I’ve been getting out and about to a few professional events lately.

Last week I had a good fortune of attending the Jericho Brainy Breakfast with Cate Bryant, from Net Growth Strategies Ltd, who gave an excellent, substantial presentation called “the 5 myths of e-commerce”.

Cate was accompanied by Mike Dunlop, a very affable chap who had a great sense of humour, which I imagine would serve him very well in his job. He told the interesting story about setting up the Ballantyne’s website

It was very interesting to learn that roughly a third of New Zealand’s top 50 retailers have an e-commerce site. According to Cate Nielsen stats show New Zealanders are reasonably sophisticated shoppers, last year shopping on over 24,000 international shopping sites

Cate had been lunching with some e-commerce aficionados in the US who told her about how difficult it is to get traction in the US market once there is an established key player in your domain. A bit like a land grab, they strongly encouraged investing in e-commerce here in New Zealand while there’s still a chance to be in first.

So what makes a good e-commerce site? Here are some tips taken from both presentations:

• Keep it simple. Focus on excellent product listing (categorization of products), and excellent merchandising (discounts, free delivery where possible, VIP etc)
• Create a multi-channel set-up.People use the online to research what they buy in-store or vice versa, and to measure the success of the site, you need to measure overall sales. A good site will drive business across every channel
• Treat the site like a business - Give it Budget, I.T. resources and integrate it into business systems as soon as possible.
• Web 2.0 “conversation features” will not necessarily guarantee success. Web 2.0 can complement your site, but get the basics right first.
• Manage search rankings
• USER EXPERIENCE wins (no surprises here)
  

 I should note that neither speakers were big on hoofing flash adverts across the site, which lead me to think they’d been traumatised at some point – a real shame because there are some good examples of flash used simply and elegantly.
Cate bought up several examples of sites that she thought were good, like Tiffany & Co: (incidentally created using flash)

 I agree with her – I had run across that site the other day doing some research for a high end retail site, and it’s beautifully simple, and yet detailed (content aside).

 Oh and she gave an example of a site where web 2.0 worked very well: Petco

 Pet owners love to talk about their pets. They go to great detail!

 I’m not so sure that web 2.0 elements are great for standard e-commerce sites, that's sound advice. But there are some cool shopping  sites like etsy or thisnext in the web 2.0 space, and even for simpler sites,we have reason to believe that at the very least customer ratings are very popular…