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Don’t force Guest to signup before Checking out:

Its a big turn off for me when i need to signup for the service to buy a product, i generally prefer to transact as guest, when the experience is good and satisfying i signup on that online store on my next transaction. Basically as an e-commerce store you need to have a very good reasons why forcing guests to register to purchase products. Try to simulate the offline shopping experience. Do you have to open an account when you buy stuff from a new retail store? Don’t make that mistake online. Allow guests to check out.

But you also need to sell reasons why guests should register. It’s all about making it easy, now and in future.

Slick and Fast -

Facilitate user to checkout easily, the process should be as fast and slick as possible. Remove any Ads which may distract users, never ever try to up sell or cross sell in this page. You can do that in product page or when the product is added to the cart. Here the objective should be to collect the payment, If out of greed you tend to entice the users to choose other stuff there is a high risk of them abandoning the cart.

Collect user feedback once payment in through -

Once a visitor has converted, rather than show the standard confirmation page, why not also ask for some feedback on their experience? User can use tools like Surveymonkey to create feedback form and collect their responses. You can add some of the questions like -

• Were you able to find products you were looking for easily?
• What you liked or disliked the most about our website?
• Please tell us how we can improve your next visit?

This qualitative feedback is priceless to e-commerce portals. Not everyone will put their views but believe me you will collect feedbacks from the smart users and don’t forget to inform them once you make the suggested changes.

Handle Errors Gracefully

Problems occur during the check-out stage. Cards are declined, people enter invalid email addresses and they forget to specify their preferred delivery method. To cover all eventualities, you should display messages that are:

• Contextual
  Put the message next to where the error occurred.
• Useful
  No “Error code 21″ messages please. Write friendly, useful error messages, such as, “Sorry, we believe your email address is invalid. Did you accidentally add an extra full stop or space?”
• Conventional
  Error messages should be red. People understand that red indicates a problem.

if you are avid book reader, love buying books and always look out at best price here is a web utility which will further enhance your buying experience.

Mysmartprice is a book comparison utility and it compares the price and availability across well known online book portals like Flipkart and Infibeam in India. In short its an aggregator.

Mysmartprice UI is simple and easy to use, their auto suggest works pretty well. I searched for book title “Devil” in Pinstripes” and here is the result page -

As per result page i find the best price from Infibeam, One column missing in their result page is “Availability” against the respective online stores, it may cause disappointment if as a user clicks on “Buy Now” on the cheapest price offered by bookstore and find out its not available.

Not sure of their exact business model but one obvious way of monetizing is through affiliate programs run by mostly all the prominent online bookstores. Do check out Mysmartprice and share your feedback.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

To achieve maximum effectiveness, primary calls-to-action (e.g., add to basket) are usually placed at the top of web pages. Yet, it is equally important to include calls-to-action at the bottom of the pages, too.

You might lose customers who have not selected a call-to-action from the top and will just exit for lack of further push from you. Such calls-to-action are determined by the goals you have set for the site or page.

They may consist of links to the following:

1. Contact details

Contact information should be seen at the bottom of every single page of your website if this is what you want your users to do. Your email address and phone number, along with a short, friendly message like “We’d love to hear from you” can produce more results than a curtly worded “Fill up the form to make an enquiry”.

2. Registering or Signing Up

If getting users to register or sign up (e.g. for a newsletter or an event) is your site’s main objective, place an appropriate call-to-action at the bottom of the page that follows your sales message. If you exerted time and effort to write killer copy, you must end it with a call-to-action so the user knows what the next step is: sign up.

3. Related Products or Services

The user may not find your main products or services to his liking. As he scrolls down without making any action, display images or descriptions of other products or services at the bottom of the page so he’ll have other options to purchase instead of leaving the site with his needs unmet.

4. Social networking bookmarking services

Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and Digg store web pages and recommend them to other users. Placing a link at the page bottom to these sites will automatically add your web page to users’ bookmarks on that site if they click on the link. The list of users’ bookmarks is open to the public, making other users and search engines aware of the existence of your site.

Guest Post by Marina, a UX manager at eBay

Potential ecommerce customers will typically scan a number of web sites before deciding on one to buy from, so it is important that your web design be structured for usability. Usability is a subjective rating of how easy a web site is to use, and in the case of ecommerce, how likely it is that a potential customer will be converted to a real one.

Avoid a Cluttered Layout :

Web surfers won’t take enough time to get used a web site unless they’ve decided that a web site is really where they want to be. So, your web design should make it clear to visitors what it is that they will find on your ecommerce web site. A design layout, cluttered with too many options, won’t give the visitor a clear idea of what they can or should do on your site.

It could be that you have exactly what they are looking for on your web site, but if your layout design looks like a pizza with “the works”, potential customers might get stuck in the cheese and never find their way to the product they want.

Make it Easy For Customers to Find Products Different Ways:

This is especially true if you have a large number of products in your ecommerce site. Make make room in your web design layout for navigation in product categories that will allow a potential customer to browse products by price, by name and by the date added. Some customers will be looking for something inexpensive while others will want to browse your newest products. You want to give customers the shortest route from their entry point to what they’re looking for, and this will help narrow down that distance.