Mega Menus are hands-down the most useful tool for helping users navigate subordinate websites when concerning website design.
eCommerce sites and other online stores are dependent on their menu to best connect with prospective customers. In fact, even online retail behemoths like Amazon, eBay and Alibaba rely heavily on their menus to sustain their ongoing commercial success.
Below, we’ll go over some of the top examples of online companies and what their mega menus look like in action, looking at both dynamic interactions and incredible design details.
Who is helped the most by mega menus?
Mega menus are especially practical if your site contains a lengthy list of subpages and internal menus as they allow you to have material information available on-demand, and not shown all at once, which would undoubtedly overwhelm the customer who sought to look through it.
Mega menus allow you to avoid panning or scrolling when showing all prominent options at once. You can format it to be shown horizontally or vertically, in accordance with your creative industry preferences. Supplemental menu options can be accessed by clicking, tapping or hovering over the relevant icon, so as to spare users visual overload while giving them an intuitive navigation program.
What makes mega menus so convenient for online businesses?
These days, most websites go into great detail when explaining complicated ideas and categories. Therefore, mega menus let users really explore the content of your site intuitively and with ease, helping them find the most relevant information quickly.
Get the most enhanced user experience thanks to mega menus
With literally thousands of available samples of eCommerce websites’ menus to view in action, featuring untold products in hundreds of categories using granular databases which put forth options including product specifications, category data, product reviews and more!
Amazing menu samples
Guests are able to view all categories at once when using mega menus. From there they can scroll onto and then drill-down into the sought after data thanks to incredible connectivity and imagery, simplifying the overall process. Previous ‘fly-out’ menus could not deliver to the same degree.
Get superior eCommerce SEO site indexing with your menu
Search engines don’t have enough resources when it comes to indexing sites and maintaining current records, which can be a challenge when those search engines need to find the links to an indexed site’s content both quickly and efficiently.
With a mega menu, your site gets a clean yet thorough link of links on each page, letting search engines know to produce direct index site content without being required to sift through any number of superfluous words to HTML and Javascript code.
Discover interactive examples of mega menus
Did you know that now is the best time to create a whole set of menus for your online business if you want to stay ahead of the curve? You can do this easily by incorporating the right eCommerce extensions for the relevant online market.
Mega menus are compatible with all major eCommerce platforms, but are especially beneficial if you are operating with the Magento 2 extension. It can enhance menu layouts and really makes your Magento 2 store stand out from the crowd. You can create multi-level menus with a URL or by drag + drop, and you have free reign to include new pages, categories and customized items within your menu. It can also accept any number of colors, background images and labels in HTML and CSS.
Top examples of mega menus in action in 2021
Let’s now see for ourselves some great examples of mega menus as they are used by top global online corporations.
#1 Starbucks
Seattle’s finest, Starbucks is hands-down the most recognizable coffee producer brand on earth. It uses a mega drop-down menu with multiple Calls to Action in its mega menu. Each page has the same width, but differing heights according to a strict standard page grid. It is closely integrated with the overall site design and includes lots of white space and bold text so as to be easily read.
#2 Adidas
Much like Starbucks, Adidas really needs no introduction to speak of. Europe’s largest and most recognized sportswear and sporting goods manufacturer has been providing athletes with gear and sportswear enthusiasts with style worldwide since 1949, and continues to be a market leader to this day.
It features a drop-down mega menu which covers most of the page and vanishes when you move your mouse away from a particular category.
#3 Moosejaw
Moosejaw.com is an outdoor recreation equipment retailer which operates both online and through its 11 physical stores throughout the midwestern United States. It specializes most particularly in equipment for snowboarding, hiking, skiing, rock climbing, and camping, as well as providing styling outdoor apparel.
As for its mega menus, Moosejaw’s website includes a span of different available categories in a highly intuitive arrangement. From there, classification is broken down into gender, age, and product category, as is a quite popular eCommerce menu format.
Note that the menu dropdown shows that the design contrasts with the header and the rest of the website’s content. It’s especially important for all information to be clearly organized with headings distinctly listing which subcategories they include.
#4 Quiksilver
Quicksilver is an Australian retailer focused heavily in the area of athletic attire. Moreover, it is among the top brands for producing equipment and clothes for surfing.
The company website uses a large-scale mega menu which is based around a highly minimalist style in which icons are centered in each page and use bold and capitalized text that really jumps out from the large blank white background.
#5 Walmart
Walmart is among the top superstore retailers in the world, most prominently within the United States, where it is universally recognized as a discount store giant.
At Walmart’s online store, drop-down menus have become a big hit with users as it provides them with a truly unique navigation experience which can be applied on any page within the site.
#6 Estee Lauder
Estee Lauder is known the world over as a top producer of high-end cosmetics, fragrances, skin and hair care products, from the heart of New York City.
In keeping with its image of a chic, sophisticated and subtle yet impactful aesthetic, Estee Lauder uses a simple design style of black text on a white background with big, bold images for its mega menu.
#7 Toys R Us
Who doesn’t have childhood memories of Geoffrey the giraffe inviting you to discover all the latest and greatest new toys and games at your local Toys R Us store? Sadly, the corporation fell on hard times in the mid-to-late 2010s and was forced to close a large number of their brick and mortar outlets in many countries. Fortunately, the company still maintains a tremendous presence in the eCommerce market for children’s toys, clothing, and baby products.
For its mega menu, Toys R Us uses bright colors and both illustrations and animated videos of its products, conveying a sense of playfulness and curiosity to site viewers, all while presented in a convenient drop-down menu
#8 GNC
GNC (General Nutrition Company) is an American-founded, Chinese-owned retailer of health and nutrition related products such as vitamins, supplements, minerals, herbs, sports nutrition and energy products.
The retailer makes its mega menu extra user-friendly by presenting high-demand categories like “Popular Brands” at the top, and sticks to its simple red, white and black text block format to be most visually appealing to viewers.
#9 Evernote
Evernote is among the world’s most popular online note-taking, organizing and task management software companies around.
The California-based software corporation encourages user creativity, allowing them to create notes by drawing, adding text, importing images, audio, saved web content and more. Therefore, the retailer’s mega menu is also designed to pique viewers’ interest with its bright green background on which menus spring up as the mouse rolls over them, producing secondary menu options, and also turning green when selected.
#10 FAO Schwarz
FAO Schwarz is a US-based luxury toy manufacturer featuring one-of-a-kind products like very realistic stuffed animals, state-of-the-art interactive games and incredible costumes for children.
The company website uses a mega menu design that is highly engaging and intuitive, using its signature raw umber color for menu categories and black writing on a white background with easy-to-navigate top to bottom, left to right movement.
Conclusion
As you can see from the examples above, there are as many options for creating a mega menu as there are websites which need them. The challenge remains finding the right format for your particular brand.
Mega menus are an efficient and cost-effective means of displaying multiple categories and navigation options to users in an accessible manner. Get started creating your ideal navigation solution today!
