Woohoo, after years of waiting and wondering Zara the popular worldwide high street fashion brand, which was orginally founded in Corunna, Spain (1975) has finally decided to sell their clothing range online. It has been a big decision from Zara, as they were one of the few high street clothing retailers in UK who didn’t sell their products online. I personally, have a massive affection for the Zara brand, being the clothing brand that most suits my style.

Zara are getting with times after embracing the development of a Zara iPhone app, they have finally taken the plunge and launched their online retail store. It’s no surprise that Zara has now decided to sell online, as this year alone the online retail market in the UK is expected to bring in 56 billion this year (IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index).

Home Page

The home page opens with this massive hero shot of a model sporting one of Zara clothing items. It’s powerful to eye, however other than to look good it doesn’t really serve any purpose to the user in terms of navigation.

There are number of call to actions of this page that have been designed to fit the aesthetics of the site design. If users notice these and click on these links is another question entirely, to me they don’t really look like call to actions until you move over them and realise they can be clicked on.

In the bottom right there is the text ‘Join Fashion’ which when clicked on takes you to another landing page with a call to action ‘send CV’, once clicked on this then takes you to InditexJobs, where the Zara vacancies are. This is a really strange way to tell people you have career opportunities at your new store openings.

On the left hand side of home page, in big typography there are 5 separate call to actions, although that isn’t particularly clear to users. You have the options to view the look book, get the Zara iPad/iPhone app, ‘click a collection making of” to view behind the scenes photos of the fashion process. You can also join the Facebook fan page, or view the catalogue.

Look Book

Zara have continued an original theme they had from their existing website, before they sold products online. This original feature allowed you to look through collections of fashion for the upcoming product lines for a particular season e.g. autumn/winter. Zara have an area on the site that allows you to look through each set of fashion outfits, there is a particularly nice jquery functionality that swaps the next image into the page.

The great thing about this section is that Zara have linked the items from the image to product pages on the site. Good stuff! So if you like an outfit in the look book you can go buy the items straight away.

Catalogue Area

This section is where things start to get a bit complex in terms of navigation, certainly I found the navigation and control in this area rather fiddly and difficult. To the average user this is a page that would be difficult to use. The main site navigation disappears on this page, however it can be brought back by hovering over the plus sign in the top left.

If you move your mouse around you have the option to ‘SuperZoom’ and view the product more closely, at times if you hover over a particular product a box will pop up showing the item information and it’s price, underneath are the words view more information.To view that product you must click again to bring up the product page. I was attempting to click the view more information with my mouse cusor, only to notice the box had disappeared.

If you click on the view more box, it takes you to a product page. The original price was show in GBP, however now you are presented with a product page in Spanish and with EURO pricing.

Site Search & Navigation

Overall, the site navigation is clean and easy to use. Sub navigation appears when you delve further into each clothing section. ‘New this week’, allows users to get straight into the new lines of clothing available from Zara once clicked on.

One thing that did bother me in terms of navigation was Zara decision, to send users to a image page symbolising each section,this is identical to the home page design. It is unclear to the user if they are actually in the mens shopping page. It would of been better to send them directly to products. After all your adding an unnecessary extra path for the user, that they may not wish to take

Site search seems to work ok, however I did a test search for ‘mens coat’ and it showed a number of women and children’s coats as well. A search filter here to show only products from the mens ranges would help.

Category pages

Looking exactly like the home page, the main men’s category page is confusing for everyone. It would of been nice to see Zara promoting popular ranges or outfits at this point and certainly with products immediately available to see and buy from this page.

Delving in further to each of the clothing categories you can see the page design is nice and clean. It is well laid out and product images are high quality and well shot, I personally like how they are faceless. A particular model can put me off buying a garment, if I feel it doesn’t look right on them it might not look right on me.

There are options here to sort the results by size, prize, colour and characteristics. This is very well done, hats off to Zara for the well thought out design here.

Product pages

Product pages, you guessed it, are clean and sparse, focusing on product pictures, with more details available as a drop downs under each section e.g. shipping. Further to this, a very well designed size guide is available where appropriate.

There is a nice big bold ‘Add to Basket’ call to action, as well tiny links below to share on Facebook, Twitter, E-mail or Print.

The product page should provide the customer with all the information they require without having to force them to navigate elsewhere on your website and Zara’s achieves this well.

There is also a link to go back, it would of been better to add breadcrumbs to let the user know exactly where they are e.g. Home>Mens> Jackets> Brown Jacket. It might look less aesthetically pleasing, but it would of severed the user better.

It took me a second or two to add the product to the basket. It seemed to be loading for some reason, this should be instant and Zara need to fix that asap.

Advising Customers on Style and What to Purchase

Consumers are most attracted to a website that provides good advice and reassurance about their purchase, with outfit suggestions (43%), recommendations (46%) and customer reviews (40%) cited as features that consumers most like. [IMRG May 2009).

Registration on the Site

Adding my information and details was easy, the form was well laid out and a green tick appear to let me know the details were entered correctly and in the right format.

Checkout process

The Zara checkout is neat and fully enclosed, with the call to action being nice and bold on the page. On this page I would like to see payment options in terms of secure certifications and payment gateway logos.

The speed to get to the next section of the checkout process took a long while to load, this could just be the site being popular today. Also there is a distant lack of a checkout progress indicator.

Conclusion

Zara's new shop online is overall very well put together and stands up against its competitors. There are one or two issues that Zara needs to sort, such as the slow loading of products to shopping basket and the speed you can process your order. I would also like to see Zara promote their Twitter link and not just Facebook on their home page.

The new site is a marked improvement over the original and I can see Zara doing big business online and competing with the likes of ASOS and River Island here in the UK.

It is clear the site is still in an early stage, and it is a bit harsh reviewing it so soon, I would hope that Zara have put a support infrastructure in place to identify and correct issues as they arise over the next few weeks.