Les Jones

E-commerce > Tog on E-commerce

Tuesday E-commerce Report #12

Are there some sites you visit more often than others? I visit InstaPundit every day. AskTog I visit every few months. He doesn't post many articles, but when he does post it tends to be a doozy.

When I checked last night I found his Top 10 Reasons Not to Shop Online.

Some of the reasons are design-related. Tog is an interface design guru, so that's to be expected. Not all of the reasons are valid. His reason number four gripes about Dell not shipping immediately. The reason for the delay is that Dell is building the systems to order. We run into the same thing on some of our product lines. When you're talking $25,000 specialty security appliances with a lot of optional configurations you don't keep stacks of them in the warehouse.

His reason number 10 has been getting a lot of attention lately. It turns out to be slower to perform some transactions - buying tickets, for instance - on the Web than at a ticket counter or even over the phone. Tog points to an excess of graphics being the problem, but there are other factors that are more important, including his reasons 8, 7, and 4.

Digest that article and we'll look at those factors in more depth next week. We'd look at it now, but it's summer time and the blogging's easy.

Meanwhile, if you ever plan on investing so much as a nickel in the stock market, you should read Tog's How I made a small fortune at Apple computer (out of a much, much larger one). It tells how he became a millionaire the day of Apple's IPO, and then lost most of it by being naive about the stock market. I'd say he was a fool, if I hadn't made some of the same mistakes during my company's IPO.

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.