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10.31.05
How To Make A Horrible eCommerce Site
 By
Jason Chance
As a frequent visitor to forums where people ask for critiques of their new ecommerce sites, I have seen the best and the worst of small business web development.
The first 1000 posts or so, I was helpful, kind, and supportive when gently pointing out the developer's site issues and how they could make their site "the best it could be". Funny thing though- I found out that doesn't really work. Site after posted site, I see the same errors in judgment and design. This is now my standard advice to every budding website entrepreneur.
1. Leave the layout stock
Because after all, if it wasn't the best layout of all time then why did they distribute it as "stock" in the first place? Never mind that your site will look like every other lazy jerk who decided that product presentation was overrated. Never mind that it has no flow, coherence, or style. And totally forget that it makes you look like some high school kid in their basement trying to take your money and run.
Lack of design talent? We understand. After all, if you could make nice websites, you wouldn't be trying to sell whatever it is you make online- You would be selling nice websites. Never mind that you can get ready made, beautiful drop in templates from sites like Template Monster- some even custom made for your cart platform- for less than $200.00. You picked a FREE cart, and by god it's going to be free if it kills you (or your chances for success). Those people that say you have to spend money to make money are all full of crap, right?
2. Don't use Thumbnails
Why would you want to speed up load times for slow connections, or make your pictures look better? Good looking images are the sign of professionalism and class, and you surely don't want your site to have either of those. Sure, successful shop owners say better images sell more products, but you don't have to listen to those people. After all, what does a successful shop owner know that you don't?
Never mind that every cart on the planet either has the ability to use thumbnail images built in or a free and easy to install contribution that handles them beautifully. Keep posting your 800k images to your site, and laugh at those people who talk about "Site optimization" and "load times".
3. Don't optimize your images in Photoshop
Optimizing your images in Photoshop or another image editing program takes time- Your valuable time. Just leaving them huge and making the customer download 3MB of images for each page in your site takes time too- The pesky customer's time. Everybody knows customers love to wait to buy your products. Play a game! See how big you can make your images, see how long your load time suffers, and then see how your conversion rates fare!
Challenge yourself to approach dialup speeds over your cable modem using your stellar layered image design- I'm sure your customers will love it.
4. Don't smooth out the checkout process
People love clicking through 8 pages of forms they have to fill in before buying stuff. Better yet, add in a couple more pages and hoodwink the customer just when they think they are finally through! Sure, you need the customer's age, gender, and the name of their first born son to sell them your custom hand painted dishrags. Make it as hard as you can for the customer to actually complete a sale and pay you money because that's how you can tell if a customer is truly dedicated (or if they love pain).
5. Ignore the market you are going to sell in
Sure, there are 50,000 computer stores online, but yours is going to be better! Market research is for people who don't know what they want to sell, right? You couldn't research for a term paper in high school and you passed, so why should an online business be any different? Don't invest time or money in unique products or services, and don't even think of developing some sort of unique selling proposition. Just bang out a site with the exact same products as your competition, only make yours more expensive, lesser known, and harder to deal with!
6. Don't add an SSL certificate
All that crap about customers "Caring about their privacy" and being "Worried about identity theft" is unfounded. Just ask my friend "John" from Indonesia. Hey, by the way, he has $30,000,000.00 he wants to send you- he just needs your credit card number along with your name and billing address.
Never mind that SSL certificates enable the 128bit encrypted tunnel between the customers computer and your payment processor- All that stuff can just be sent plain text across the internet. SSL certificates cost money, and you are on a budget. Sure, the customer can sue you after your website is responsible for their identity theft, but that's not very likely to happen. After all, you treat your customers like they are stupid and their personally identifiable information is worthless, so they probably don't have the smarts to hire a lawyer to sue you into the poor house. After all, $50 is a lot of money for security and peace of mind!
7. Don't add Terms of Use, Privacy, or Conditions of Sale statements
Some might say that customers like to know who they are dealing with, but those people are full of it. Customers don't care about your return policies, what to do if they receive a broken product, or what to do if the size they ordered is wrong.
Read the rest of the article.
About
the Author:
Jason Chance is the Online Product Manager for a company that manufactures specialty fire fighting chemicals and equipment.
He maintains www.jccommerce.com and offers free advice for SMB owners and online professionals. |
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