I recently purchased a small video camcorder from Amazon. You would think this to be nothing unusual, so why bother writing about it. Well, I think there are lessons in e-commerce that we can all learn about what they do and how they do it.

Amazing customer service

Ordering on Amazon is a real breeze. The site knows me whenever I’m there and it offers me 1 click ordering. When I ordered my camcorder there was an offer of a free accessory with the purchase. I selected an item and added it, but at the time of checkout it appeared I was going to be charged for it, so I deleted it from my shopping cart. As you can imagine I was a bit disappointed.

I wrote to Amazon and explained what had happened. They were really good and I promptly received a response asking me tell them what the accessory was and they would send it out. There was no questions asked. It was immediate, problem sorted.

But here’s the really amazing part of the story, the camcorder that I ordered on Sunday afternoon, arrived on my desk on Thursday afternoon - half a world away!

What makes e-Commerce amazing

There’s a real proliferation of e-commerce sites around and most are really bad. The reason why they are bad, in my opinion, is because there’s no little thought about:

• the online customer experience
• the back-end processes required to run an online business

It is these things that Amazon excel at, and which other online businesses should emulate as appropriate.

The online customer experience

There is a lot more than just the plain old twaddle you get from web developers and designers who always bring out the same old mantra about usability, without being able to successfully define what they mean. Yes, easy and intuitive use has a lot to do with it, but there is a whole lot more to it than that. It’s about having a ‘psychological integration’ with the user, understanding the triggers that cause a person to buy, and understanding what needs to be done to encourage and support the buying decision.

Once you’ve got their money there is also, it’s also about how you ‘farm’ your customers so they become second time buyers (can be a bit hard when you’re selling only one product!). This means having a system in place whereby you can communicate and keep contact.

Back-end processes

I talk to many businesses wanting to set up a shopping cart or e-commerce component to their business, but many have not thought through whats actually required. Basic questions like, “what happens when you get an order”, or “how do you manage returns” are significant issues that need to be thought through and integrated into the business. Another significant issue is what is the staffing implications for such a venture.

All of these issues must be considered and have developed systems and processes, which ideally should integrate with the back-end functionalities of the website.

e-Commerce done well has a cost
- and a huge potential reward

I was talking with a developer who I trust about e-commerce.  We both agreed that it is a misconception that a e-commerce website is cheap. There is a cost for things to be done properly, and lets face it, you generally only have one opportunity to get it right when you’re selling online.

Don’t get me wrong, doing things online is, in most cases, is a lot less expensive than doing it offline, but it can still cost. I like to look at it in a comparative way. If you were setting up a shop in a mall you would be spending big dollars in order to get a slice of the action, and these costs would be ongoing. The same analogy should be applied to doing things online (after all it is a business channel). You must give it the investment it deserves if you want to make a good chance of it, especially when you consider the rewards online are potentially much greater.

For the life of me, I just can’t understand how so many people can have Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) so wrong for so long. Just to check, it is 2009, right?

SEO Horror

I’ve recently been asked to make some changes to an existing website. How could I refuse, brand new client, well designed website. I then had a look at the source code for the home page, in particular the title, keyword and description tags. My first thoughts were ‘amusing’. The description tag, despite being a long monotonous story was, at a pinch, relatively within the subject area. But the keywords were anything but.

I then proceeded to look at the tags for all the remaining pages of the site, only to discover they were an exact copy of what was on the home page. Oh, and by the way, the title tag, was the name of the company. Well, I suppose that’s better than having nothing there at all.

The big issue for me is that it appears that websites such as this, are sold under the guise of having been optimised. Whereas, optimised they are not.

Using title and description tags to best effect

I’m going to be a bit loose and liberal here, but hope you’ll see the point. The emphasis placed on meta tags is misplaced. From an optimisation perspective the important tags where care needs to be taken are the title and description tags. The title tag should give the reader and idea about what the subject of the page is.

The description tag serves a slightly different purpose. This should be used to invite people to open the page. In some ways this is like and advert that calls the reader on a search engine page to action. And yes, both the title and description tags should contain the appropriate keywords!

Keyword tag

As far as the keyword tag is concerned, none of the major search engines are going to penalise you if you don’t have this tag - in fact they don’t even look at it. That said, I still use the keyword tag, but more as an aid to remind and help me focus on what the exact keywords for that page are.