I recently had the opportunity to attend the 3rd annual Internet Retailer Web Design conference in Orlando, Florida. With an emphasis on design and usability, eTailers from all over the world attended the conference to learn about how they can make specific changes to their websites that affect how a user interacts with it. The biggest highlight of the conference, in my opinion, was the ability for attendees to sit down with web design & marketing companies and have their sites reviewed. I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of these consultations all 3 years that the conference has been around. I thought I’d pass my experience with these consultations around to let others in on some of the common challenges eTailers are facing and how I suggested they solve them. Check them out below:

I don’t know my customers.

I heard this from probably about half of the eTailers I consulted with. They’ve built some big businesses on the web and continue to grow each year, but have little idea who their customers are. Without really knowing your customer, it becomes more difficult (and more expensive) to target the right person online; and, once they’re on your website, to maintain the scent. Here’s what I suggested:

On-site feedback/surveys – Simply asking your customers a series of questions is the most direct way of finding out who they are. Stress to them the importance of feedback on your site, and offer a prize or hold a contest to entice more users to complete the survey. You can use a 3rd party such as Kampyle or you can do it yourself. Start with simple questions like the sex, age and location of your users. I would also recommend including more advanced questions around education, salary, online buying habits and family/marital status.

Usability studies – You can outsource usability studies to 3rd party companies who will identify your user groups. You can have them give general feedback, or ask them to perform specific tasks on the website and see how they do. This will paint a much clearer picture as to how web-saavy your customers are, their browsing habits, interests within your website (what stands out?) and more.

I can’t do that with my platform.

I sat down with companies working with all sorts of eCommerce platforms. They ranged from custom, in-house platforms to more commercial software such as Miva, xCart, OSCommerce, and Yahoo Stores. Their biggest challenge with my recommendations (design, development, testing, etc.) was that they simply said “I can’t do that with my platform.” I think just about anything an eTailer or consultant can dream up is possible on the web, but one must definitely consider the time and cost involved, and the potential return on investment for the given project.

My suggestion to these eTailers was an upgrade. If you’re severely limited by your platform and you keep building on top of it, you’re going backwards. An outdated, inflexible platform can limit everything from your ability to carry out A/B and multivariate tests to being able to effectively communicate with your back end software.

The executives at my company don’t want to implement my ideas.

One of the benefits of working at a smaller company is that your ideas are heard and most of the time, they’re implemented pretty quickly. This was the case with many of the smaller eTailers I consulted with; they were constantly coming up with their own ideas to build traffic, increase conversion or make their site more user-friendly.

My advice to eTailers in this all-too-common situation was to get proof. Present the data on a very high level and be straightforward. Do you think implementing a new 3rd party piece of software will save the company money? How much will it save? How long will it take to implement? Who’s going to set it up? If you’re trying to get the resources for an A/B or multivariate test, make sure the goal and predicted outcome(s) of the test are defined. If you spend $5,000 on a design variation of your home page and test it, what’s the potential for additional revenue? Will that one-time $5,000 investment lead to an additional $20,000 in monthly sales?

Aside from having a plan and being visual, provide the executives with concrete examples. Find case studies on the web where other retailers have shown improvements with testing, or how much money they saved by investing in a new eCommerce platform. Some eTailers told me that they had the most success with telling their owners/executives “Amazon did it and it worked.” Other big eTailers would work just as well, but everyone knows Amazon. Mentioning other big name companies that have had success with implementing new ideas is especially important to executives who may not know a whole lot about the eCommerce world, but can relate to the commercial success of other big brands.