Here’s a book for those interested in the subject of abandoned shopping carts. Perhaps not quite what you were expecting….
I heard about Internet Retailer’s publication Guide to Retail Web Site Design & Usability and so put out the cash to buy it.
It’s a magazine format publication that weighs in at 264 pages, including ads. It’s not too ad heavy fortunately – maybe only 20 pages or less.
Overall, I was a bit disappointed. For $50 there’s quite a range of books I could get which would offer no end of value. This is magazine format, but it’s also magazine style. Much of the deep content is written by vendors. For example, there’s a three page article about using video to enhance ecommerce written by – guess who – a CEO of a company supplying video services. To their credit, the articles are well written and not advertorials. However, take a guess what the conclusion of the article is – is video good or bad? I’ll leave it up to you to decide on that.
There is also a lot of “case studies”. They are indeed case studies, but lack any sort of meaningful analysis. The case studies almost invariably start with what they did (eg deploy an open source solution, add page features, create a social networking environment, etc) and attempt to draw broad conclusions from that. There is no meaningful analysis at all, and no attempt to try and relate multiple similar case studies. What would have been useful would be “three companies embarked on similar projects, here’s the three approaches they took and how the outcome differed as a result”. Once again, they are written in a journalistic style.
About 120 pages are a “features and functions of the top 500″, showing a breakdown of the top 500 internet retailers. There’s not much insight here, just facts and figures, most readily available (although not all – it does include session length which I found interesting).
That’s followed by another 40 pages of listing vendors broken down by category (CMS, tracking, etc). Top that off with 20 pages with even more filler: lists of interesting books, glossary and a supplier directory, you’re left with a distinct feeling of “where’s the beef?”
Overall, it is probably of mild interest to some people, and it is only $49. Personally, I can’t see myself purchasing the 2009 edition.