Brand Interactivism

E-Commerce Best Practices

On one of the mailing lists I frequent, Zack Halbrecht posted a list of best practices for e-commerce websites. It's a simple list, and much of it is common sense, but sometimes it's good to state what should be obvious. Clearly it's NOT so obvious as so many e-commerce sites don't do this...

Zach wrote:

• Don't charge the card until you ship
• Don't store credit card information - leave that up to the payment processor unless you really want to become PCI compliant, which is costly and a pain. Most payment processors have some sort of recurring billing api too.
• User account information should be protected with a salted hashed password. Do not store passwords in plaintext.
• Offer real time shipping quotes w/ Tracking # in confirmation if possible.
• Keep it simple. Collect as little information as possible. NO OPT OUT (checkbox already checked) marketing! OPT IN ONLY.
• Get your privacy policy visible and sensible.

More Live Blogging the Plone Conference

Links to a couple more Plone Conference posts on CMSWire:

• Wanna Get Paid? E-commerce Add-on for Plone
• Plone for Media @ Plone Conference 2007

I also really liked the article CMSWire posted about the legitimate threat that open source content management systems are posing for commercial systems.

Aesthetics and Usability are Keys to Success

A report from Questus shows that usability and design are extremely important for e-commerce websites.

"We find that Web sites have three seconds to make an impression," said Jeff Rosenblum, co-founder and research and strategy director of Questus. "The actual usability is more important than aesthetics, but at the same time aesthetics are critical."

Clean site design is noted to be a more effective way of getting conversions from online shoppers, according to Rosenblum. "Information overload is a critical and consistent problem, and in this study we found that Web users were more likely to say that a site had too many links as opposed to too few links," he said.