Lots of people want to have a product review feature on their site. People love reading reviews of products written by other people. I bet I’m not the only one who has gone to Amazon to read the reviews of a book before going into the local bookstore and buying it there, just because I want the opinions of real people who have read it.

When you are choosing a shopping cart and you say you want product reviews, just saying that might not be enough. There’s a few things to think about:

• Do you want to be able to moderate comments before they go live? This feature is useful to get rid of stupid/abusive comments, but if you use it to remove negative comments you are reducing your credibility.
• Do you want to be able to edit or retrospectively delete comments? I would suggest no, I personally believe comments should be unedited.
• Do customers need to be signed in to review the product?
• Do they need to have bought the product from you to review it?

There’s probably other things to think about that I haven’t. Oh, and please don’t put up fake reviews. Karma will catch you if your users don’t.

In case you are interested, the reviews on this site are moderated just to check they aren’t abusive or rubbish. I approve roughly 80% of comments. The other 20% are either blank, contain gibberish, or are just angry rants. I don’t mind people being very critical, those ones are approved, but people who are just talking angry rubbish will get deleted. If you want a negative comment to be approved, just make it well reasoned and it’s sure to get through! I never edit either, it’s all or nothing.

Categories: Shopping Carts | Date: Mar 30th, 2007 | Author: Mark | No Comments

One of the things that is hard with any site, but especially an ecommerce site, is working out what people do on your site. Good statistics go a long way, and usability studies are great – but expensive and time consuming. One tool I’ve used a few times recently and am in fact using on my own site is Crazy Egg. They have a really neat tracking tool which has the nicest looking and easiest to use reports I’ve seen from any tracking tool. Check out their site and look at some of the sample reports. It’s really as easy and cool as it looks, no catches. For smaller/lower traffic sites, it’s free as well! I put it on an ecommerce site I was working with and found out all sorts of information. I managed to get rid of a couple of elements that almost no one was using and improved some bits not getting used much that I wanted to get used. If there’s another way to get high quality data with that little effort and cost, let me know about it!

And, I have no connection with CrazyEgg, just a happy user.

Categories: Tracking | Date: Mar 28th, 2007 | Author: Mark | No Comments

Thanks for reading! I’m excited to re-launch the site today with a bunch of new features.

• Reviews of hosted shopping carts (a few to start with and a whole lot more on the way)
• Reviews of payment gateways – just about everyone after a shopping cart is after a payment gateway, so why not?
• A new advanced search that allows you to do a Google-powered search of just the sites of the vendors on this site at once. Awesome feature for that obscure feature.
• A slightly tweaked design
• A blog! (had you noticed the blog yet?
• A few other little tweaks here and there

It doesn’t stop here, there’s some more changes that didn’t quite make it to this version but are coming soon.

Any thoughts on the new site? Any bugs (oops!)? Leave a comment!

Cheers,

Mark

Categories: General | Date: Mar 24th, 2007 | Author: Mark | No Comments