10 Easy Steps to a “Horrible” Ecommerce Site
Jason Chance, a contributor at sitepoint, manages the day to day business operations of numerous e-commerce sites and consults to small businesses on developing online selling strategy. Over the years he has critiqued numerous e-commerce site and seen the best and worst.
The following humourous and very sarcastic tips should be followed if you want to create a website that won’t work.
1. Use your E-commerce software’s default layout
Whatever shopping cart you use, the “stock” or default look is fine. After all, if it wasn’t the best layout of all time, why would they distribute it as “stock” in the first place?
2. Don’t use Thumbnails
Why would you want to speed up load times for slow connections, or make your product shots 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.
3. Don’t optimize your Images in Photoshop
Optimizing your images in Photoshop or some other image editing program takes time — your valuable time. Leaving pictures at their original, huge dimensions and making the customer download 3MB of images for each page in your site takes time too — the pesky customers’ time. Everybody knows customers love to wait to buy your products.
4. Don’t smooth the Checkout Process
People love filling out 8 pages of forms before they can buy stuff. Better yet, add in a couple more pages to surprise the customer just when they think they’re finally through! You really do need the customer’s age, gender, and the name of his first-born son before you can sell him your hand-painted dishrags.
5. Ignore the Market you’re “Targeting”
Sure, there are 50,000 computer stores online, but yours is going to be the best! Market research is for people who don’t know what they want to sell, right? You never researched for a term paper in high school and you passed. Why should an online business be any different?
6. Don’t add an SSL Certificate
All that junk 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.
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.
8. Completely leave out Product Descriptions
All your customers need is a browser-resized, jagged picture of your product. They don’t need to know its features, limitations, or comparisons to other products.
9. Add Flash. Lots of it. Throw in some Java, too.
Flash intros rock. Add two of them, and make sure you don’t put one of those annoying “skip intro” links at the bottom. Heck, if you did that, nobody would get the chance to experience your Uncle Joe’s mediocre Flash skills. When you finally do let the three customers who are willing to sit through your tedious intros into your store, make sure you have a Flash product menu, a Flash header, and random Flash buttons all over the page. Page animations and moving text equate directly to quality and usability, and don’t you ever forget it!
10. Never post your Address or Phone Number
Customers never want to get a hold of you: that’s why they buy online!