Ever had one of those “aha” moments with your website? You know, that instant when you suddenly realize you’ve been doing something wrong for a long time? What is your site’s stumbling block? Confusing navigation? Broken links? A tedious checkout? Odds are, there’s something hindering the performance of your website. Since it’s usually challenging to [...]

With all the modern gadgetry of eCommerce, it’s easy to overlook basics such as site navigation. In this post, the first in the 3 Things series, covering 3 innovative ways e-tailers are differentiating themselves, I’ll review some creative navigation strategies. Solution Oriented Navigation Traditionally, both retailers and e-tailers have organized their stores based on product [...]

The following guest post comes courtesy of Linda Bustos from the Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog. After reading the post, be sure to stop by the blog. It’s a great resource for anything pertaining to Ecommerce, usability, or social media. When you run an ecommerce website, you have the potential to sell products to people around [...]

When was the last time took a look at your top exit pages? Odds are, there’s a few pages that suffer from higher than average abandonment rates. Off course, at some point, visitors will leave your site. But why not keep them there as long as possible? Below I’ve listed what I think are the [...]

The ultimate disappointment for a customer is viewing the product page of an item they really want, and finding it’s not available. Recently, I came across several sites that take a unique approach with handling out-of-stock or discontinued items. Example #1: Lancome-USA Makeup retailer Lancome offers an extremely innovative “Since you liked… Now you’ll Love” [...]

Walking out of a theater last night, I struggled to convey to my wife why I didn’t like the movie. “I can’t tell you exactly what they could’ve done better,” I said, “I just know they did it wrong.” Odds are, 99% of the internet population is clueless about good web design, just as I’m [...]

Google has raised the bar. If you misspell a word, it tells you. If you perform a search returning millions of results, they prioritize the results by showing you the most relevant page (usually). Compare that to most internal site search features on eCommerce sites. Not only can they not handle misspellings, they usually to [...]

Ahh the shipping page. The un-welcome step in every eCommerce site’s checkout process. Because many sites fail to answer basic questions such as “how long will it take?” or “how much will it cost?”, many sales are lost at this important juncture. Some research shows that shipping concerns top the list of reasons why people [...]

Speed kills. In the case of website usability, the lack of speed kills. Many have erroneously assumed the advent of high speed internet connections would make website performance optimization irrelevant. On the contrary, it seems as internet connection speeds increase, users simply become more impatient and demand faster browsing. Below, I’ve gathered some simple (and [...]

E-tailers have a lot to learn from traditional retailers. It seems that well-known eCommerce sites get away with atrocious usability mistakes simply because the internet as a shopping medium is growing so fast. Web managers may think that because sales numbers are up they must be doing everything right. For many online stores, nothing is [...]