E-commerce

Solid piece from the legendary Tim Ash about pre-checkout actions to stop people leaving – generally, all under a retailer’s control via content management. 1. Fix On-Site Search 2. Cut Down on Your Navigation Categories 3. Place Trust Symbols Where They’ll Decrease Anxiety 4. Give Visitors a Reason to Act Soon Simple.

We found a rewarding read of an interview with e-commerce veteran Michael Ross (founder of Figleaves). It’ll take 5 minutes, but here’s some inspiring excerpts: What’s important moving forward? “On the horizon what I expect to see is retailers getting the basics right, so the next big thing is lots of little things. Having the right products, [Read more]

It’s time to wrap up our weblog for another year, but just in case you have missed anything, we’ve created this handy list of our 11 most popular posts covering e-commerce best practice, great stats, navigation, SEO, and loads more….The data is drawn from Google Analytics and based on page views.   1. SEO in [Read more]

We came across this valuable summary on e-consultancy about current techniques & approaches to improving conversions. Read the whole article, but here’s a summary: 1. Have a FREE delivery proposition 2. Provide a USP bar in your site-wide header 3. Quick access to both new in and sale items from the primary navigation 4. Have [Read more]

When discussing website design we naturally  focus on the homepage. In reality, the majority of your customers who come from search engines will be directed straight to your landing pages, category pages or product pages. The effectiveness of the different pages deeper within the site is vital to persuading these browsers into buying customers. How [Read more]

I was recently asked to comment on my views how online retailers should “merchandise” their websites. The gist of my response was as follows. From experience gained by working with over 300 retailers over the past 10 years, the key issues around developing online sales are in the following areas: Development of brand offline Having [Read more]

Readable interview with Marc Andreesen, Netscape Founder and now VC. Here’s a few highlights: “Most of the people in the world still don’t have a personal computer, whereas in three to five years, most people in the world will have a smartphone…. If you’ve got a smartphone, then I can build a business in any [Read more]

We are pleased to re-print here an article (which appeared in Catalogues & Ebusiness) which sets out some easy-to-implement principles about how to organise the products on your website and what mechanics you can employ to help your visitor find them. Getting visitors around an online shop is surely one of the biggest challenges of [Read more]

Interesting piece in Smashing Magazine about understanding the personae of your visitors and producing the right tone/content for different types of visitor. “Product pages for e-commerce websites are often rife with ambitions: recreate the brick-and-mortar shopping experience, provide users with every last drop of product information, build a brand persona, establish a seamless check-out process. [Read more]