Why e-commerce sites need to focus on usability

Investors are demanding a return on their dotcom speculations. High profile e-commerce sites are collapsing. If you're under pressure to show some tangible results, we provides some practical tips to help you shift your site's focus from technology to customers.

Benefits of ease-of-use

Making your site easy to use will

• Improve your conversion rate (lookers/bookers ratio) and hence improve sales. On a high-volume e-commerce site, raising the conversion rate by one tenth of 1% can add £000's in revenue per month.
• Increase hits. A happy customer brings free word-of-mouth exposure—bringing more buying customers to the site.
• Avoid leakage to your competitors. One bad customer experience can cause a customer to abandon a site permanently and result in bad publicity
• Keep developers focused on important business metrics, such as: conversion rates; revenue per order; acquisition cost per new customer; % repeat buyers; % revenue from repeat buyers; abandoned shopping carts.
• Lower your support costs. Customers won't need to phone up to check their order went through.
• Help you keep focused on tasks customers want to achieve, rather than on the web as a technology tool
• Improve customer satisfaction and show customers you are responsive to their needs
• Show where you're wasting development time and guide your next moves

Users first or bust, the most neglacted warning on the web.

Physoclogists say most grandiose feeling of security are based on the "Illution of invulnerability". People have a tendency to belive that cancer, car accidents, violent crimes, out of business, etc."wont happen to me". We tend to feel others are more likely to become victims. We tend to see ourselves as special and less likely to be victimized. We maintain the illusion because it is comforting, but in reality it sucks. On the web users rule. Take care, put users first than anything on your web site, right now.

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