Monday, October 1, 2007

Costco

costco.com

Intended Audience:
  • Costco Members
  • People who may be interested in becoming Costco members
  • People who wish to order something from Costco.com, but do not wish to become members

Usefulness of Content:

There is not a great deal of information on the site about becoming a Costco card member. There is only one page, and it mainly details the types of cards one can purchase. I think this is a weakness, since Costco.com is logically the place one would visit to discover information about store.

The site has little information about the products and merchandise that they carry in their stores/warehouses. If someone was wondering what Costco offers, they would need to visit their nearest location. The site has some overlap with what their stores offer, but not complete overlap. For instance, the stores are predominantly taken up with food and beverage goods. The site does sell food and beverages (wines), but these are marketed as premium goods.

The web site does include a wide variety of goods, most of which are available in the store, but are more prominently on display on the web site. The "Travel", "Decor" and "Funeral" sections of the site contain much more information than is available at the store. The web site also offers greater variety in most of the non-food-and-beverages sections. Most of the stores can't afford to have everything displayed on the floor - however, the web site can list what they sell, and can then ship a product to you that may not be available at your local Costco.

Consistency of Design:

The design of the site is very consistent. The screen is always white background, with black text. Every interior page has the same navigation bars available at the top of the screen. When one clicks on a general sections (i.e., "Decor"), at the top of the main section of the web page is a box that displays "featured items," and underneath this is a box titled "featured categories" [I did not notice this until I began this review of the website, but the titles of the web pages are in lower case. Design-wise, I would prefer that Costco would use uppercase initial letters, but it's a small complaint.]

On each page, then, is a listing of all the subcategories for that particular section, in this example, "Decor." Sometimes the subcategories are also the "featured categories," but they are not always in the same order. In both the "featured items" and "featured categories," both text and an image are used to link the page to an interior page. This is a nice way to advertise the merchandise, but sometimes the photos are not very descriptive of the product (i.e., the photo for "Custom Blinds/Shutters/Shades," in which two women are sitting on a couch, and I assume, are looking over shade options.)

Ease of Navigation:

One of the things I love about Costco.com is that they do not hide the hierarchy of the web site. I like to know the name of the page I'm visiting, as well as the higher levels of the web page that helped direct me to the specific page. It makes it easier to move back and forth through the web site. Costco displays the hierarchy at the top of the page, underneath the main navigation bars.

It is also very easy to navigate back to home from any interior page. The Costco.com logo is also a link back to the main page. Most of the category names are concise and clear in meaning.

I think that this is overall a very good website design, with some very minor content issues.

No comments: