
Hidden Secrets of the Amazon Shopping Cart - mattmcknight
http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/02/26/amazon-shopping-cart/
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vaksel
Great article...its really something people need to remember. You may want the
PERFECT website, but all the "perfect" websites that you are comparing
yourself to, have spent close to a decade progressing to the current status.
So its better to launch early, even if it looks like crap, just to see what
people say.

If "crappy design" is the only negative comment your site gets, you know you
are on your way to big bucks. Because you can always update the design at a
later time

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russell
I once worked for a web analytics company. One of the very popular
presentations was an overlay of the customer's page which showed counts and
percentages for every link and button off the page. It was a simple visual
that showed what was converting and what was not. You should try to collect
this data even if you are not using an expensive service. It facilitates
little optimization experiments.

~~~
ratsbane
I use Google Analytics on several sites. It's got the same view you're talking
about. We like it a lot although there are other things I'd like to change
about GA. Can anyone suggest alternative web/ecommerce analytics?

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russell
IIRC Coremetrics starts out at $2 - $3000 per month. Probably the same for
Omniture. Web Trends is quite a bit cheaper.

~~~
ratsbane
Interesting - thanks. I have a friend who used to work at Coremetrics. I
didn't realize it was so expensive. Maybe it wouldn't seem like so much if we
weren't all seduced by the free Google stuff.

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dhimes
I think one of the points we don't want to overlook is that _they have
something I want_. I remember being quite angry that I actually had to figure
out their web site after one of their changes, but I wanted the damn books and
they beat the competition on price so I stuck it out.

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tokenadult
Wow! Great article. I still remember that first version of the Amazon website
shown as part of a series of historical screen shots.

The author makes a great point about having an evidence-based culture.

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Timothee
Anybody has any experience, links or suggestions on how to implement that sort
of testing?

I'm interested in things like how to put it in place, with which users, over
what period of time, tools to analyze the results, etc.

The concept is extremely simple: let's compare how people react to different
design/layout/copywriting and pick the best one. In practice, it seems that
there is quite a lot to put in place to track things properly.

Is Google Analytics enough for this?

~~~
slig
You can check out G Website Optimizer

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diN0bot
A good friend on mine interned there. Let me pose something to HN that he
posed to me: 90% of my job was to get users to consume more. Is that ok
because we're offering a good (cheap, convenient) service or is it slimey?

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antiismist
"Consume" has negative connotations. How about "transact"? Voluntary
transactions are good, because if they were bad people wouldn't do them.

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staunch
> _Voluntary transactions are good, because if they were bad people wouldn't
> do them._

Why would this be true?

