Do you build e-commerce sites?
Do you own Jakob Nielsen‘s E-Commerce User Experience?
It’s one of the best books about building e-commerce sites. It provides a substantial amount of insight into how people interact with sites, what visual cues are most helpful, common stumbling points, and how to present product information. The book is based on a fairly rigorous survey of how people interact with 20 sites in 7 categories — clothing, department stores, flowers, food, furniture, music, and toys — and includes a detailed report on the methodology of the survey.
It’s solid stuff.
This book has been very valuable to me because I’ve seen how easy it is for designers, developers, and managers to slip into groupthink about the site they’re building. We all become comfortable with the sites we construct, and with comfort comes resistance to changing how things work or look. Every site becomes “intuitive” after spending a few hundred hours designing, building, and tweaking it … but it’s a very different story for Joe or Jane Internet User who finds your site for the first time.
E-Commerce User Experience has 389 pages, 207 tips, 221 screenshots, and covers categorization, product pages, shopping carts, checkout, registration, search, trust and credibility, and selling strategies. The book is more expensive than others of the same genre, but it’s certainly worth it.
My friend and photographer Owen Carey delivered over 800 photos — I’ve cut it down to under 25 for public consumption, and I’ll let The Wife post pictures of the ladies on her Flickr account. Good times!
Peat’s Wedding Photos
A few days ago, Google unveiled Checkout — their e-commerce tool for making purchases directly through Google. The service is straight forward: a little shopping cart appears next to your AdWords text advertisements. Someone clicks on the shopping cart, pays you through Google’s site, and you ship it. Pretty simple. You can also add their payment services to your website, so that people who have a Google Checkout account can buy products from your site a with a couple of clicks.
This is similar to PayPal in that it’s a trusted third party mechanism for making payments. Both of them support online payments for goods and services, but they’re pointed in different directions: PayPal is geared towards people sending each other money; Google Checkout is designed specifically for e-commerce. PayPal’s primary commercial use is within eBay’s web site; Google Checkout is distributed everywhere AdWords are shown. PayPal operates independently of advertising efforts; Google Checkout is (currently) strictly tied to AdWords.
PayPal and Google Checkout overlap, and there will certainly be fierce competition over common ground, but I think they’re sufficiently different (and well funded) to survive in their own right.
What’s Next?
The logical extension of Google Checkout is through Froogle, their shopping comparison search engine. With Google Checkout handling financial transactions, and Google Base providing a huge inventory of products, the mating of the two is a natural progression … and if that happens, who’s going to feel the heat?
Amazon.
For the last several years, Amazon has been making a huge push to become an end-all, be-all market place. Their core business may be books, but their partnership with other retailers and heavy promotion of sell through merchants has expanded their business tremendously. Froogle + Checkout directly competes for those customers, and with Froogle and AdWords results along side Google searches, I think it would catch on very quickly.
My expectation is that Google Checkout + AdWords is the testing ground for the technology before combining Google Checkout with Froogle. If that’s the case, we’ll probably see little green shopping carts on Froogle and at the top of our Google searches before the winter shopping season.
Ever been interested in stirling engines? Here are some rather creative and gorgeous functional models, from Boehm Stirling-Technik. The designs are Giger-esque, but pretty darned neat.
Here’s another interesting e-commerce shop: http://www.panic.com/goods
Panic makes great Mac software … and also sell some pretty swanky geek t-shirts.
Although the merchandise is pretty sweet, the drag and drop interface is what sets it apart. For their layout (big pictures, uniform products, simple navigation) and intended audience (geeks), it’s a perfect fit — an interactive and innovative way to do an “old fashioned” job.
What can you get with $25 and an afternoon on eBay?
A couple big packets of uncirculated world banknotes, and a bunch of mylar sleeves to protect such a substantial investment.
This is really quite exciting, which more or less proves my nerdiness. Regardless, here’s the loot:
- A 10,000 “biletov” note from Russia’s MMM scandal. Post-communist Russia didn’t have the financial laws in place to prevent this very straight forward pyramid scheme from ensnaring millions of people and over a billion dollars. In the end, when the pyramid collapsed, these notes were everywhere and entirely worthless. Now they can be had for less than a buck, and make for an entertaining story if you have friends interested in history, Russia, economics, or scams.
- A set of 12 “Saddam” Iraqi Dinars. The collection spans the original American Gulf War, and is remarkable in how the quality of currency changes between 1999 and 2002. The early bills are high quality and attractive — Swiss made, fine intaglio printing, rag paper, colorful, and pleasing to handle. After Operation Desert Storm the bills become … well … crap! Cheap Chinese lithographs with poor alignment, weak colors, blotchy textures, and wood based papers. Consequently, counterfeiting soared, and the dinars lost value rapidly. Interestingly, the original Swiss dinars retained their value, even through the issuing of the current, post-Saddam Dinar.
- A set of 35 notes from all over the place (Belarus, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, China, Cambodia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Nicaragua, Myanmar, Laos, Argentina, Brazil, Transnistria, Tajikistan, Croatia, Peru, and a “bonus” German Notgeld). The range of quality and artistry is amazing — generally speaking, the south-east Asian bills are beautfully designed, and the ex-Soviet countries look much more formal and powerful … with the exception of Belarus, which printed a very cute squirrel on one of their notes. Go figure.
Anyhow, all of the notes in more or less perfect condition. Over the next few weeks I’ll be scanning and adding them to my Flickr account, and writing more about particularly noteworthy notes!
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Update: The biletov and some of the Saddam notes have been scanned. Enjoy!
Do you like robots? I do — or did! Now I’m afraid of my blender and refuse to use cruise control.
How to Survive a Robot Uprising is an inexpensive, entertaining, and enlightening book. It’s an overview of modern robotics, but with a humorously paranoid twist. Written while getting his Ph.D. in Robotics, Daniel H. Wilson provides a reasonably thorough introduction to subjects like robot vision, mobility, and surviving getting shot with a laser. It’s a fun read, and the graphic design is enjoyable as well.
