Ecommerce Blog

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Original post by Om Malik

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Original post by Kevin Kelleher

No eCommerce company in existence would ever set any volume of sales as ‘enough.’ There will always be another deal to close and another deal to make, so long as you know how to work with your market …

Original post by default@goarticles.com (Ronaldo Rick)

For one reason or another, it’s very likely that the operations of your eCommerce company is still some ways away from perfect. There’s almost always those one or two things that you overlooked or did…

Original post by default@goarticles.com (Ronaldo Rick)

Some online retailers mistake eCommerce web design as just for the sake of looking pretty, hence the lack of attention that they give to it. What those e-tailers don’t know is that a good design can q…

Original post by default@goarticles.com (Ronaldo Rick)

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Original post by Stacey Higginbotham

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Original post by Om Malik

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Original post by Om Malik

This is the third installment of a 4 part series on mobile commerce design and usability:

Part 1: Home Pages and Navigation
Part 2: Search and Category Pages
Part 3: Product Pages and Cart Summary
Part 4: Forms and Checkout

This series is based on a review of 10 mobile ecommerce sites: Best Buy, Target, Sephora, Moosejaw (old and new design), Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Sears2Go, Ralph Lauren and Tickets.com. (Links point to mobile versions of each site)

Product Pages

Though you can access e-stores on any smartphone, product pages on mobile optimized sites are much more usable, as you can see below:

Product Descriptions

While stripping down images and unnecessary navigation on home pages is a good idea on mobile sites, keep in mind the importance of content in the online buying experience:

• 77% are “very to somewhat” influenced by the quality of content (descriptions, copy, images and tools) when deciding to purchase from an online retailer
• 79% “rarely or never” purchase a product without complete product information
• 76% believe content is insufficient to complete research or purchase online “always,” “most often” or “some of the time”
• When faced with incomplete information, 72% go to a competitor or research further

Source: e-tailing group, 2007

The best online stores provide rich product descriptions, multiple image views, image zoom, review content and even product comparison tools. While it may not be optimal or even possible to include everything from the online store into the mobile site, care should be taken that product information presents the key benefits of the product/brand/make/model.

Above is a product page for an HDTV on Best Buy’s ecommerce store. The same product page on its mobile site:

The Best Buy example is concise, but if the mobile site is to be used for product research, is this enough information to “sell” the product? Will customers understand the jargon of HDMI inputs, aspect ratio and piano key black cabinet?

Customers also want as seamless an experience as possible. If you won their loyalty through a usable and content-rich website, it’s important to meet expectations on mobile devices also.

Be careful that product descriptions don’t display as run-on paragraphs. Moosejaw ditched its squished descriptions (left) in its redesign (right):

The old site suffered from several problems, HYPN OLV probably describes the color - but it’s not obvious what it means. The click-to-call and add to cart buttons were way too close together, too easy to tap the wrong one on a touch-screen. And the Zoom Prod. Image call-to-action at the end of the paragraph doesn’t look like a link. The new site looks and feels more like the regular Moosejaw site, and its descriptions include the quirky Moosejaw personality. The click-to-call link and and multiple images are easier to tap for touch-screen users.

Target takes advantage of bullet points to present an easy to scan snapshot of product specs:

You can even send product details to yourself via text message.

SearҀGo allows you to read an intro to the description and expand for more detail if you wish. This removes the burden for folks that hate to scroll while presenting enough information to satisfy researchers:

Sephora and Sears link to ratings and reviews right at the top of the product page:

Be careful with tables, they often force the user to scroll horizontally and sometimes both horizontally and vertically to view them, like Ralph Lauren on the iPhone:

Moosejaw allows customers to expand and contract reviews, which minimizes scrolling and page load time:

Images

Considering 77% are “very to somewhat” influenced by the quality of content including images and tools, quality imagery should not be skimped on. Target, Ralph Lauren and Sears show large images by default, and Moosejaw offers alternate image views. Obviously, you can expect better conversion with better images.

Calls to Action

Avoid stacking calls to action like “Add to Cart,” “Add to Wishlist” and “Continue Shopping” for touch-screen users. Leave some space between buttons, or place them side by side instead:

Cart Summary

Best Buy, Sephora, Target and Moosejaw don’t support mobile checkout. Of the sites that did, here are some highlights:

Ralph Lauren and Sears both allow cart editing, and Barnes and Noble allows you to move items to a wishlist. Surprisingly, Amazon doesn’t have a cart summary page - it jumps right to a sign-in screen.

Ralph Lauren confirms the item is in stock and highlights that free shipping is honored for mobile purchases. Sears offers shipping or in-store pickup options, but disables store pickup when it’s not available for a product. The best feature is Sears’ security icon on its cart button - as I mentioned in last week’s Multichannel 2.0 webinar, fear of security is a major roadblock to actually completing mobile purchases.

Tickets.com is interesting, its business is unique and one aspect of ticket purchasing is a time limit before the tickets are returned to stock if you don’t complete the purchase. You also rarely see a captcha in an ecommerce checkout, but the ticketing industry is more vulnerable to shady activity than other retailers. Unfortunately this captcha is difficult to decipher.

Next post we’ll cover highlights from the checkout process and forms on mobile commerce sites.

You may also like these similar posts:

• Mobile Commerce Usability: Search and Category Pages
• Mobile Commerce Usability: Home Pages and Navigation
• How Top Retailers Show Product Images
• Reducing Customer Anxiety About Products on Product Pages
• Webinar Recap: Holiday Wish List for Mobile Commerce

Original post by Linda Bustos

Function-wise, eCommerce website design is very similar to planning and designing a brick and mortar store. It’s ultimate goal is to make buying as easy and simple as possible so as to encourage peopl…

Original post by default@goarticles.com (Ronaldo Rick)

Can we just head this trend off at the pass? It seems that Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, at their “All Things D” conference announced the beginning of the Web 3.0 era.

That’s ridiculous.

And I’m not the only one to think so.

Short aside: It’s interesting that neither Kara nor Walt show up very often on friendfeed, which is the best example of the 2010 Web right now. Kara Swisher has made a total of five comments there. Walt is even worse, doesn’t bring any items in there, and only has six comments. How can you know what the 2010 Web is, if you don’t use it and don’t participate in it?

The Web does NOT have version numbers. Naming what was going on in the last eight years “Web 2.0″ did us all a large disservice (Tim O’Reilly did that, mostly to get people to see that there was something different about the Web that was being built in 2000-2003 than what had come before).

But by naming it a number, I believe it caused a lot of people and businesses to avoid what was going on and “poo poo” it as the rantings of the new MySpace generation (which was just getting hot back then).

See, the Web changes EVERY DAY and a version number just doesn’t do it justice. Think about today, we saw Microsoft announce a major new update to its search engine, named “Bing,” that turns on next week and is already getting TONS of kudos. Seriously, in the rental car shuttle today a guy I met said the demo he saw at Kara and Walt’s conference was “awesome.”

Also today was Google’s Wave, which caught everyone by surprise and which sucked the oxygen out of Microsoft’s search announcements. Check out all the reports that I liked from around the world this morning.

But, back to the theme of this post. There IS something going on here. I covered it a few weeks ago.

The things that are happening are NOT just Twitter and search. Here, let me recount again what is making up the 2010 Web:

1. Real Time. Google caught the Wave of that trend today BIG TIME.
2. Mobile. Google, again, caught that wave big time Wednesday when it handed Android phones to everyone at its IO conference.
3. Decentralized. Does Microsoft or Twitter demonstrate that trend? Not really well.
4. Pre-made blocks. I call this “copy-and-paste” programming. Google nailed it with its Web Elements (I’ll add a few of those next week).
5. Social. Oh, have you noticed how much more social the web is? The next two days I’m hanging out on an aircraft carrier with a few people who do social media for the Navy.
6. Smart. Wolfram Alpha opened a lot of people’s eyes to what is possible in new smart displays of information.
7. Hybrid infrastructure. At the Twitter Conference this week lots of people were talking about how they were using both traditional servers along with cloud-based approaches from Amazon and Rackspace to store, study, and process the sizeable datasets that are coming through Twitter, Facebook, and friendfeed.

So, why doesn’t a version number work for these changes? Because they don’t come at us all at once. A lot of these things have been cooking for years. The Internet makes iteration possible. Tomorrow will be better on the Internet than today. In the old world of software you’d have to wait for the compilers, then you’d need to distribute tons of CDs or disks. That no longer needs to be done.

The idea that we have a version for the Web is just plain ridiculous. It makes the innovations we’re implementing too easily dismissed. How many times have you heard that “Twitter is lame?” I lost count 897 days ago.

Now, is using a year number, like what I’m doing, better? Yes. It gets us out of the version lock. And it makes it clear to businesses that if you are still driving around a 1994 Web site that it’s starting to look as old and crusty as a 1994 car is about now. Executives understand this. It’s a rare executive who drives an old car around. Most like to have the latest expensive car to get to work in.

Same with the Web. Calling it the “2010 Web” puts an urgency into what’s happening. If your business isn’t considering the latest stuff it risks looking lame or, worse, leaving money on the table. Just like driving a 1994 car risks looking lame or, worse, breaking down a lot more often than a newer car.

Is the year metaphor perfect? No, I’m sure there are a few things wrong with it. For one, if you want to host a conference based on the “trend” you’ll have to change your conference name every year. That costs money, which is why conference companies like to have more stable trends that they can exploit for a few years, at least.

Also, there are some clear “eras” in the Web, so I could see wanting to suggest that we’re in the third era of the Web, but I’ve been studying this for the past eight years and calling the second era “Web 2″ actually held us back because mainstream users didn’t think anything was happening in the past few years and Web 2.0 became a useless phrase anyway.

Anyway, can we use year numbers to describe the Web now? It’ll make it easier to evangelize the modern world to businesses. We’re entering the 2010 Web, that’s what I’m exploring. Calling the Web a version number is for people who don’t really understand, or participate in, what’s going on here. Kara and Walt, you gotta do better here.

Original post by Robert Scoble

Can we just head this trend off at the pass? It seems that Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, at their “All Things D” conference announced the beginning of the Web 3.0 era.

That’s ridiculous.

And I’m not the only one to think so.

Short aside: It’s interesting that neither Kara nor Walt show up very often on friendfeed, which is the best example of the 2010 Web right now. Kara Swisher has made a total of five comments there. Walt is even worse, doesn’t bring any items in there, and only has six comments. How can you know what the 2010 Web is, if you don’t use it and don’t participate in it?

The Web does NOT have version numbers. Naming what was going on in the last eight years “Web 2.0″ did us all a large disservice (Tim O’Reilly did that, mostly to get people to see that there was something different about the Web that was being built in 2000-2003 than what had come before).

But by naming it a number, I believe it caused a lot of people and businesses to avoid what was going on and “poo poo” it as the rantings of the new MySpace generation (which was just getting hot back then).

See, the Web changes EVERY DAY and a version number just doesn’t do it justice. Think about today, we saw Microsoft announce a major new update to its search engine, named “Bing,” that turns on next week and is already getting TONS of kudos. Seriously, in the rental car shuttle today a guy I met said the demo he saw at Kara and Walt’s conference was “awesome.”

Also today was Google’s Wave, which caught everyone by surprise and which sucked the oxygen out of Microsoft’s search announcements. Check out all the reports that I liked from around the world this morning.

But, back to the theme of this post. There IS something going on here. I covered it a few weeks ago.

The things that are happening are NOT just Twitter and search. Here, let me recount again what is making up the 2010 Web:

1. Real Time. Google caught the Wave of that trend today BIG TIME.
2. Mobile. Google, again, caught that wave big time Wednesday when it handed Android phones to everyone at its IO conference.
3. Decentralized. Does Microsoft or Twitter demonstrate that trend? Not really well.
4. Pre-made blocks. I call this “copy-and-paste” programming. Google nailed it with its Web Elements (I’ll add a few of those next week).
5. Social. Oh, have you noticed how much more social the web is? The next two days I’m hanging out on an aircraft carrier with a few people who do social media for the Navy.
6. Smart. Wolfram Alpha opened a lot of people’s eyes to what is possible in new smart displays of information.
7. Hybrid infrastructure. At the Twitter Conference this week lots of people were talking about how they were using both traditional servers along with cloud-based approaches from Amazon and Rackspace to store, study, and process the sizeable datasets that are coming through Twitter, Facebook, and friendfeed.

So, why doesn’t a version number work for these changes? Because they don’t come at us all at once. A lot of these things have been cooking for years. The Internet makes iteration possible. Tomorrow will be better on the Internet than today. In the old world of software you’d have to wait for the compilers, then you’d need to distribute tons of CDs or disks. That no longer needs to be done.

The idea that we have a version for the Web is just plain ridiculous. It makes the innovations we’re implementing too easily dismissed. How many times have you heard that “Twitter is lame?” I lost count 897 days ago.

Now, is using a year number, like what I’m doing, better? Yes. It gets us out of the version lock. And it makes it clear to businesses that if you are still driving around a 1994 Web site that it’s starting to look as old and crusty as a 1994 car is about now. Executives understand this. It’s a rare executive who drives an old car around. Most like to have the latest expensive car to get to work in.

Same with the Web. Calling it the “2010 Web” puts an urgency into what’s happening. If your business isn’t considering the latest stuff it risks looking lame or, worse, leaving money on the table. Just like driving a 1994 car risks looking lame or, worse, breaking down a lot more often than a newer car.

Is the year metaphor perfect? No, I’m sure there are a few things wrong with it. For one, if you want to host a conference based on the “trend” you’ll have to change your conference name every year. That costs money, which is why conference companies like to have more stable trends that they can exploit for a few years, at least.

Also, there are some clear “eras” in the Web, so I could see wanting to suggest that we’re in the third era of the Web, but I’ve been studying this for the past eight years and calling the second era “Web 2″ actually held us back because mainstream users didn’t think anything was happening in the past few years and Web 2.0 became a useless phrase anyway.

Anyway, can we use year numbers to describe the Web now? It’ll make it easier to evangelize the modern world to businesses. We’re entering the 2010 Web, that’s what I’m exploring. Calling the Web a version number is for people who don’t really understand, or participate in, what’s going on here. Kara and Walt, you gotta do better here.

Original post by Robert Scoble

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Original post by Jordan Golson

Starting an online business can be intimidating, but it doesn’t have to. This article will show you that starting an ecommerce business is easier than you may think, if you take the time and find a n…

Original post by default@goarticles.com (Daniel Richard)

Many small business owners have a doubt regarding online marketing. They feel that having an online presence is not important since they only sell their products or services locally. That belief could…

Original post by default@goarticles.com (Sean Hess)