It's pretty easy to know which kinds of sites to trust and which sites not to trust. Even from the basic look of the site: if it's tacky or not, you can decide whether you'd want to buy something from them or not. If there are too many misspellings or other grammar errors, it might be best to steer away from the site as well because obviously they don't see it important to represent themselves in a professional manner. It's a lot easier to trust big names and companies that say they offer security or won't share your information when you plug in your information.
I think online shopping is only going to increase in the future. So many stores offer it, and many even offer online-only products. The only bad thing is the shipping, but sometimes you can make yourself feel better about spending the money if the item is on sale anyway. Lots of times there are even deals on shipping. If environmentalists step in the way of the construction of more shopping malls and land development, I could see the online shopping experience even going virtual and taking over our in-store shopping experience. It could be a holographic experience where you could select and try holographic clothes on yourself. It could also be an online experience where you have a personal avatar who walks through a virtual store and picks up clothes and tries them on. Honestly, that would be really exciting, but I don't think it'll happen for awhile. At most realistically, I would think you would be able to browse a panoramic view of a store. However, I do think online shopping will be even bigger soon and that almost every business will have an online store and the number of customers to make it worth while.
Three examples of E-Commerce sites, varying in design, function, and subject are: As Seen on TV, Cheese Supply, and Threadless.
I looked at the As Seen on TV site and immediately thought: this is so accurate. When one thinks of As Seen on TV products, they probably think sleazy, tacky, cheap quality, etc. It's pretty much the same impression when you look at the website. At least it's consistent, right? If you go to the site knowing exactly what you want and what it's called, you won't have too much trouble, but if you want to browse, you will find this site to be very lacking because it's so busy and unorganized. Personally, I would not want to shop on this site.
When I looked at cheesesupply.com, I was kind of saddened because a website about cheese has so much more potential than this site exemplifies. By name alone, I expected the site to be more "surplus store" organized. Really, the only way to find what kind of cheese you're looking for is to go by category (not even cheese name!) and then narrow down or to do a search if you know the name. The nature of the site is impersonal, mostly because of navigation and how old-looking the site design is. This site would benefit from the article we read about CSS styles you can't live without where it talked about special radio buttons and such.
I think the threadless site is definitely the strongest website of the three. Just from looking at it, it seems to be the most modern design-wise. Everything on the site is clearly organized and very easy to browse through. It's also really easy to filter your results to get exactly what you want out of the site. The site is fun and amusing and very functional. It's easy to get around the site and shop.
Of all the sites, I think the design and usability rank from best to worst as follows: Threadless, CheeseSupply.com, and As Seen on TV. I think CheeseSupply and As Seen on TV are fairly close though, their most obvious difference would be their design. Their organization is about the same, though CheeseSuppy seems a bit more categorized and easy to navigate (but that could just be that As Seen on TV overwhelms me whereas I like cheese). The design is bad in both cases, but in different ways. As Seen on TV's design is just tacky, whereas CheeseSupply's is old.
I also found some articles and sites for good E-Commerce websites.
I thought it was really interesting that this article mentioned Magento because I had just stumbled upon that site at work the other day and looked at what they had and explored their options. Since I didn't know much about WordPress (prior to building a site using it recently), I found it interesting that there are E-Commerce templates / themes / plugins. I think this was a really great article because it shows how many resources are out there to serve as starting blocks for these kinds of sites. In the examples that were given, it was also interesting to note the similarities and differences between the templates, especially in the things that tended to stay the same versus the things that changed. Links are always on the top or left, categories are always on the left or right, and the main area is subdivided. There is either a header or a large image area, but usually not both. Some of the sites look more plain or industrial or based on function, while others are more focused on design. I think every one has a search bar, so I'm assuming when we do ours we'll have a search bar, which will be a nice thing to know how to do.
I think this article was very informative because obviously, it told us 15 mistakes not to make when we design E-Commerce sites that we might have not thought about otherwise. I think a lot of these are easy to realize if you think about your own experiences with online shopping. For example, the inclusion of plentiful, detailed product information is common sense since, when you go to purchase a product online, you want to learn every single thing you can about the product before you buy it. The tip about putting contact information at the bottom of every page was useful because when I've done sites, I've only ever had a contact page. Putting it at the bottom of every page is certainly more convenient. I didn't realize the ideal checkout process was one page with all the information on. I would think it would be easier and nicer if the information you had to supply was broken up. The tips for making an adequate site search engine have to be right on because that's what I hope for when I visit a site. The reminder to have a good FAQ section with the basic questions was helpful because it's probably one of those things that would be easy to forget. The discussion of tiny images makes me wish I knew how to code for zooming in on an image. I hate when I visit sites and the image sizes are inadequately. When it comes to putting multiple product images, it's hard to remember to leave room or get them from the right angles. For this, I would just say to pause and think what you would want to look at on the product if you were purchasing it. The tips on Poor Shopping Cart Design were informative and made me nervous about attempting an E-Commerce site because there's so much to think about. At the same time, it makes me want to attempt one even more. I just wish we were going to make it functional so we could really test it out. It was interesting to learn that you can find programs that let you manually relate things to items being considered for purchase instead of just letting the program do it itself. I really like that Amazon does that, but with all the categories they include (recently viewed, etc), I think it tends to junk up the bottom of the page a bit. The tips on categories make me think sitting down with a good old paper and pencil to make a sketch of your online store before you or someone else creates it is a great idea. You can list which products will be displayed and in which categories they will appear. This way, you can group them ahead of time and have the categories finalized before the site is designed and you don't end up with too few or too many things in a category. I hate sites that hide their shipping charges, especially after reading this article and finding out how easy it is to include it on the site. I think this article really helped me to be ready to design an E-Commerce site.
I think reviews on products on sites are a great idea and I'm a user of them, however I think they can easily get out of hand. How you filter that unbiasedly, I'm not sure. For smart people, when they read through the reviews, it's usually fairly easy to see if someone really knew what they were talking about or if they went into using their product dumbly. For less experienced or more innocent people, that might not be the case and it could end up hurting business, which is obviously bad. It was interesting that this article said that bad reviews were okay and actually didn't hurt business that much. Reading so much about comments makes me wonder how you allow for them to be posted immediately (like on blogs) and how the blog technology works. I would think the best feedback system would allow for marking a rating without logging in and an optional comment section for which you must log in (which you would be able to do in that box). Showing the ratings in a box is a good idea. This makes me wonder if these things are programmed in or if they are widgets / plugins and things that can be used outside of things like WordPress so they are updated instantaneously (approximately). I also like the idea of asking for feedback on reviews because then as a businessperson, you'll know how people regard what kinds of things are being said about the product you're selling. I do think this article might place a bit too much emphasis on reviews and how amazing they are, but I did learn a lot from it and I think it's a good technology to use.
I found this article really informative because it made me think a lot. Especially with an E-Commerce site, it's ridiculously important to mull over how your site should function and you need to think about that before you design. When you're tight on time, it's easy enough to go right to thinking about page layout, but it makes it so much easier if you start with functionality of the site. I liked the question that was raised about including offers on the websites because while those exist in both real life and online, I never thought about how hard it would be to make that happen behind the scenes. I also had no idea that google and amazon offered payment services similar to PayPal. Setting up a merchant account sounds very complicated, but that could be my inexperience. Dealing with digital products seem even more complex. This article was over my head in a several ways (especially in details), but it did help me realize how complicated the world of E-Commerce is, or can be.
I found the in-depth view of Google Analytics to be quite informative and I think it's an even greater tool than I thought it was when I first became aware of it. When I read about the visualization tools, I was amazed and my inner geek wants to get my hands on all of them because they not only sound cool, but useful. I won't try to rank them, but I did find the heat map particularly interesting. The Product Page Tips were some of the same things mentioned elsewhere, but there were some useful new tidbits. I had no idea there were that many ways to test your site either.
It was really helpful that the selection of websites chosen for this piece were of a variety of subject matter and styles. It was really informative to see what all could be done with an E-Commerce site and that they don't all just have to be plain and boring. These designs are really inspiring and I'm sure I'll be looking at them again.
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