I wish I read this article a year ago....

The Problem With Ecommerce: Don’t Build Your Own Ecommerce Engine

...... The reality is that it would take several man-years to even come close to matching the features that a mature ecommerce application would have.

This article could have saved me a lot of time. I honestly had no idea how difficult rewriting the core code of osCommerce is as I always thought that the real challenge behind designing the perfect site was in the usability and architecture - not the actual coding!

At least now I understand why the state of E-commerce on the web is so backwards. Finding experts in website usability design, online Marketing and Sales, and hardcore osCommerce coding is nearly impossible to do. It has taken about a year for me and all I had to do was find a kick-ass programmer!

I'm not sure if my e-commerce opus was worth the nightmare. While usability design is extremely important, it can only increase your sales linearly. Marketing & Sales are what give you the geometric increases in business. At least I will be getting an e-commerce site 4 generations ahead of my closest competition; compared to my site, they will look like the Taliban.

Google product search soon to seduce online businesses

Say hi to the future of e-commerce and finish your mother’s day shopping at the same time – here comes Google product search. The pieces on the chess board are almost in place. How long do you think it will take Google to align their product search, their checkout, and their various social networking sites? Not long - I guess I will be working for Google soon. :(

As an alternative, I can can choose Yahoo as an employment option - as what ever Google is doing, Yahoo is always a step behind. I mention the possibility of Google checkout and yahoo checkout becoming a best practice for PPC, in a marketing forum. I never thought this would be correct because the rules of e-commerce were changing.

All things considered, I think Google checkout and Yahoo checkout will soon dominate the internet for online transactions. In fact, objects are already in motion. Why else would Google checkout and yahoo checkout be offering free processing until 2008? Price wars are a rookie move – don’t think for a moment that Paypal and Google aren’t aware of the stakes they are playing for.

Don't make your customers think: use blue hyperlinks

Personally, I have always felt that when you choose your sites color scheme, the rule of thumb is to use blue hyperlinks. This is because blue hyperlinks have the highest click through rates. People are conditioned to recognize blue text as a hyperlink – there is no thinking involved, the recognition is immediate.

As Steve Krug said in his famous book - don’t make your customer’s think! While black hyperlinks are as widely recognized as blue hyperlinks – black hyperlinks take a few moments longer to recognize. Whether it is a split second, or several moments: any extra thinking you demand of your customer makes them less likely to trust you. Since lack of trust is a leading reason preventing online purchases, the answer is simple. Don’t make your customer’s think! Use underlined blue hyperlinks.

Creating hyperlinks that boost customer trust

When I was a neophyte to e-commerce; I remember monsterwebdesign telling me that that the best place for your privacy policy to appear is above the fold. But this practice is about as backwards as your Doctor using live leaches to clean an infected wound. Sure it might get the job done; but you aren’t going to win over your customer’s trust – that’s for sure.

By the way, the reason you need to make your policies readily available, is because many customer’s just don’t trust you. Whether it’s with giving you their email address or their credit card information; you need to reassure them. The solution to this problem is not displaying a laundry list of policies above the fold – but by providing the appropriate policy only when a concern becomes relevant.

Example 1) You are selling a product that has a money back guarantee - how should you inform your customer's of your return policy?

-----------------

which looks more professional and straightforward to you?

Example 2) You want to convince your customer that they are safe from being spammed if they give you their email address:

easy

Example 3) You want to assure your customer that it is safe to pay via credit card over the computer. You need to prove to them that some computer hacker living in Norway is not going to intercept their credit card information and then sell their identity online inorder to feed a crystal meth addiction.

easy

As far as dealing with customer concerns; relevant hyperlinks are the way to go. Mark my words, this will be a textbook part of web design in ten years.

Hacker safe logo only good for bad sites

I have been getting lots of questions recently regarding the significance of using a hacker safe logo. In short, a hacker safe logo will only boost your sales if you do a lousy job of reinforcing customer trust during the checkout.




And what signifies a bad site - in the context of hacker safe? If the 'https' found in your browser is the only clue that a purchase is secure.

If you want further elaboration, check out this post I wrote a few months ago.

Exploiting keyword research with relevant marketing

Pimping out low value keywords ain't easy. Finding them is though - all you need is a keyword research tool and a little due dilligence on Google. Once you identify a low competition keyword, with reasonable traffiic, think long and hard if there is any possible way for you to exploit it. Look for keywords that represent desire's or need which can be fullfilled by the benefits of your product. The less the demand for those keywords, the higher your ROI the more fun the challenge is.

For example lets say you are selling auto induction kits (700 keywords a month). Why would you want to compete in that kind of grind? Instead, create an ‘auto air filter’ landing page, and market to 3,600 keywords a month that there is less competition over. But wait, we can take it further still: consider the benefit to gas mileage auto air filters provide your car. Wow! Between gas mileage, mileage, and driving mileage – you have well over 50,000 searches a month. Yes, it is a test of your persuasiveness in constructing a landing page with scent trails – but you have so much to gain and so very little to lose.

Turning traffic into sales

“If you build it, they will come”. Unless you can go back in time to the 90’s, this is flat out wrong. For an e-business to succeed in today’s competitive business environment; you need to have more than just a laundry list of products listed in virtual space. You need products that fulfill a need – your marketing must add value. Easier said than done, right? Actually, it is nearly impossible to add value to a product through marketing alone. That is because there can be no distinction between sales and marketing in today’s e-commerce website.

The most common faux pas I see is when entrepreneurs design an online store, write great (or horrible) copy for each product, and then implement ppc advertising while hoping they will be the next Amazon.com. This is backwards marketing – both literally and figuratively.

Want to know what separates the boy’s from the men? Here is the secret. You figure out your advertising angles first, then you write relevant copy in the form of landing pages. While this is really just bringing relevancy, your most beloved Google will measure each landing page by quality score – so don’t skimp on any of the details.

Got white input fields?

Believe it or not, the color of your fields influences your conversion rate. Usually only by a little though - like by 0.1% Considering that you must first test a multitude of colors to obtain such a result, I do not recommend this tweak for the smaller businesses out there.

That is unless of course your website uses a gnarly color scheme. Every now and then I see a website with a color scheme so deviant, white is a clashing color. Yet they never bother to change the background color of their fields to something else - even when it causes a headache to look at.

Take sketchbagz.com for example. They have a great site design and sell high quality merchandise for artists ( best place to purchase stencils in the U.K. ). However, the artistic look they capture dies as soon as the customer reaches the checkout and gets a migraine.



How do you think field background colors are affecting your online business?

Desigining fixed 800X600 e-commerce sites is an extinct best practice

Times have changed since this was established as a best practice. As few as 5 years ago, 800X600 was the most common computer resolution, used by over 50% of web users. Today that number is closer to 10%, and unlike 5 years ago, it is usually a concession for poor eye sight ( often signifying older users ).

2002 Screen resolution statistics

49% 800X600
38% 1024X768
5 % unknown

2007 Screen resolution statistics (recorded from Taming The Beast)

51.80% 1024×768
12.04% 1280×1024
10.88% 800×600
8.83% 1280×800
3.58% 1152×864

Back in 2002, you could count on the vast majority of internet traffic to sport one of two resolutions: 800X600 or 1024X768. Higher resolutions were too uncommon to even consider. Had higher resolutions of 1280X1024 been a reality five years ago, there is no way that 800X600 would have ever been established as a best practice. The reason? 800X600 fixed width websites look horrible when viewed at 1280X1024. They seem to make use of only 1/3 of the computer screen and make for a painful user experience. It is a given that this will drag down conversion rates (unless you target people with narrow angle glaucoma).

Adaptive width, the new design standard

For the modern online business, you need a site design that looks good in any resolution. Therefore, the new best standard is to use an adaptive width site design that will scale to any resolution. An adaptive width website looks good on any screen size, from 800X600 to 1600X1200.

Second best choice to Adaptive Width?

If designing for an adaptive width is not an option, I would recommend a 1024X768 fixed width design as your next best choice. Why? For one, it is the lesser of two evils. More and more people sport high resolutions of 1280X1024 than low resolutions of 800X600. Hence, a fixed width design of 1024X768 will frustrate less internet traffic than an 800X600 design would. If you need further reason for embracing a 1024X768 design standard, your must indulge in a few assumptions about demographics.

Low resolutions of 800X600, in most cases, signifies users with impaired vision or low income. Assuming poor vision is more common in senior citizens, we can characterize 800X600 browsers to be primarily composed of older users who are statistically less likely to buy online. Compared to high resolution browsers, who have the money and desire to use the newest technology, it seems 1024X768 is a better design standard as far as fixed width is concerned.

Buttons and your Conversion Rate

When people put their OSCommerce stores up for review, the most common way I see them shoot their conversion rates in the foot is with a weak call to action. What is a call of action? Well, if you are selling something, the ‘add to cart’ button is your call of action. If you are trying to obtain email subscriptions, the ‘subscribe’ button would be considered your call to action. But for this article, we are just going to look at how to improve conversion rates through the design and placement of the ‘add to cart button’.

A lot of research has shown that you can increase your conversion rate through a stronger call of action. Think about it, how is someone going to buy something from you if they cannot find the ‘add to cart’ button? Case study after case study has shown that ‘add to cart’ buttons which are more attention grabbing improve a websites conversion rate.

Aside from the product image, the ‘add to cart’ button should be the first thing your visitor’s see. It should be as big as aesthetics permit, and should contrast enough with your site so that it literally seems to pop out at you. It should be above the fold, near the price and product image, and should appear again at the bottom of long product descriptions. A good rule of thumb is to make sure that your call of action can be easily seen to someone who is standing away from the computer on the other side of the room.

If you are currently using a 'buy it now' hyperlink, an annoying graphic, or a button that is subservient to your color scheme - you are losing easy sales. I've seen case studies citing a 300% increase in conversion rates - just by overhauling the 'add to cart' button.

How to use hyperlinks like a kung-fu master

If you want to learn whether your SEO company actually knows a thing or two about marketing, see if they forgot to use embedded hyperlinks. If so, it is a dead give away that your SEO company sucks at what they do. These dinosaurs use to rule Internet marketing, but they started going extinct when a Google algorithm hit them several years ago.

So, if you want to increase your sales, it is up to you to learn how. I can teach you how to raise your conversion rate by crafting hyperlinks like a kung fu master. So read carefully.

Like kung fu, you will learn hyper link usage by watching my examples. Study hard grasshopper!

The wrong way of using hyperlinks (in a random article I wrote)

If you play Texas hold em for large stakes of money, it is imperative you be aware of the various methods a card cheat could employ against you.

• Peeking the top card of the deck or using marked cards
• The second deal
• Engaging in collusion with other players

Wrong! Just because this is what you are used to seeing does not mean anything. Don’t write copy this way. The only way you could possibly make this even more backwards is, god forbid, displaying html URLs’s.

Here is the correct way of using hyperlinks. When you employ this method, you increase the chance someone clicks onto a scent trail which funnels sales and reduces page abandonment rate. Also, if you wish to one day aspire to a black belt in hyperlink usage, you must learn this first. So follow your Sensei.


The responsible way to use hyperlinks

If you play hold em for large stakes of money, it is imperative you be aware of the artifices that can be employed against you. Unless the crooked gambler possesses sleight of hand skill; the hustle is usually simple collusion between a couple players.

Professional card cheats prefer an information advantage obtained through peeking the top card or marking the cards in play. These cheats are difficult to detect as they are often good enough to beat you on the square if they wished to. And they never cheat during the first game.

Some card cheats combine their knowledge of the top card with false dealing to obtain an even greater edge. With knowledge of what the burn card is and with the ability to keep it via second dealing, you are 5 times more likely to make your hand.

You found this second paragraph with the embedded hyperlinks more interesting, didn't you? Good! You are now ready to use hyperlinks as a blue belt.

Tunnel vision and crappy marketing

Marketing impotence really sucks – it leaves the client unsatisfied and humiliates you as a person. For a marketer, there is only one thing to do when you are locked seeing things in one perspective – resign.

Microsoft’s marketing department has not been able to see the big picture since they got those bean bag chairs back in the 80’s. My guess is that this video is a personal attack by some marketing firm.

E-commerce coming to a Myspace profile near you

You are probably either laughing or shaking your head. My first impression was that Newscorp was scrounging around for that extra nickel. But this is not a joking matter. This is online necromancy between e-commerce ans social networking. Who knows what it could mean for the future of e-commerce?

Though your internet marketing firm will tell you different – these are uncharted waters for marketing experts. Understand that while Myspace and Ebay are nothing special by themselves, joining them is going to give birth to a new life form. Experts say that this synergy will ‘leverage the social network’. But I don’t think anyone has even begun to map out all the possibilities that lie in waiting.

So how could leveraging a social network help your e-commerce site? Too illustrate, pretend for a moment that a popular e-commerce platform, such as OScommerce, had a social network of its own to leverage. Certain weaknesses would be turned into strengths. For example, currently many OScommerce stores find difficulty obtaining customer reviews. Not an issue with a social network, as customer reviews would be as inevitable as comments are on Myspace. Plus, you would be getting better reviews that leverage your conversion rate even higher.

When I say that these are ‘uncharted waters’ for internet marketers, I am referring to the hidden opportunities that await to be discovered or exploited. For example, take the under used practice of writing copy tailored for a visitors personality type. Data from a social network could allow an edge in profiling personalities, whether by keywords and click paths or other means entirely. The other side of this coin is the ability for social networks to provide more relevant advertising.

What do you think social networks mean for e-commerce? Something limited to giants like Ebay, or the future of e-commerce?