The Design of Sites: Pattern Group G — Advanced E-Commerce
Pattern Group G of The Design of Sites — seven patterns (G1-G7) building on the basic e-commerce checkout flow (Pattern Group F) with optional features for promoting products, personalizing the shopping experience, and supporting customers after the sale. Documents all seven in full six-part format, per Web Design Patterns.
License: © 2006 Pearson Education / New Riders — all rights reserved, no open license; one of the book’s co-authors is a FuguUX founder, which is the basis for citing it here.
Key points
- Featured Products (G1) — curated, editorialized product lists (Best-Sellers, Editors’ Picks, On Sale) for browsing-minded customers who don’t arrive with a specific product in mind.
- Cross-Selling and Up-Selling (G2) — recommending accessories or upgrades related to a customer’s current choice, kept visually secondary to the main product and repeated at checkout in case it was missed.
- Personalized Recommendations (G3) — recommendations built on deliberate signals (ratings, a short preference interview) rather than noisy inferred browsing data, with explicit attention to privacy disclosure.
- Recommendation Community (G4) — customer-written reviews: a two-step write/preview funnel, use policies and filtering, and meta-ratings (Amazon’s “helpful?” votes, eBay’s buyer/seller feedback score) to surface trustworthy reviews.
- Multiple Destinations (G5) — shipping different items in one order to different addresses, with a destination-grouped order summary.
- Gift Giving (G6) — price-hiding packing slips, per-item gift notes and wrap pricing, and a gift-finder recommendation flow.
- Order Tracking and History (G7) — self-service order history, modification, and shipment tracking, replacing phone-based customer service for routine status questions.
Cited In
Patterns
- Cross-Selling and Up-Selling
- Featured Products
- Gift Giving
- Multiple Destinations
- Order Tracking and History
- Personalized Recommendations
- Recommendation Community