myadsl.co.za has an article about how difficult it is to build a profitable transactional website (ie an e-commerce site like YuppieChef).

Arthur Goldstuck is quoted in the article:

“Even the large retailers are battling locally because of the high cost of maintaining a transactional Web site, with issues ranging from secure and stable payment systems through to effective fulfilment,” he says. “In addition, site audits of online retail sites indicate tremendous strategic gaps in implementation, content management and transactional processes, with local online retailers showing very poor awareness of best practice in Web site strategy.”

Well, that's a relief. If the big guys are battling, then I suppose it's OK for us to feel like there is still a mountain of work left to do on our sites!

Filipe Serralheiro, application performance management consultant at Compuware SA, says transactional sites should form part of any retail business, much like shop fronts.

“Yet how often are IT managers asked to justify additional bandwidth, or marketing managers asked if the online site is feasible?” Serralheiro asks. “The tools used to measure performance, accessibility and - most importantly - user experience, are therefore vital to any business decision maker.”

In fact, I'd take it a step further. The IT manager, who spent his morning ordering new network routers and meeting with hardware companies, spends his afternoon meeting with a web designer, or worse, developing the site himself in Frontpage! It amuses me how senior management put websites into the same box as "computers", and therefore it lands on the IT guy's desk, when in fact a proper website presence encompasses everything from marketing to the supply-chain. If you don't treat your company's website holistically, it's not going to work.

“A high proportion of visitors to most sites begin a shopping process but then abandon their baskets during the checkout process – often due to the complexity of the transaction process,” he says.

You will notice that on our e-commerce sites we don't ask a user to register before making a purchase. We see this as yet another hurdle in the checkout process, particularly when they are required to come up with a unique username, a password that contains 9 characters and at least 4 digits, and then wait for an e-mail to confirm their registration, which often doesn't arrive. Having user registration does make the second purchase slightly easier, but that doesn't help if they never complete the first purchase!

On our sites, after the customer has added everything to their cart, we have a simple form to capture their name and contact details. At that point the order is entered in to our system and an e-mail sent to the customer, so even if they pull out then we can still make contact to push the transaction through. We use a cookie to store a reference to the user's information, so in most cases if they make a second purchase in the future they won't have to re-type information.

After the first transaction is succesfully completed we could ask the user if they want to make a username and password to speed up future purchases. This step will always be optional.

Half the respondents claimed to monitor and manage the performance of their transactional Web sites – yet only six percent have specific information about the end-user experience for each individual logging on. In fact, 61% of companies have no idea whether, or when, a client drops off a page - or how many times they might click the refresh button in a particular section.

Goldstuck says that local online retailers do have the data available to track the behaviour of their customers, but most have no idea how to monitor that information or make it meaningful in order to improve their performance.

I agree, anayltics is hard and time-consuming. We use Google Analytics and Crazy Egg on our sites, but we have only experienced a hint of their full potential. The massive online retailers can afford to pay a professional a few thousand dollars to tweak their site, because increasing conversions by half a percent will easily earn that back. For smaller sites like our's, a 1 percent improvement in the conversion rate would barely cover the cost of the phonecall to a professional analytics company.

Goldstuck predicts the market will not remain as forgiving as it has been until now. “Our research indicates the online shopper of 2008 and 2009 will be much more demanding, forcing online retailers to be far more strategic in managing their Web sites,” he says.

It's decision-time for South African companies - make a serious go at developing an online presence and be prepared to put a lot of money behind it, or don't bother. Sometimes a one-page site with your contact details can cause less damage than a poorly executed e-commerce site.

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