Three Simple Rules for Improving E-Commerce Sites

Just found this choice post from Dr. Bonny Brown, who is director of research and public services for Keynote Systems, Inc.

Based on his advice, here are three tips for improving your e-commerce offering:

• Poor user experience leads to bad satisfaction. For example, ensure that out of stock items are labelled as such earlier on, to prevent irritation. And capture your errors, preferably with e-mail alerts - customers will be instantly turned off if they see errors or become frustrated with how a site functions.
• Follow the leader - sites like amazon.com are top for a reason, they behave and are optimised for customer satisfaction and higher sales. The process for developing our own e-commerce platform is based on looking at what is working on big online retail sites and making it possible for smaller retailers to achieve the same.
• Get customer feedback - you’ll be suprised what you find when you start asking and listening to what customers say. Make it easy for them to interact with you on your site and find the time to sit down with customers and watch them use your site. What you think is obvious might not be. You may be suprised where customers get stuck, what you thought was easy to use might not be so, and this will be harming your potential sales.

Image credit: silicon.com