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Make searches work. Any e-commerce site needs to be easily searchable – at<br />
an absolute minimum, someone should be able to type in the name of any<br />
product and have the product's page appear. You should never, ever say 'no<br />
results found': display a selection of your most popular items instead, with a<br />
message saying "we couldn't find that item... maybe you were looking for<br />
one of these?"<br />
Sort results by most popular first (that is, best selling first). Whatever you do,<br />
don't sort by price unless the customer asks for it: sorting by lowest price<br />
first makes your customers look at the cheapest items before the rest, while<br />
highest price first make you look like you're trying to fleece them.<br />
Have pictures. It's commercial suicide not to attach a picture to every single<br />
item description, and preferably more than one. Make them small, but make<br />
sure users can click them to display a bigger version, if they want to – this<br />
saves on both screen space and bandwidth.<br />
5 Simple Steps to Accepting Payments.<br />
When you're selling things, you need people to be able to pay you. Sure, they<br />
could send you cheques in the post, but that's not really convenient or<br />
scalable, is it? No, to do business on the web, you need to be able to accept<br />
card payments electronically – and, luckily for you, it's never been easier.<br />
Here's the whole process, in five simple steps.<br />
Step 1: Choose a Payment Service.<br />
While you could get a merchant account and do your own card processing, it<br />
isn't usually worth it, unless you do an awful lot of transactions. For most<br />
business, third-party payment services are a better solution, and there are<br />
lots of services out there that let you accept card payments for a small fee.<br />
When you choose a payment service, then, the main things you want to<br />
consider are the prices, and whether your customers will trust it. You used to<br />
need to consider which services your customers would have accounts with,<br />
but as most services now let you accept payments from people who don't<br />
have accounts with them that's not much of an issue any more.<br />
Right now, the biggest general payment player is PayPal, and they're worth<br />
The Web Design Guide for Newbies |101
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