One great thing about attending conferences is finding new tools and resources we can use and recommend to our clients. Recently, while the CLM team was exhibiting at the ACCM conference in New Orleans, I was introduced to a valuable resource site targeted to ecommerce, one that I’d like to pass it along to the CLM blog readership: FitBase.

If you’ve read many of my posts or heard me speak, you’ll know that I think ecommerce, in general, still has a long way to go. There are hundreds of competing platforms that all claim to solve the needs of online retailers, with more coming online nearly every week. And in my humble opinion, most of these platforms are losers. They’re hard to truly customize - no matter what they may say to the contrary - they’re difficult to manage, they don’t incorporate even basic conversion optimization or SEO guidelines. And that’s just the beginning of the problems.

Retailers may not know to look for certain game-changing features (such as single-page checkout), and often end up selecting a platform based on unreliable reviews or anecdotal information. Or they don’t know how important an informed management strategy is for the ongoing success of an ecommerce venture. Plenty of credible research papers, blog posts, and discussion boards are available to address these topics, but they’re scattered across the internet in a disorganized fashion.

This, then, is why I’m recommending FitBase. It’s the first significant effort I’ve seen to pull together reliable ecommerce reviews, research and comparison, and keep it all up to date.  Some of the information is free to all, much of it is subscription-based but looks well worth it. It’s an education resource for ecommerce strategy, planning, marketing, and managing. In the words of FitBase’s parent company, FitForCommerce:

“FitBase is the most comprehensive knowledge base created for and by the eCommerce community. With access to thousands of best practices, feature evaluations, expert know-how and solution provider insights, online retailers have what they need to make informed decisions and stay competitive. FitBase content is specific, actionable and organized to help you get to the in-depth info you need - saving you time and effort.”

That about says it, except for the full disclosure that Closed Loop Marketing is one of the vendors listed in their “Providers” directory. Personally, I think it’s about time for a resource like this. The sooner retailers understand that ecommerce is difficult and that a platform won’t solve all their problems right off the shelf, the sooner I can stop grumbling about it. So, thank you, FitBase.

Seriously, though, if you’re serious about improving your chances at ecommerce success, check it out. You’ll be glad you did.

Yes, this is another article about Bing. But I’m going to take a different spin. Instead of doing another expert review of the quality of the results and the cool interface like all the other search geeks (I use the term with affection), I want to review Bing the way that normal people will. So I’m going to take off my search expert hat and approach Bing from the perspective of the average user, who has very different concerns and motivations than the average search expert—starting with the fact that they don’t give much conscious thought to them at all. Because let’s face it: while every search geek in the world has been checking Bing out this week, our moms don’t even know it exists yet.

(Read the full article on Search Engine Land, here: http://searchengineland.com/bing-a-google-killer-get-real-20510)

In last month’s column, I brought up the idea that the first impression your web site makes can have a bigger impact than many of the more traditional design considerations we tend to regularly obsess about. My theory is that users’ gut-level reactions when seeing a new site for the first time—and the split-second judgments they make about the site based on that first impression—have a major influence on the likelihood that they’ll ever end up transacting with that organization. I was intrigued to find that the amount of time it takes a major league baseball hitter to decide whether to swing at a given pitch is exactly the same amount of time it takes web users to start forming judgments about a site. The magic number for both turns out to be 0.05 seconds, or 50 milliseconds. Which is way faster than we can think consciously.

I decided to test this concept a bit at some recent speaking events. During my presentation, I show the audience a glimpse of two different sites, flashing each up on screen for about half a second (as fast as PowerPoint would let me). I then asked the audience which site they’d rather do business with. The results have been overwhelmingly one-sided. Almost everyone chooses the second site. When I ask people why they chose the site they preferred, they used words like “professional” and “credible.” For the losing site, they used terms like “small-time” and “cheap.”

Ouch. Pretty harsh judgments for a split-second view.

Read the full article on SearchEngineLand >

Question: What do web users and professional athletes have in common?

Answer: They both make fast decisions about their next action based on limited information in the blink of an eye.

This thought occurred to me as I was reading How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. It’s quite an amazing book. I say that because it’s a book about brain science and psychology (ooh, gotta get me some of that) and yet it’s really fun to read. Seriously.

The thrust of the book is that the traditional model of how human beings make decisions based on either a rational or emotional basis is flat wrong. Instead, the author’s position is that we make decisions using both our rational and emotional minds simultaneously.

Pretty heady stuff, to be sure. But Lehrer weaves in such compelling and well-written stories that otherwise dry subject matter really comes to life. I was reading a passage about New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s decision-making ability on the field when the similarities between his thought process and that of a new user arriving at a site for the first time hit me.

Here are the lessons I took away from the first part of the book:

Read the full article on Search Engine Land >

One of the coolest parts of being an author is receiving unannounced foreign language copies of your book in the mail. Last week we received the Polish version, which they apparently named “E-Business.” So watch out, Czech Republic; Poland just gained a competitive advantage.

Sandra is upset about a minor color shift in the cover design. And that button label is way too long! But otherwise it looks very nice - great job on retaining the page layouts!

For the English version and related freebies, visit http://www.WebDesignForROI.com.