Web Marketing Analysis of Nflshop.com

Web Marketing Analysis of NFLShop.com

Breadth of product selection, ease of navigation and usability, security levels, previous experiences and the most critical of all, trust, are all key success factors for any e-commerce website to succeed (Ramanathan, 191). The larger the selection of products, the more varied the product customization options, the orders of magnitude more complex the back-end pricing, inventory management, catalog management and distributed order management systems need to be. With these criteria in mind the website NFLShop.com is critiqued through a Web marketing analysis. This is a website that carries a very broad selection of merchandise, much of it customizable to customers' preferences from any team in the AFL or NFL, for immediate purchase online or customization and later shipping.

Web Marketing Analysis of NFLShop.com

The most critical component of any website design is usability that sets the foundation for trust over time (Pearson, Pearson, Green, 816). NFLShop.com has designed the primary navigation to be visual with ease recognition of team insignia and logos throughout the main body of the page. The richer, more detailed catalogs are in the context-sensitive pull-down menus of Shop by Team, Jersey, Men's, Women's, Kids, Hats, Big & Tall, Collectables, Home & Office, Tailgating and DVDs. Usability, to be effective must invite personalizing the online navigation and shopping experience (Pearson, Pearson, Green, 816). In conjunction with usability, the navigation and buying process or series of steps must also be designed to provide for website visitors to laterally move through areas of interest, there must be agility to the design (Kim, Sivasailam, Rao, 344). NFLShops.com has gone through several design iterations to create this level of lateral search and navigation. The focus on creating an agile, easily traversable buying experience also gives the online customer greater autonomy over the massive amount of content on the site. This also works well for NFLShops.com because if the focus on usability, navigation and implied personalization was not as well done the amount of data would be overwhelming.

NFLShop.com is designed for the impulse buy of the loyal fan, and strives to capitalize on team loyalty over its own website's loyalty. This is where the site could improve. It is too focused on team loyalty at the expense of its own website loyalty. This is evident in the very small font and graphics navigation for signing up for the site and for requesting a catalog. As a result, the site must do the majority of its sales purely on impulse purchases.

Despite this shortcoming, the site delivers on the critical success factor of delivering trustworthy content and information assurance (Kim, Sivasailam, Rao, 344). This aspect of the site is what makes it succeed; it makes the site trusted with loyal NFL fans. This catalyst of trust compensates for weaknesses in navigation and the lack of loyalty it is generating for the site itself.