, and James Pearse. Really sharp. One ecommerce site that I have been admiring lately and has excellent photographs is endclothing.co.uk

sellmates.co.nz is a bit different but pretty tidy. Agree that the balance between looking hot and achieving a great user experience can be tough, but crucial if you expect that the design is really going to drive growth.

Great Collection.

This is a really disappointing post and fails to really understand what good ecommerce design is about.

As mentioned by other commenters there is so much more to ecommerce site design and design in general than a pleasing aesthetic. What ever success you may have in creating an appealing skin will quickly wane if people trying to USE the site/artefact are not engaged and even worse; obstructed. Let’s not forget that ecommerce is about selling, which requires true innovation to stand out in a crowded marketplace, just a pretty face won’t cut it. This is predominantly a list of unremarkable, middle of the road vendors and not really worthy of an article attempting to document the success stories. I’m motivated to quote the time-honoured mantra ‘form follows function’.

A well designed site should at the very least pass CSS & HTML validation. A little disappointed that SM chose some of these sites to showcase, more than half of them don’t validate.

Here is an example of a nice e-commerce online shop for women fashion.http://www.fashionchicks.net. It has nice layout easy to find the items.Its build using wordpress as CMS system. Members can easily post apparels they find online.

I like Smashing Mag – I really do. It’s a great resource for many things – tips ‘n’ tricks.

But, I can’t seem to get over the lack of empirical evidence they provide in many of their posts. Are these shops well designed? I don’t think so. The few that I visited didn’t seem to adhere to usability best practices – accessibility to my shopping cart, bloated pages, slow loading.

Smashing – look at the comments! Your readers are easily able to identify what makes our respective professions valuable. Post like this only serve to reinforce the mistaken idea that we are merely window dressers and that good design is one dimensional.

Respectfully,
Bill Doern

most of them are quite rocking,evethough some looks staid…

Wow you ppl cry a lot

Great inspiration! I’m going to buy me silly in watches at nixnow!

Amazing list. love it!

@KurtMac – hey yo – I’m the guy who made that Ophelia Fancy site. I know what yo umean about the long list.To get round that you’ll see that when you hit the shop front – you can browse straight away by category and even drill down to tags by colour – e.g. http://opheliafancy.com/shop/tags/black... I suspect you were distracted by all the frilly knickers

Maybe you should have added “homepage” on the title. They may be good e-commerce homepage but it tells nothing about the rest of the site.

Great list of sites, some really strong design in there – big fan of smashing ag by the way, this is my first comment!

I wish to have a page like that someday thery’re very cool…

The best site, IMHO, was the Crate & Barrel site. Easy to navigate, nice menus, the ability to change the product thumbnail size and a shopping cart bar along the bottom of the site that stays with you as you shop. Great use of color and LOVED the way the logo was used on the front page.

As everyone else has already commented, great photography is basically the whole site. If the product isn’t photographed properly then a groovy interface and fancy shopping cart is useless.

Overall, nice collection. As usual another useful group of inspiring sites and designs.

Cheers.

Ashely (Posting 52),
I don’t agree. Design and therefore the “brand experience” matters! You can take rather generic goods, like whole seller/ drop-shipper items and give them a whole new spin by . Your perception of the brand and your willingness to shop will be affected, wether you want to or not. Or would you shop in a real-world store that has no branding but rather a few boxes with labels saying “shoes”, “shirts” etc. and maybe a cash register that says “pay here”? Such simplicity can only be pulled off by brands like Apple, where the brand itself is about usability and simplification. In a changed market of serving very individual niches, a combination of great usability AND brand experience by design should be the goal.

What ever one can say but i feel nothing like Interspire

One should consider its backend too that is what i feel.

Great list! I’d like to add the recently revamped DubLi site ( http://www.dubli.com ). They didn’t have a search engine before, but now they do. And boy, it’s only when a search facility is lacking that you realise how integral to the internet experience a search is! The site’s also been streamlined down.

Of the sites featured in the article, I think the Burberry site wins my vote – though I wouldn’t be seen dead wearing their clothes!

Cool list…I was a bit sad to not see a lot of (web design trends for 2009) features on these sites.