Ten E-Commerce Mistakes

[HairyTroll]

This article explains the Ten E-Commerce Mistakes (http://www.paulgraham.com/mistakes.html).

Comon sense perhaps, and geared more towards large sites but useful nonetheless. It does have some nuggets that relate directly to the indie vs large publisher.

"As a rule of thumb, a business will do well on the Web if it could prosper next door to Wal-Mart. There is no physical distance on the Web: you are next to Wal-Mart. So if you are just selling a smaller selection of the same products, you don't have a chance.

How do you succeed? Specialize. There are thousands of profitable niches that the big players don't have the time to focus on: skateboard wheels, organic seeds, antique watches, you name it. The key point is to choose a niche that is the right size for you."

[Morphecy]

Good article. Some common truths which are always good to keep in mind. I'd like to add few more E-COMMERCE MISTAKES:

11) Keep your website meaning a big secret

It's awful to see how many websites don't understand that you should tell RIGHT away why you exist and what is the meaning of your site / company. People may check out few pages (at top, if site looks good..) but if they don't know what you are offering there's no way they are going to try/play/buy it.

12) Forget KISS

KISS - "Keep it simple, stupid." I often see pages with fancy technologies, new 3 letter words and lots of big figures and thousands of options to go.

If you want your customer to play your game, make it easy for him. If you want him to buy it, make it easy for him. If you want them to contact you, make it easy.

And please don't add all that jargon and all those links to the first page. Please.

[Cogin]

5. A Dynamically Generated Site

This is outdated I think. At least google checks all kind of pages.

[tentons]

This is something which is subtle. I don't consider it obvious, anyway (maybe because I'm used to "signing up" at web sites):


3. Obstacles to Shopping

The single biggest mistake in e-commerce was probably one made by Wal-Mart. For their first two years online, they made visitors create an account, with a user id and a password, just to put something in a shopping basket.

That kind of obstacle stops shoppers like a concrete wall. Most people who put an item in their shopping basket are still just browsing. They are not committed to buy. If you put a big obstacle in their way that early, they'll just leave.

[Coyote]

Getting people to sign up so you can track them and continue to market to them is definitely a high priority. But trying to force them into doing that is bad news.

[Jak]

11) Keep your website meaning a big secret

It's awful to see how many websites don't understand that you should tell RIGHT away why you exist and what is the meaning of your site / company. People may check out few pages (at top, if site looks good..) but if they don't know what you are offering there's no way they are going to try/play/buy it.

Reminds me of HuhCorp (http://www.huhcorp.com/) :)

-edit- Hey I just realized this is my first post here at the new forums. :D

[MattInglot]

This is outdated I think. At least google checks all kind of pages.

Definitely very outdated. It's not very practical to have a site that isn't dynamically generated, especially due to the nature of modern online stores. Amazon.com is very dynamic and it certainly doesn't have problems with search engines. This advice wasn't entirely accurate in 1997 either though. It's possible to make dynamic pages that appear to search engines as static pages using tricks like URL rewriting. http://download.lizardsoft.com/CustomBar_trial_100_setup.exe for example actually calls a PHP script! :)

[Morphecy]

This is something which is subtle. I don't consider it obvious, anyway (maybe because I'm used to "signing up" at web sites):

Well - I guess the idea is also about this: "It's common sense: don't make people jump through hoops in order to give you money." (pretty much the same as KISS strategy.)

Oh - and #5 is definitely outdated. Google caches dynamic pages to their archives so no worry about that (man, last night just before going to sleep I remembered that "hey, this dynamic stuff is baloney - gotta come back here and inform that" but I guess you guys got here first...