If you turned back the ecommerce clock a few years, you'd find that most retail sites had very clear paths from the home page or a landing page to a product detail page. This path was created to help shoppers step easily through the site's content to the products that interested them.
While these clear paths are good for many reasons, unfortunately the landing-page-to-category-page-to-product-detail-page-to-shopping-cart model rarely works in a real shopping experience. Rather, a shopper might arrive at a landing page; go to the home page; go to a category page; and then move back and forth from a category page to several different product detail pages before making a buying decision.
With this more realistic shopping pattern in mind, many leading ecommerce sites are implementing "Quick Views" that allow shoppers to get more information about a product from either a landing page or a category page. This approach means that shoppers will land on fewer product detail pages, but it does strive for a better shopping experience and may expose potential customers to more of a merchant's inventory.
With large retailers using the Quick View technique to supplement site hierarchy, it is only a matter of time before small and mid-sized merchants begin to implement Quick Views.
How Quick Views Affect Development
From the web development perspective, this trend has three possible implications: (1) promoting Quick Views may help freelance developers gain a competitive advantage; (2) a retailer's desire to use Quick Views may influence ecommerce platform selection; and (3) developers will need to monitor page performance as more content is required on every page.
Marketing Quick Views
Web developers aware of the trend toward using Quick Views, can market the technique to potential clients.
Often, freelance web developers or small agencies will have initial "pitch" meetings with prospective clients. These meetings are when a merchant narrows the field of potential freelancers or agencies, and they are just the place to describe some of the sales-conversion-boosting features that you could implement.
Get a Quick View into your portfolio as soon as possible, even if it is just on a demonstration site. Offering features like a Quick View can put a freelance web developer or small agency ahead of the crowd.
Platform Selection
If a retailer already knows that it wants to use Quick Views, it may make sense to suggest ecommerce platforms that already have the feature in place rather than building it from scratch.
Developing a Quick View is not difficult. Ecommerce Developer has, in fact, published a basic tutorial related to the topic. That tutorial explained how to provide a "tool-tip"-like view of product images. The technique is very similar to what is required for a more robust Quick View. But even though something can be developed easily, it does not necessarily mean that it is the best choice for the project.
If two similar platforms are under consideration and one offers Quick Views, perhaps that feature should make the difference.
Beware of Performance Hits
Finally, developers will want to pay careful attention to how implementing a Quick View affects performance. For example, will more content in the form of text or images need to be loaded? Can HTML5 web workers be used to speed up a Quick View? And what is the best method of implementing the feature? AJAX? Flash?
All of these questions should be addressed with page load times in mind.
Summing Up
Quick Views are becoming more popular in ecommerce, and as a trend they will affect how web developers market, select platforms, and work.
