Monopoly eCommerce
Major eCommerce Companies
One of the things I have always done is looked at major businesses to see how they do things. I’m NOT talking about copying ideas (slogans, colour schemes etc) because that will never get you very far. I am talking about aspects of what they do that help them to be so successful.

Here is latest list of the top 20 ecommerce websites and their market share* – week ending Jan 3rd 2009.

Excluding the ebay websites because they are different to the type of websites you and I run, it is worthwhile visiting the other websites and taking a close look at the whole layout and functionality of the website and how it is different to yours.

Focus on all aspects of the different pages (home, product, informational etc) and make a list - why do they do that? why is that there? why do they put that information here? how do they get the navigation bar to do that? how come their product page is so much more compact than mine?

It is then important to get in to the mind of the customer and try and see what they see. How do all these things you’ve listed help the customer? If it doesn’t come to you then start searching google for related terms, or get answers from Yahoo or ask on business forums. Eventually you will work out why the things listed help and how you can integrate them in your ecommerce website.

In my opinion self learning like this is a great habit to get into and in the past it has helped me trigger other ideas from what I’ve seen on websites on the big online retailers!

* Stats source: Hitwise Image: danielbroche