7 Rules for Running a Successful E-Commerce Site

It seems like every week we hear about another brick and mortar store that decides to try its luck on the internet. And we're thrilled. For the few billion people that don't live in New York, LA or a few other major cities, it's an opportunity to get designers that they simply don't have easy access to. For small retailers it's yet another way to solidify and expand their business, to turn inventory quicker and to possibly get some press attention from non-local outlets.

But about 1/3 of the time, we look at a new online shopping site for an existing store and just shake our heads. Somewhere, someone along the way gave the shop owners bad advice and they're stuck with a (no doubt expensive) website that won't help their business or their customers.

So, as visitors of thousands of e-commerce sites and shoppers at over a hundred, we've decided to write this whirlwind guide to the rough and tumble, live on razor's edge world of e-commerce. Here goes nothing.

Sell unique products

This first rule sounds almost stupid. The best way to do well in e-commerce is to sell labels that aren't widely available online. You'd think that with the hundreds of thousands of online shops there would be no unique products left to sell. And you'd be oh so very wrong. Just focusing on apparel, we can easily think of several dozen high-end, boutique brands (that get coverage in fashion magazines and everything) that have little to no online sources. Another area is international labels. There are no shortage of in demand Japanese, French and South American labels that are simply not available at US e-commerce outfits. Sell unique products and your customers will find you.

Get the basics right

In this day and age, there's no excuse for a e-commerce site that's slow to load. There's no excuse for a site that's ugly or difficult to use.

Go all the way or don't go at all

We've seen this one a few times. A respected brick-and-mortar shop will add online shopping but do so reluctantly. They'll only add a handful of items and they'll update it almost never. Frankly, we think these kinds of efforts reflect poorly on retailers. Either commit to a fully functional online component (and it is quite a time commitment) or don't do one at all.

Don't use Flash

No matter how, well, flashy, and cool a web designer's Flash-based e-commerce sites look do not, under any circumstances, agree to a Flash-based e-commerce site. Flash is great for funky animations, self-contained applications and self-aggrandizing waiter actor websites. For e-commerce outfits most Flash shopping carts have many problems. 1) Flash sites look like a blackbox to Google and other search engines so basically forget about your new site and products being indexed by Google. 2) Flash sites generally won't let customers "deep link", which means that people can't bookmark a product on your website and come back to it later. 3) Flash sites break the browser's "Back" button which for e-commerce sites make them frustrating to use. 4) Flash sites are blogger unfriendly. Bloggers can't usually link to specific pages (see previous) and can't just save and re-use product images from your site. So they're actually buzz unfriendly.

Okay, actually, if you've found your self a really good Flash designer most of the problems above have work-arounds. But the question we ask is why bother? Are those dumb animations worth all the problems you'll need to deal with to get a Flash e-commerce site to work well?

Have a 'New Items' area

The best kinds of customers are repeat customers. Make it easy on them. Don't make them look through every page on the site to see if there's any new stuff. Include an easy to access area where customers can see all the items that have been added to the site recently.

Allow browsing by label AND category

Some people will come to you site looking for a specific label or company's products. Someone else will come to your site looking for a specific type of item like shoes or dresses. Make it easy to do both.

Make your return and shopping policies easily accessible

This one bit us recently. We bought a pair of pants from a favorite shop and they ended up not fitting. We wanted to have them exchanged. But we couldn't figure out how. It took us 20 minutes of browsing until we found a customer service e-mail address in some forgotten corner of the site. From then on the customer service was easy and friendly. Don't make your customers go through this. Add a link to your complete return and shipping policies and procedures at the bottom of every page.