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The E’s of eCommerce: Part 1 – Easy

July 8, 2005 By Joe Rawlinson

The “e” in eCommerce stands for electronic. However, your company needs to make sure that “e” stands for more than just that. eCommerce should be:

Easy to Use

Customers are looking for convenience when they use your website. They’ve come to your website because they don’t want to wait on hold after calling nor drive to your store or office. Your site must make life easy for your customers. Your site should facilitate these actions:

  • find needed information
  • contact you
  • purchase your products
  • subscribe to your service

Whatever the objective of your website is, you must pave the way for your customers to achieve that goal. Make it simple and straightforward.

Easy = Usable

The key to ease of use is to follow standard conventions that are used across the web. Take the shopping cart for example. Web users understand this is a place to store their items before purchase. If you use wording, mechanisms or other
elements on your site that have never been seen before, you may be endanger of confusing your visitors.

When your site is usable and people are successfully completing their objectives, your site becomes easy to use. If customers stumble over problems on your site, they find it difficult because they can’t effectively use it as they wished.

Find a Role Model

As you use the web, look for sites similar to yours. Examine the leaders in your field. What are they doing that works? What do you see that you don’t like? Just because something has never been done before, doesn’t mean you can’t. Just be cautious and always help your visitor understand what is happening.

Further Reading

Sign up for these great newsletters for insights into creating easy to use websites:

  • Jakob Nielsen’s www.useit.com
  • Jared Spool’s www.uie.com

I’ve also read these books that offer some solid information on website usability that you can use to improve your site:

  • Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
  • Designing Web Usability : The Practice of Simplicity
  • Defensive Design for the Web : How to improve error messages, help, forms, and other crisis points
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