I’m absolutely loving the new Nordstrom.com, launched over the weekend. They’ve dramatically simplified navigation on the homepage, offering the user the choice of Department, Brand, or Conversation:

The main content in the center offers a flash-driven set of vignettes, allowing the Nordstrom team the ability to set up editorially driven, fashion magazine style interactions which lead directly to shopable category pages.

The Department navigation menu cascades nicely once you’re in a primary department (for example, once you’re in Women’s, all the subcategories fan out to the right, including the related content and other non-catalog links):

They’ve also really highlighted the community aspects on the new site, elevating “conversation” to the level normally reserved for the primary shopping links, and bringing together on the conversation home page a series of stories, blog posts, net-a-porter style look books, Twitter feeds, and Facebook links.

While some of the comments on Nordstrom’s Facebook page and in the “Change is Good” vignette, where the redesign is described, suggest that not everyone is in love with the new look, I think it is an excellent step forward into next-generation ecommerce, moving beyond the traditional storefront into something more editorial and community driven, while retaining the easy ability to transact. (Which Optaros refers to as the convergence of Content, Community, and Commerce).

Kudos also to Nordstrom for not just focusing on the front-end of the shoppers’ experience, but thinking through to fulfillment and customer service. As explained in a New York Times article today, Nordstrom has also changed how its systems track inventory for online shoppers:

. . . Say that a shopper was looking at a blue Marc Jacobs handbag at Nordstrom.com. She could see where it was available at nearby stores, and reserve it for pickup the same day.

More significant, if the Web warehouse was out of that bag, it did not matter. Inventory from Nordstrom’s 115 regular stores is also included. Maybe there was just one handbag left in the entire company, sitting forlornly in the back of the Roosevelt Field store — it would be displayed online and store employees would ship it to the Web customer.

What Nordstrom did on its Web site — displaying stock from both the Web warehouse and its stores all at once, was unusual. And that, said Jamie Nordstrom, president of Nordstrom Direct, drove “some pretty meaningful results.”

One of the keys to successful multichannel retail continues to be finding ways for the multiple channels to cooperate, leveraging the strengths of each, rather than competing with each other. Allowing visibility from the web into store inventory, and enabling the stores to ship to web customers directly, is an excellent way to drive an improved customer experience while also maximizing the overall opportunity to sell products.