Chapter Three. Profitable Ecommerce

Let's start by defining ecommerce as "selling goods or services directly over the Internet that are delivered individually to each customer." This definition is important, because there are many businesses that cannot benefit directly from ecommerce and would do better using the Internet as a purely promotional medium and making their actual sales offline, either by phone or in person.

Used cars are an example of products that should not be sold (or bought) online. New, factory-built cars of a given make, model, and color may be essentially identical to one another, but each used car is an individual item, with its potential value determined almost as much by the way it was treated by previous owners as by the characteristics it had when it left the factory. A person who buys a used car without looking it over carefully, driving it, checking under it for fluid leaks, and perhaps having it inspected by a third-party mechanic, is a fool. A car dealer may put up a Web site that shows its used car inventory, but that site should be considered a promotional tool designed to bring prospective customers to the dealer's place of business, not a sales vehicle in and of itself. That dealer needs a promotional Web site, not an ecommerce site. This distinction is important enough to give each site its own chapter to avoid confusion.

Now that we've decided what we're talking about here, let's start by saying: "A Web site is a Web site, and all the usability rules we've talked about apply to ecommerce sites as much as they apply to any other kind."