The WebCredible folks have come up with a set of 8 Rules for using images in your cart. I particularly like rule 2, which suggests that photographs be taken from a variety of perspectives.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Usability suggestions
An excellent list of 21 Cart Usability Best Practices from eCommerce Opimization.
Number ten is an interesting one:
10. Make sure shoppers can easily access their cart contents and that it can easily be modified or adjusted.
A lot of carts (and Zen Cart in particular) don’t have a notion of “editing” an item in the cart; to modify an item in the cart, you need to add a new item to the cart and delete the old one. From a software development perspective I understand why they made this decision (clue: it’s easier), but I’ve always found it aggravating.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
More Top Ten Lists for Cart Designers
Reading the previous post from Marketing Pilgrim reminded me of a couple of other links I had up my sleeve.
- Ten Ways to Minimize Cart Abandonment from BizReport
- Top Ten Mistakes of Shopping Cart Design by Shivashankar Naidu and Barbara S. Chaparro from Wichita University
- Rules for E-Commerce Startups to Live By Part 1 (from E-Commerce News) and Part 2 (from CRM News).
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Usability and Open Source
You can always tell a human factors person, but you can’t tell them much. 
The guys over at Humanized provide some food for thought about designing usability into Open Source applications. My favorite suggestion was the first one:
Get a Benevolent Dictator
Someone who has a vision for the UI. Someone who can and will say “no” to features that don’t fit the vision.
If there isn’t someone on the team whose job it is to say “no,” you’ll say “yes” to everything, and you’ll wind up with bloatware. Having a plug-in architecture (suggestion 4) is the compromise that makes this suggestion workable.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Wow! Lancome.com site updates
This is guided e-commerce taken to the next level. All those cool new Ajax features? They’re using them. Take the site tour and be amazed.
Background: The New York Times gives a brief overview of what’s new in beauty websites (with some discussion of Lancome); Digital Pulp discusses their work on the site.
Monday, October 1, 2007
Poor cart design considered harmful
… to your bottom line. Online customer experience management firm Tealeaf commissioned a poll that found that 87% of people have experienced a problem with an online transaction in the last year. And boy, are people intolerant of problems! The poll report, Reasons for e-Shop abandonment (PDF), says that they will permanently switch to a competitor if they find the site hard to navigate or experience problems on checkout.
Special thanks to Shoshana Deutschkron at Tealeaf for providing this report.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Keyword Stuffing and being banned by Google
Every once in a while some genius will post to a forum about how he’s discovered a “great trick” to boost his Google PR – and it’s invariably white text on white background, setting visibility property, or something similar. Don’t do this. Either Google will catch you themselves, or your competitors will notice and gleefully report you. Google’s Matt Cutts discusses this (and gives a particularly egregious example) on his blog.
