As a frequent visitor to forums where people ask for critiques of their new ecommerce sites, I have seen the best and the worst of small business web development.
The first 1000 posts or so, I was helpful, kind, and supportive when gently pointing out the developer’s site issues and how they could make their site “the best it could be”. Funny thing though- I found out that doesn’t really work. Site after posted site, I see the same errors in judgment and design. This is now my standard advice to every budding website entrepreneur.
1. Leave the layout stock
Because after all, if it wasn’t the best layout of all time then why did they distribute it as “stock” in the first place? Never mind that your site will look like every other lazy jerk who decided that product presentation was overrated. Never mind that it has no flow, coherence, or style. And totally forget that it makes you look like some high school kid in their basement trying to take your money and run.
Lack of design talent? We understand. After all, if you could make nice websites, you wouldn’t be trying to sell whatever it is you make online- You would be selling nice websites. Never mind that you can get ready made, beautiful drop in templates from sites like Template Monster- some even custom made for your cart platform- for less than $200.00. You picked a FREE cart, and by god it’s going to be free if it kills you (or your chances for success). Those people that say you have to spend money to make money are all full of crap, right?
2. Don’t use Thumbnails
Why would you want to speed up load times for slow connections, or make your pictures 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. Sure, successful shop owners say better images sell more products, but you don’t have to listen to those people. After all, what does a successful shop owner know that you don’t?
Never mind that every cart on the planet either has the ability to use thumbnail images built in or a free and easy to install contribution that handles them beautifully. Keep posting your 800k images to your site, and laugh at those people who talk about “Site optimization” and “load times”.
3. Don’t optimize your images in Photoshop
Optimizing your images in Photoshop or another image editing program takes time- Your valuable time. Just leaving them huge and making the customer download 3MB of images for each page in your site takes time too- The pesky customer’s time. Everybody knows customers love to wait to buy your products. Play a game! See how big you can make your images, see how long your load time suffers, and then see how your conversion rates fare!
Challenge yourself to approach dialup speeds over your cable modem using your stellar layered image design- I’m sure your customers will love it.
4. Don’t smooth out the checkout process
People love clicking through 8 pages of forms they have to fill in before buying stuff. Better yet, add in a couple more pages and hoodwink the customer just when they think they are finally through! Sure, you need the customer’s age, gender, and the name of their first born son to sell them your custom hand painted dishrags. Make it as hard as you can for the customer to actually complete a sale and pay you money because that’s how you can tell if a customer is truly dedicated (or if they love pain).
5. Ignore the market you are going to sell in
Sure, there are 50,000 computer stores online, but yours is going to be better! Market research is for people who don’t know what they want to sell, right? You couldn’t research for a term paper in high school and you passed, so why should an online business be any different? Don’t invest time or money in unique products or services, and don’t even think of developing some sort of unique selling proposition. Just bang out a site with the exact same products as your competition, only make yours more expensive, lesser known, and harder to deal with!
6. Don’t add an SSL certificate
All that crap 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.
Never mind that SSL certificates enable the 128bit encrypted tunnel between the customers computer and your payment processor- All that stuff can just be sent plain text across the internet. SSL certificates cost money, and you are on a budget. Sure, the customer can sue you after your website is responsible for their identity theft, but that’s not very likely to happen. After all, you treat your customers like they are stupid and their personally identifiable information is worthless, so they probably don’t have the smarts to hire a lawyer to sue you into the poor house. After all, $50 is a lot of money for security and peace of mind!
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.
Likewise, they don’t care what you are going to do with the personally identifiable information you collect. I know for a fact there are people who love SPAM mail- I received an email about it just the other day. Oddly enough it had a link for cheap “V I AG RR A” in it too, whatever that is. Never mind that providing privacy and terms of sale information is a legal requirement- That just goes back to your customers getting a lawyer. Everybody knows that people don’t like to sue stupid companies for easy money, right?
8. Completely leave out product descriptions
All your customers need is a crappy picture of your product. They don’t need to know its features, limitations, or comparisons to other products. Hey, if they knew all that they would probably go buy the other guys widget right?
Don’t describe your product at all. Be sure to use your own arbitrary part number scheme too, so customers can’t search by the manufacturer’s part number to find the products they already know they want to buy. Oh, and use some random other picture for your product with a note at the bottom that says “Picture is a demo, actual product may vary” so the customer never really knows what they are going to get.
9. Add Flash. Lots of it. Then throw in some Java too for good measure.
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 see your Uncle Joe’s mediocre flash skills. Then, when you finally let the three customers who are willing to sit through your crappy intro 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 = Quality and usability, and don’t you ever forget it.
Don’t worry- if that doesn’t slow your site down to a crawl you can always add Java. Sure, most professional developers and customers alike refer to Java as “That Damn Dirty Java”, but your customers are different. Put random Java image switchers and scrollers on every page. Put that neat-o Java water ripple effect thingy on your homepage, because that wasn’t old and tired in 1993. And make sure you require Java along with Flash, Windows Media Player, QuickTime, Comet Cursor, and lord knows what else to use your site properly. Maybe throw in an ActiveX dialer installer just for good measure- Customers love compulsory ad ware laden downloads while trying to spend their money on your products!
10. Never post your address or phone number
Customers never want to get a hold of you- That’s why they buy online! Plus, if they have a complaint they have no way of getting in touch with you other than email, and we all know how easy to ignore that form of communication is. Just think, without them knowing who you are, where you are, or how to contact you they can never make returns, never make complaints, and never cause waves. It’s brilliant! You can claim customer satisfaction is 100%, because nobody could ever call you and tell you otherwise.
Sure, this might put off about 90% of your potential customers, but don’t let that stop you. That still leaves you 10% of the Internet, and trust me, that darn Internet sure is big. Make sure you ship your items from the UPS store or the post office so there is never a return address on the box too. When the credit card company calls you about a chargeback, make sure you tell them the customer never called and complained, and you never received a return.
Jason Chance is the Online Product Manager for a company that manufactures specialty fire fighting chemicals and equipment.
He maintains www.jccommerce.com and offers free advice for SMB owners and online professionals.
