Les Jones

E-commerce > Tuesday E-commerce Report #7

Nuride is a system for drivers to find carpool partners. How does it make a profit? By selling pollution tax credits to local government. Link.

Site Design Problems at New England Tastes

New England Tastes sells Maine lobsters, shipped fresh to your home. Or they would, if anyone was buying:

I have tried several ways to sell, using overture for two dollars a click for the key word lobster and a few others. Since the last of December I have nearly 200 clicks and no sales yet . Dropped overture temporarily and having a fair amount of visitors, still no sales Am I up against a super hard market?

Several people on the biz.ecommerce newsgroup diagnosed some of the problems, and there are several more just below the surface:

• A majority of the page is rendered using JavaScript. That destroys a site's visibility to search engines. This is the first thing I'd change to increase the number of visitors.
• The page is slow to load. The code is bloated with spaces, and there are too many graphics. Lots of visitors are probably bailing out before the page loads.
• The products on the front page are below the fold (they require scrolling to see) even on a 1024x768 screen. They should be higher on the page.
• Related is the fixed table layout that's just 800 pixels wide. It's possible to use flexible layouts that fit on small screens and still take advantage of the extra space on big screens.
• The pictures of the lobsters are terrible. They're too small and were compressed too much. For these prices, I'd expect better pictures of what I'm buying.
• The navigational graphics are rendered as JPEGs, and show obvious JPEG artifacting. Rendered text looks better as a GIF.

What's good

• There's a prominent Shopping Cart link at the top of each page.
  
• Search is available from every page.

Buying Domains

Last week I discussed selling domains. More people buy than sell, so let's take a longer look at the acquisition side.

If you know the domain you want is available, go to any of the current domain name registrars. I'm old-fashioned, and buy everything through Network Solutions. If the domain is available, you pay for it with a credit card for a fixed number of years, then renew as needed.

The .com version of the domain is always the most valuable. People automatically assume that domains end in .com, and modern browsers do, too. Enter "lesjones" into IE or Mozilla and they'll automatically add "www." to the front and ".com" to the back. It may also be a good idea to get the .net and .org variations.

Buying domains that are already taken

What if the domain you want is taken? First, go to the Web address to see if the owner is using the domain for a Web site. If not, that's a good sign: it could be one of the millions of registered but unused domains in existence. I still own half a dozen. The owners of unused domains are more likely to be motivated buyers. On the other hand, if the owner is using the domain for a business, they'll be very reluctant to part with it, with consequently high prices.

Next, contact the owner. You can find contact information using whois. Expect to encounter outrageous demands for even trivial domains. Be tough, and be prepared to walk away. Start with a low bid (a couple hundred dollars) and poor mouth your financial prospects. If you're a recognizable company name, or a financial, legal, or medical concern that people will assume has deep pockets, it may be a good idea to use a third party so the seller won't realize who the true buyer is.

See last week's report for advice on transferring domains.

Buy all the likely spellings

It may be a good idea to buy possible hyphenated versions. If you do buy the hyphenated version, definitely get the non-hyphenated version. cgi-resources.com didn't, and they quickly had a competitor spring up at cgiresources.com. Funny story: expertsexchange.com is an experts exchange, but some people parsed the domain name differently and assumed it was a place for expert sex change. The company eventually started using the experts-exchange.com domain to avoid confusion.

If there's a chance people would confuse the plural and singular forms, get both. Again, cgi-resources.com didn't, and someone else got cgi-resource.com.

For medium to large companies I recommend getting the "www no dot" version. For instance, lesjones.com and wwwlesjones.com. For small companies, there aren't enough hits to worry about, but for more popular sites those misspellings add up. I'm seeing more and more people snapping up those domains, and more and more companies preemptively registering them for themselves. Here's wwwyahoo.com.

Next Week: Can You Sell Carpet on the Web?

 

Les Jones is an e-commerce manager living in Knoxville, Tennessee. He offers consulting in Web design and site promotion, and programming in JavaScript, Web+ Markup Language, and the Web+Shop shopping cart system.

Posted by lesjones