Best Practices Review

January 11, 2010 · by Rick Wilson

About a week ago someone on our community forums started a best practices thread and I was getting ready to chime in with what I consider to be one of the most often overlooked and easiest to implement ideas:

Make sure you have a phone number (preferably toll free) in your global header

And then I decided to do something prudent, I checked our own website for this best practice to make sure we were actually doing it, otherwise I would get a large vocal chorus of people pointing out my own web hypocrisy. Lo and behold we weren't doing it and I have thus far withheld my contribution to that list until we get it added.

This led me to writing this blog post and reminding all of us (myself included) of a small handful of fairly easy things to do that can improve your online business and to double check that we're actually doing them on our own sites. Especially if you're a service provider in ecommerce, it's like the cliche' about doctor's families having the worst health, it's very easy to preach to our clients about what to do, yet we never actually get around to doing it ourselves.

I recommend once a year at the very minimum review accepted best practices and see where the low hanging fruit is to implement changes to your own site.

So for 2010 here's my top 5 ecommerce best practices:

Don't hide from your customers. Online shopping has to overcome many of the benefits of shopping offline and one of them is knowing how to get in touch with the person who sold you something. Make sure it's easy and obvious for your customers to reach you if they have any questions or issues. Two of the best ways to do this is with a Live Chat on your site (that is actually monitored) and a toll free phone number clearly marked in your global header.
Make sure you know how your site looks to your shoppers. I've seen this mistake more than I care to imagine, roughly 30% of your shoppers are likely looking at your site in 1024x768, have you designed your site with that in mind? Do all of the critical buying decision buttons show up without scrolling at that resolution? If someone has to scroll to buy, there is a very high probability they won't and just keep going to another site.
Use trust marks to convey safety and security to your shoppers. A/B test after A/B test has consistently shown that trust seals are important to conveying security and safety to your customers. Most site owners however don't display some or all of the trust seals they are already within their rights to show. At a minimum make sure you show your SSL seal or Logo and if you belong to the BBB and have access to their seal it's a good one as well.
Great photos are the secret to great sales online. I'm routinely shocked at the poor quality of photos, mis-sized non optimized photos and lack of zoom or larger photos available often times for very high end products. Photos online are the digital equivalent of picking up and holding a product in the offline world. If you have poor quality photos without multiple angles or zoom, it's like locking up all of your inventory behind a huge glass wall and not letting anyone handle your merchandise before they choose to buy. Make sure you have great photos.
Don't muck up checkout with extra steps or forced accounts. I'm always dismayed at how difficult people make it to checkout once I've decided to purchase. From the Add to Cart button being in a weird non obvious location, to extra account creation steps forced that prolong the checkout, once someone has decided to buy your product you want them to be able to do it in the easiest way possible for them. Personally since I don't believe people like to scroll, I don't like one page checkouts, but a thoughtful 3 or 4 page checkout with progress bars a long the top and all of the buttons clearly marked to guide me through the process. Make sure your website isn't acting as your sales prevention team.

This post is filed under Navigating eBusiness and has the following keyword tags: e-commerce, shopping cart, best practices.