Hot Tips for Deploying a Successful e-Commerce Web Site

By Jim Schibler

As companies rush to establish e-Commerce web sites,
many are overlooking some of the most important factors that make the difference between success and failure.

Monty Swiryn, President of Cuesta Technologies, has been building web sites since
the early days of the web. He shared his insights with a full-house crowd at
the Marketing SIG on February 14th, 2000. (These concepts still apply today.)
Several of the points seemed so self-evident that many of us might never consider
them to be issues. Yet the web abounds with sites that have significant problems — problems
that cause shoppers to go elsewhere. Monty laid out 10 simple guidelines for
building a successful site, and illustrated his points by going live to real-world
web sites to show what works and what doesn't.

1. First Impressions Count.

Your
home page establishes your image — make sure it's the right one. Choose
a look that's clear, fresh, and attractive. Avoid cluttering the page with too
much information or too many links, a mistake made by many news, office supply,
and computing-related sites.

2. Don't Alienate Customers with Technology

If
your stunning multimedia opening sequence makes prospects wait 20 seconds
or more before they get a chance to buy from you, is that really helping
you reach
your goal? What about the visitors who only have a 28.8 K modem connection
-- is a visit to your site so punishing that it will never happen twice?
With some
sites, if you don't have a Flash Player, you don't even see the company
name on the home page! Other examples Monty showed included a major
corporation
whose web site requires you to download a *.PDF file to see the ingredients
of their
hamburgers, and a haircut chain whose white-on-black format causes their
locations listing to print as a blank page.

3. Use Appropriate Technology.

Plenty of web
sites fail to do simple things that they really should, like invoking a pop-up
window when the user requests help rather than switching the whole page.
Another familiar example is the "now you see it, now you don't" form that forgets
all the information you painstakingly entered if you take a side trip to figure
out what one of the fields is requesting, or to check the privacy policy (something
that should be present on every e-Commerce site). Many sites fail to validate
user entries, and thus are guaranteed to collect garbage. For a model of a well-done
site, Monty cited BonusPoint.com, whose forms approach he finds elegant. Monty
spent several minutes discussing why using cookies (small files written to the
user's disk) to track user activities is inelegant at best. Because of privacy
concerns, many users refuse cookies or set their browsers to prompt before accepting
cookies. Many web sites cause these prompts to appear a dozen times or more before
displaying a page; some won't even let you see the home page unless you accept
a cookie. Monty pointed out that cookies are easy to implement, but cannot store
much information and are not a very robust way to track users. He recommended
using an opt-in registry of users, and using a database on the server side to
do any necessary tracking.

4. Create Easy, Intuitive Navigation.

Many sites now
have dynamic pop-up menus. If designed carefully, these can be useful,
but many sites use them simply to pack more choices into the same space.
Some even use
multi-level pop-ups that only a Nintendo junkie could effectively navigate.
Monty recommends keeping menus simple; you should be able to easily get
to the information
you want in just two or three clicks. If users need a site map to get around,
your site's navigation is too complex. Provide visual feedback (such as
menu text color changes) that help users keep track of their current
location. Avoid
the "you are here" syndrome; don't put an active link to the current
page on the current page.

5. Make It Fast and Easy to Find and Order Products.


Shopping on many sites is inconvenient, because users have to visit too
many pages to select items, specify styles and quantities, and check
out. A pet supply
e-shop forces a page refresh every time any attribute of an item is selected,
which bogs down the selection process. A clothing site returns you to the
store entrance after you add an item to your cart (would you put up with
this in a
physical store?) One of the biggest e-tailers on the Web has a 5-page checkout
procedure that gives visitors plenty of time to back out of the deal.

6.
Implement Secure Order Processing.

E-Commerce is new, and people are
justifiably concerned
about giving out credit-card information (recalling the eBay hack-in).
Most sites use SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) to safeguard sensitive transmissions,
but what
about security beyond the initial transmission? Since the sensitive data
need to be transferred to the order processing system anyway, Monty
recommends moving
them off the web server as soon as possible -- within minutes -- to minimize
the amount of information a hacker might be able to access. Naturally,
off-line systems must have adequate security technologies and procedures
in place.

7.
Make Maintenance and Updating Fast and Easy

Changing a price shouldn't require
a programmer. Marketers should be able to quickly and easily make changes to
everything in an on-line catalog, and set up special promotions, without any
outside help.

8. Track Visitors and Get Reports

Find out which parts of your
site are working well and which are not, but don't violate customer privacy
in the process. Implement a tracking scheme that does not rely on cookies;
you can
then advertise "we don't use cookies" the way some Chinese restaurants
boast "no MSG". (Caution: Dynamic IP addressing can make tracking user
addresses difficult. A visitor registration system is probably the most robust
approach.)

9. Build Customer Relationships

Make every visit to your site a pleasant,
rewarding experience -- even visits that do not result in immediate sales.
Let users opt-in for mailings; don't force unwanted choices on them.
Guard their
privacy zealously. Honor your visitors, and they'll be more likely to reward
you with their business. 10. It Costs More to Do It Wrong. Although creating
a winning e-Commerce site may entail some more up-front cost, the cost of not
getting the leading position in your market space is far higher. Don't get "Amazoned".

# # #

By Jim Schibler

senior technical marketer and co-chair of the
SD Forum Marketing SIG.

Jim can be contacted via

jimschibler@home.com

Return to Library of Business Information