Let me tell you a shopping experience I had a few months ago. We had been on holiday for a week far from home staying at my wife's family. When we left, we loaded up the car, got the kids ready, then lo and behold, we really needed some last minute supplies to keep the kids entertained on a rather long car journey. No problem I thought, so I headed down to their local supermarket, but not having driven in that city much before, I took a wrong turn and ended up in a different suburb. I didn't consider this a major problem at the time, having been in this other suburb plenty of times in my single stomping days, 20 years ago, on pushbikes when a friend lived there. But hey these times are different, I'm driving a car on considerably more crowded roads approaching from a different angle, and yep I got lost again. I now was completely dependent on signposts to find this supermarket I had been to several times before. To cut a long story shorter, I found this supermarket in the mall, to find there had been some serious building redevelopments in the area, and this once moderately sized shopping mall, had grown into a mega sized mall. The supermarket was now greatly enlarged with multi-story parking, at one end at this sprawling complex. Finding my way in was a challenge in itself, but once there it was greeted with every possible retail purchase imaginable, but finding what I wanted in a hurry was not an easy thing. And yes, when finally got the nibbles for the kids and found the checkout, there was a very slow checkout operator and a queue that slowed me right down.

Don't get me wrong I was in a serious rush, the later we left during that morning would have big consequences. I really wanted to get away as soon as possible on a long car journey, but something quite straightforward on our home turf, turned out to be quite a time consuming & stressful process.

You might just well ask, well what on earth has this got to do with e-commerce? I think there are lessons that can be learned through this.

When it comes to E-commerce, old traditions die-hard when it comes to shopping in the Internet age.

Firstly, can your customers find your website? This is a critical factor in ensuring the success of a site. Can your customers find you through publicising your domain name and through directories and other publicly available sources of referrals? Are you happy for your customers to arrive neatly and politely on the front doorstep i.e. your homepage? or are you quite happy for your customers to arrive there though any conceivable opening, with customers entering through the side doors and clambering in through the windows? For this to happen your e-commerce site needs to be both search engine optimized (so products are optimised for key phrases) and search engine friendly (some search engines can't read query strings). What use is a store, when how great it may be, but the opening is hard to find, except for the select few.

Your site needs to be visible; it should come up through the search engines for attracting more customers.

Secondly, I noticed when developing my own e-commerce software that many sites were rather cumbersome to navigate. Can a customer find your product in a hurry? Or is it buried 4 levels deep through a hieratical menu structure that waits for 6 different images to load on every page. This means if your sitting by the bananas in a store, can you find the shredded chicken in one hit, or do you have to go through 5 slow page loads, taking say 1 minute to reach they next desired page. I noticed the number of mouse clicks required to achieve a purchase, was in most clicks far more necessary than required.

Another area that many of my clients preferred was having instant feedback on the shopping cart. When I'm in the supermarket I've got a pretty good idea what's in my shopping cart, if any items are missing and an approximate cost. I know, I can't miss it, my shopping cart is there right in front of me!! Yet many e-commerce sites, you don't really know what's in your cart. Most of clients liked the shopping cart on the right hand side of the webpage, which was valuable in providing constant instant feedback on the shopping experience.

The statistics are that approximately 50% of customers abandon their shopping cart before making a purchase. I'll repeat this again about 50% of customers abandon their shopping trolley before hitting the checkout. Why? Obviously some are window shoppers, but a major factor in this is a poorly designed checkout. Can you imagine this happening in real life, with a supermarket littered everywhere with abandoned shopping carts?

I noticed when I'm at the checkout at the supermarket the checkout operator obtains the minimum amount of information to make a purchase by whizzing my money machine card or credit card. Yet when I'm going through the checkout at an e-commerce site, I'm quite often asked information that is surplus and slows down the speed of the checkout process. Why would I need to be asked my fax no., when the storeowner has no intention of ever contacting me by fax? Is your checkout at express experience requiring the minimum amount of information or a complex procedure involving more than one page with the user been bombarded with unnecessary questions?

Another turnoff I found is with a first time user been asked to create an account, before entering the checkout. Can you imagine me being asked to fill out an application form for an account at a new supermarket for a one off purchase? Other factors that create a bad user experience are with misleading or slightly rude error messages, or hitting the "submit" button and not really knowing if your order went through. The latter can be prevented by having the submit button greyed out after pressing this.

To summarise, customers need to find your store easily, know how to get around in a jiffy and need to whiz through the checkout seemlessly, it all just does come down to basic common sense.