There has been a recent campaign in the UK for nigh on a year now for eCommerce merchants to offer 3D Secure along with their payment gateway settings. One of my clients insisted that 3D Secure should be running against his site as he wanted to capture as many payment possibilities as possible (Maestro being the main target.) I obliged and then we watched, amazed as his payment conversions crashed at such a rapid rate.
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A new report released today by The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) focussed on the lack of trust still shown by UK consumers when shopping online. The main factors holding back these potential online shoppers were : lack of trust as the main factor; fears over personal security; consumers did not trust companies that sell online.
A recent eCommerce project brought about the challenge of re-designing the URL involved with the internal pages of the site. Straight away, my internal thoughts said, “Keywords present, dashes seperated, lowercase, nice clean URL’s. Simples!” But this nagging feeling inside, wouldn’t go away. I wanted to make sure what I had read and practiced was actually the best way to proceed in today’s forever changing search environment.
Back in 2002 I read an intersting article, of which the main theme was the introducion of usability techniques on web sites to help enhance a persons web browsing experience. The article spoke of designing sites where the end-user could get to the most important information in the fewest clicks and without the website performing all sorts of weird tricks on the browser the user was using to surf the site with i.e. resizing the browser window, links that opened up in a new window and the fact that the majority of ecommerce sites sucked big time.
Why is the 8th of December an important date? Well, it is historically the day, in the UK, when consumer spending will peak on the lead-up to Christmas. With the current slowdown hitting the High Street this year, expectation is that online spending will reach a new height. As much as I am delighted for both myself, being involved heavily in ecommerce marketing, I’m also saddened by the current state of affairs within the UK bricks and mortar retail market.
