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How To Make A Horrible Ecommerce Site
By Jason Chance, Mon Jan 2nd
As a frequent visitor to forums where people ask for critiquesof their new ecommerce sites, I have seen the best and the worstof small business web development. The first 1000 posts or so, I was helpful, kind, and supportivewhen gently pointing out the developer's site issues and howthey could make their site "the best it could be". Funny thingthough- I found out that doesn't really work. Site after postedsite, I see the same errors in judgment and design. This is nowmy 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 thenwhy did they distribute it as "stock" in the first place? Nevermind that your site will look like every other lazy jerk whodecided that product presentation was overrated. Never mind thatit has no flow, coherence, or style. And totally forget that itmakes you look like some high school kid in their basementtrying to take your money and run. Lack of design talent? We understand. After all, if you couldmake nice websites, you wouldn't be trying to sell whatever itis you make online- You would be selling nice websites. Nevermind that you can get ready made, beautiful drop in templatesfrom sites like Template Monster- some even custom made for yourcart 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 yourchances for success). Those people that say you have to spendmoney 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 thesign of professionalism and class, and you surely don't wantyour site to have either of those. Sure, successful shop ownerssay better images sell more products, but you don't have tolisten to those people. After all, what does a successful shopowner know that you don't? Never mind that every cart on the planet either has the abilityto use thumbnail images built in or a free and easy to installcontribution that handles them beautifully. Keep posting your800k images to your site, and laugh at those people who talkabout "Site optimization" and "load times". 3. Don't optimize your images in Photoshop Optimizing your images in Photoshop or another image editingprogram takes time- Your valuable time. Just leaving them hugeand making the customer download 3MB of images for each page inyour site takes time too- The pesky customer's time. Everybodyknows customers love to wait to buy your products. Play a game!See how big you can make your images, see how long your loadtime suffers, and then see how your conversion rates fare! Challenge yourself to approach dialup speeds over your cablemodem using your stellar layered image design- I'm sure yourcustomers will love it. 4. Don't smooth out the checkout process People love clicking through 8 pages of forms they have to fillin before buying stuff. Better yet, add in a couple more pagesand hoodwink the customer just when they think they are finallythrough! Sure, you need the customer's age, gender, and the nameof their first born son to sell them your custom hand painteddishrags. Make it as hard as you can for the customer toactually complete a sale and pay you money because that's howyou can tell if a customer is truly dedicated (or if they lovepain). 5. Ignore the market you are going to sell in Sure, there are 50,000 computer stores online, but yours isgoing to be better! Market research is for people who don't knowwhat they want to sell, right? You couldn't research for a termpaper in high school and you passed, so why should an onlinebusiness be any different? Don't invest time or money in uniqueproducts or services, and don't even think of developing somesort of unique selling proposition. Just bang out a site withthe exact same products as your competition, only make yoursmore expensive, lesser known, and harder to deal with! 6. Don't add an SSL certificate All that crap about customers "Caring about their privacy" andbeing "Worried about identity theft" is unfounded. Just ask myfriend "John" from Indonesia. Hey, by the way, he has$30,000,000.00 he wants to send you- he just needs your creditcard number along with your name and billing address. Never mind that SSL certificates enable the 128bit encryptedtunnel between the customers computer
and your paymentprocessor- All that stuff can just be sent plain text across theinternet. SSL certificates cost money, and you are on a budget.Sure, the customer can sue you after your website is responsiblefor their identity theft, but that's not very likely to happen.After all, you treat your customers like they are stupid andtheir personally identifiable information is worthless, so theyprobably don't have the smarts to hire a lawyer to sue you intothe poor house. After all, $50 is a lot of money for securityand peace of mind! 7. Don't add Terms of Use, Privacy, or Conditions of Salestatements Some might say that customers like to know who they are dealingwith, but those people are full of it. Customers don't careabout your return policies, what to do if they receive a brokenproduct, or what to do if the size they ordered is wrong. Likewise, they don't care what you are going to do with thepersonally identifiable information you collect. I know for afact there are people who love SPAM mail- I received an emailabout it just the other day. Oddly enough it had a link forcheap "V I AG RR A" in it too, whatever that is. Never mind thatproviding privacy and terms of sale information is a legalrequirement- That just goes back to your customers getting alawyer. Everybody knows that people don't like to sue stupidcompanies 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, orcomparisons to other products. Hey, if they knew all that theywould probably go buy the other guys widget right? Don't describe your product at all. Be sure to use your ownarbitrary part number scheme too, so customers can't search bythe manufacturer's part number to find the products they alreadyknow they want to buy. Oh, and use some random other picture foryour product with a note at the bottom that says "Picture is ademo, actual product may vary" so the customer never reallyknows what they are going to get. 9. Add Flash. Lots of it. Then throw in some Java too forgood measure. Flash intros rock. Add two of them, and make sure you don't putone of those annoying "Skip intro" links at the bottom. Heck, ifyou did that nobody would see your Uncle Joe's mediocre flashskills. Then, when you finally let the three customers who arewilling to sit through your crappy intro into your store, makesure you have a flash product menu, a flash header, and randomflash 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 youcan always add Java. Sure, most professional developers andcustomers alike refer to Java as "That Damn Dirty Java", butyour customers are different. Put random Java image switchersand scrollers on every page. Put that neat-o Java water rippleeffect thingy on your homepage, because that wasn't old andtired in 1993. And make sure you require Java along with Flash,Windows Media Player, QuickTime, Comet Cursor, and lord knowswhat else to use your site properly. Maybe throw in an ActiveXdialer installer just for good measure- Customers lovecompulsory ad ware laden downloads while trying to spend theirmoney on your products! 10. Never post your address or phone number Customers never want to get a hold of you- That's why they buyonline! Plus, if they have a complaint they have no way ofgetting in touch with you other than email, and we all know howeasy to ignore that form of communication is. Just think,without them knowing who you are, where you are, or how tocontact you they can never make returns, never make complaints,and never cause waves. It's brilliant! You can claim customersatisfaction is 100%, because nobody could ever call you andtell 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 theInternet, and trust me, that darn Internet sure is big. Makesure you ship your items from the UPS store or the post officeso there is never a return address on the box too. When thecredit card company calls you about a chargeback, make sure youtell them the customer never called and complained, and younever received a return. About the author:Jason Chance is the Online Product Manager for a company thatmanufactures specialty fire fighting chemicals and equipment. He maintains http://www.jccommerce.com and offers free advicefor SMB owners and online professionals.
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