We’ve recently been privileged to work on various e-commerce sites. The fundamental purpose of these sites is to transact business, so a cardinal rule must be: make the payment process as painless as possible. Conversely stated, each hoop a user must jump through lessens the probability of purchase completion.

Usability expert, Paul Rourke, may have said it best, “Provide the visitor with all they need to know for them to be happy to progress to checking out, without any un-answered questions.”

We think ASOS does shopping carts justice. According to their e-commerce director, James Hart, one small change to the first step of their checkout process resulted in a 50 percent decrease in abandonment of shopping carts. What was this magical change? Simply allowing the user to continue unimpeded to checkout without having to create an ASOS account.

“People talk about the number of steps they will have to go through, all the extra information they will have to provide, and the fact they haven’t got time to be creating an account. What I find most fascinating is the response I get from people when I ask them ‘what additional information do you expect you will need to provide if you create an account compared to a guest checkout option?’”

The only additional info required is a password. ASOS asks users to create accounts in the checkout form, by including “password” and “confirm password.” The new UX design cuts out steps that waste the user’s time and makes account creation way more approachable.

The definition and use of traditional shopping carts still apply online. The cart should be a tool, provided by the shop, for transporting the user’s merchandise to the checkout counter for purchase. It should help users, not delay them. Spending time upfront on usability and focusing on the sole function of the shopping cart will aid customers in completing purchases without distraction.

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Marketing and Nerdom collide in glorious fashion this week in Austin, Texas, site of the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) conference. And because Red Square lives at the center of both worlds, we’re there.

Digital wunderkinds, Karen Sullivan and Jeff Whitlock, are on hand to absorb as much knowledge as humanly possible. They’ll be tweeting, facebooking, blogging and flickr’ing the whole deal, so stay tuned. If you want to catch up with them in Austin, hit ‘em up.

Also, a small aside: We are quite humbled and excited to be on the list of finalists in the interactive awards show for our BCBS work. So we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.

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Our digital work for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama has been selected as a finalist for the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Awards. Please excuse the serious tone with which that intro sentence was written, but this is some seriously awesome recognition. SXSW is the digital/media/tech equivalent of the Super Bowl. The awards “uncover the best new digital work, from websites to web applications and beyond, while celebrating those who are building tomorrow’s online trends.” Just to be considered a part of this movement is pretty amazing.

Our “Be You” social sharing site was selected as one of five finalists in the business category. Awards are given in an assortment of categories, and notable nominees include (watch your feet—we’re droppin’ names) Groupon, The Social Network, US Census, Unilever, Jay-Z, the Pepsi Refresh Project and Conan O’Brien.

We’ll be deploying to Austin in March to absorb as much knowledge and inspiration as our brains can handle, and hopefully we’ll bring back some well-deserved hardware for our great clients at BCBS.

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Building a new website is one thing. Building a new business model is another. With NDI, manufacturer of the finest floral and botanical reproductions in the world, we did both. Here’s the story.

NDI had previously only sold product through high-end retailers, such as Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom. They came to us with a challenge: build a site that sells direct to the consumer without alienating our trade customers. And make it awesome.

We’re happy to present to you our solution: NDI’s new storefront.

Visitors can shop the entire inventory (over 4,000 products) in a very intuitive manner; products are organized by five different filters. The store recommends similar items and optional upgrades for products like trees and greenery. Customers can come back and quickly reorder previous purchases or update their information. The site also serves trade customers, with trade-specific content for logged-in trade users.

From a management standpoint, the site is built with a custom CMS (content management system) that allows NDI to update everything in their online store: track orders, edit individual items or multiple items at once, and reorganize categories for seasonal promos. They can also access their customer database for real-time info on each customer.

In the two weeks that we’ve been live (and debugging), the site has already seen good results. Sales are happening—66 percent of the visitors are new to the site and the average site visit is almost 9 minutes.

Take a look around, buy some flowers. And if you see any bugs in the site, holler at Janine.

As we continue to develop the site, we’ll keep you updated.

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This year, we’ve ramped up our interactive capabilities in a massive way and have some great product to show for it–as well as many lessons learned. Most importantly, there has been a solidification of process. Our agency now applies best-of-class interactive production practices–learned from partners all over the country. Our projects are run methodically (obsessively), with tightly defined scopes of work, production requirements documentation, timelines, approval checkpoints and deployment processes.

A lot of these systems are borrowed from the software industry because web sites really don’t have a finish line. Think about it. Software development is known for versioning. Your site is no different. Your “launch” is just a starting point, with improvements made along the way.

Recently in Advertising Age, Rick Webb of The Barbarian Group described this mindset perfectly:

What [the ad industry] should have been taking away all this time–and have increasingly begun to–are the concepts of the constant beta and agile development. Marketers need to abandon the time-limited campaign online and start to think of it as a constant application of a rigorous discipline.

In other words, quit tinkering with the site and launch. Test in real time. Use the web as a place to experiment. If something doesn’t work, adjust. There’s no reason you can’t move quickly. If stuff does work, move anyway. Throw social media into your interactive mix, and change becomes a must. Remember, the shelf-life of content on the web is very short.

If you want to get real results (increased brand awareness, affinity, sales) out of your site, you’ve got to keep working on it. It’s like riding a bike. You can only coast so long. To make progress you’ve got to pedal.

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