Hi Steve,

Do you and your wife have a burning passion for wedding linen? Do you go on forums for brides and talk all about thread count and such?

What would you recommend is the cut-off line between “according to my metrics, this should sell well and generate good profit” , and ” I freaking LOVE this product”.

Do you really need to be excited about your products in order to run a successful online store?

The Many Facets Of Passion

First off, I fully admit that I’m not terribly passionate about wedding linens. Decorative pieces of fabric don’t really make me excited and to be honest, I’m not in love with what we sell.

But don’t get me wrong. I strongly believe in our products and the value we provide to the end customer but none of that stuff sends tingles up my spine. When my wife and I first started our business, it was all about the numbers and whether the business could make enough money so my wife could quit her job.

At the time, it didn’t really matter what we sold as long as we fulfilled our end goal. In fact, selling wedding linens online wasn’t even our first choice. We explored many other options including opening a Kumons franchise, selling pearl milk tea as well as wheeling and dealing surplus electronics online.

So for me at least, the answer was no. You don’t need to have a burning passion for the products you want to sell. But you do have to have direction and a clear goal in mind.

Finding A Goal

In most cases, making money for the sake of making money is not a really good reason to start a business. You have to have an end game in mind. After all if making lots of money is your primary focus, then it’s very easy to get carried away and have your business consume your entire life.

In fact, you pretty much have to decide from the start what you want out of your business venture. For my wife and I, it was about financial freedom and allowing us to spend more time with our children. We figured that $100,000 a year would be good enough so we channeled all of our energies towards starting a business that would allow us to work as little as possible and make only as much as we needed (though it ended up being a lot more lucrative).

Starting out, I was willing to do whatever it took for my wife to quit even if it meant selling something that I didn’t really care for.

The Passion Will Come

But a funny thing started happening once my wife and I got the first few sales under our belts. I found myself getting really excited whenever a customer entered our store. I would stalk their every move. I would obsess over and analyze all of their clicks.

I found myself spending countless hours staring at the online tracking numbers for our business. Why did a customer leave our store on this page? Why did the customer abandon their shopping cart? Why isn’t this product selling at all?

In short, I became fascinated by the business analytics and the metrics involved in evaluating our sales performance as opposed to our products. Everyday, I was amazed by how many people from all across the country were able to find our tiny little website among millions of other shops.

And so I started studying customer behavior and why certain products were more appealing than others. As a byproduct of improving our sales, I learned a great deal about the wedding and textile industry.

Not only did I become an expert with our own products but I also analyzed our competitors and kept up to date with various trends in the wedding world. I even developed a persona and became a regular on the wedding and sewing forums.

The funny thing is that it didn’t really matter what we sold, I became interested in our products simply because it brought us closer to our end goal. It also helped that the money started rolling in and I could see the results of our labor. Google Analytics became a fixture on my desktop 24 hours a day, seven days a week!

Customer Psychology Is Fascinating

But what truly excites me about our business is the customer psychology behind selling online. By making very subtle tweaks in the pricing of your products, you can have a profound effect on sales.

Related: Pricing: Psychological Mind Games That Stores Play

By changing small graphical elements on your website, you can control and funnel customers to different parts of your website. By simply altering the colors and layout of your site, you can provide a drastically different mindset for your customers.

For example did you know that by pricing a product a certain way compared to other similar products that you can drastically alter the human perception of cost? Did you know that customers are more likely to add additional items to their shopping cart once they are ready to checkout?

It’s these little psychological mind games that really make me wake up every morning excited to run my online store. In fact, running a business is just like having your own scientific laboratory with your customers as guinea pigs.

You can make a different set of tweaks to your website and observe how your customers react. Making changes that positively impacts sales is extremely satisfying and I must say that I’ve learned a tremendous amount about human behavior just from manipulating some HTML.

Creating A Website Is Gratifying

The other thing that I love to do is design websites. As an engineer that develops hardware for a living, I often have to wait months or years to witness the fruits of my labor. But when it comes to creating a website, I get instant gratification.

I must say that I’ve had a blast managing the website design for my online store. And designing the mobile optimized version of my website made me giddy for weeks.

So whenever someone asks me how I can possibly be passionate about wedding linens, I always reply that it’s not about the product, it’s about the business. If you can find some aspect of your business that really excites you, then that is good enough. Just make sure that whatever you decide to pursue is inline with your end game. I’ll sell anything (well almost) as long as I get to spend more time with family.

Pressure

Photo by WWarby

There are plenty of business owners out there who feel utterly overwhelmed by their work. A job can be beneficial for many reasons – security potentially being one of them.

Meanwhile, many entrepreneurs wrestle with cashflow issues on a consistent basis. “Just getting by” on a modest salary is one thing – not knowing whether you will be able to get by from one month to the next is something else altogether.

Related: The Tradeoffs Of Owning Your Own Business Vs Working A Day Job

Don’t get me wrong – I am not anti-entrepreneurship. Far from it in fact – I quit my job at the end of last year. I took risks, which I would like to think were carefully calculated. But simply owning a business does not represent a cure-all. Your quality of life, and that of your family’s, is far more important than anything.

Full time entrepreneurship does not guarantee a better quality of life – in fact, it could promote an opposite effect.

It’s All a Matter of Perspective

I do not intend to climb up on a soap box and preach here. I am no “self-help guru”, nor do I consider myself a kind of expert on fulfillment. But I can talk to you about my own experience in setting goals, hitting them, realizing that it wasn’t what I really wanted, and completely re-assessing my outlook on life.

Related: What Type Of Entrepreneur Do You Want To Be?

The simple fact is that a lot of people are driven (often subconsciously) by goals that will not ultimately result in their happiness. If you assess what you truly want from life, as opposed to what you think you want, you might be surprised. It is amazing how much a change of perspective can affect your attitude towards every facet of living.

I always wanted money. I used to think that success was defined by your wage. This attitude seems to permeate through the western culture. Keeping up with the Joneses, working hard for a better future, and so on. But eventually, I discovered that it wasn’t what I wanted at all.

Defining a Better Goal

The epiphanic moment came for me when I began to understand that time is by far the most valuable commodity we have. Money is a means to an end – it can be earned in abundance, or not. Either outcome does not determine whether or not you will actually be happy.

The simplest explanation of what makes you happy is essentially how you spend your time. If you work 70 hour weeks and earn an enormous amount of money, but you hate your job and have no free time to spend your earnings, do you consider yourself successful? I wouldn’t envy that person, nor want his or her life.

I originally wanted to work for myself so that I could earn more money. Now that I do work for myself, I love it because I have control over my time. I can work more hours and earn more money, and vice versa. I can work to increase my income per hour worked. On a daily basis, I can decide what I want to do with my time.

A Balancing Act

The key is in living for the present, as well as the future. One extreme says that you could be hit by a bus tomorrow, so you should live each day as if it were your last. The other extreme says that you should work hard now for a better tomorrow. In my opinion, a balance should be struck in the middle.

When it comes to my definition of success, I consider there to be four key considerations:

1. Am I earning more than my outgoings?
2. Are my earnings on an upwards trend?
3. Am I happy with my future prospects?
4. Am I happy with my day-to-day living?

When I am setting goals, I ask myself the above four questions. There is nothing wrong with choosing to do less than eight hours work a day because you are happy with how much you are earning. It is not lazy or unambitious. It simply reflects that you are confident in knowing what you want from life.

Owning a business may allow you to satisfactorily answer the above questions, but it is not necessarily the end game – more a means to an end.

What About You?

At this point, I am happy with my earnings as long as they continue on an upwards trend. But what about you – how do you strike an effective balance between living for now and for the future? How do you recognize that sweet spot? Let us know in the comments section!

Hi Steve,

I really like your videos and blogs as they are very informative. My question is: I have an opportunity to purchase an existing website that is currently offline. This website is a pet supply store and uses two drop shippers.

I am talking with the broker about it. He is not sure of the reason for the sale but he did say the drop shippers have a good reputation and usually keep the items in stock. He said one of them had been in business for 50 years and the other for about 5.

The price of the website is $2,000 although he said it is negotiable. I am putting the information below and would really appreciate it if you would tell me what you think. Thank you.

In addition to the website, the vendor has also mentioned that this store has a customer email list that contains about 2000 contacts. Here’s a screenshot of the website below. Should Randy purchase this site for $2000?

What Do Dropshipping Websites Typically Sell For?

While the selling price of a dropshipped ecommerce store varies from shop to shop, the general rule of thumb is anywhere from 1-2 years of income or between 8-12X monthly profits. In addition to the numbers, it also depends on whether the income is sustainable or not in the long run and whether there’s room to grow in the current niche.

In Randy’s case, he didn’t get a chance to ask the owner of the website for any numbers just yet before he emailed me for my opinion. But fortunately, I didn’t need to see any numbers at all in order to give him my answer.

After doing some very basic research, I determined that this site probably isn’t making any money at all and that Randy should probably stay away. Here’s how I broke things down.

How Much Is The Website Design Worth?

Many people want to jumpstart their online businesses by purchasing a ready made site. Randy’s first question was whether the website design in itself was worth the $2000.

As soon as I saw the website, I instantly knew that the site was based on the popular open source shopping cart Open Cart. How did I know right away? Even though the designer tried really hard to hide all traces of the open source shopping cart, anyone who has seen or used Open Cart would be able to tell right away.

Related: How To Install An Open Source Shopping Cart Without Any Technical Knowledge In Under 5 Minutes

In addition, the template that is being used is very close to the vanilla out of the box template. Therefore, the cost of creating a website design similar to this pet supply shop would be next to nothing or $50 at most. Because Open Cart is open source, the source code for the website is completely free.

There’s nothing particularly special about the look and feel of the website either. The logo is just ok and the images and product descriptions seem to be taken straight from the dropship vendors. Therefore, I would place very little value on the website itself.

What About The Value Of The Dropship Vendors?

Under normal circumstances, there is value in having an established relationship with vendors that supply an online store with goods to sell. In this case however, I doubt that this store has made very many if any sales at all (more on this later). Therefore, I can probably assume that there hasn’t been any long term relationship established with the vendor at this point.

In addition, if you take a look at any of the products for sale, it becomes immediately obvious who the 2 dropship vendors are. See the example below.



So if you really wanted to create an identical replica of this store complete with the same vendors, all you would have to do is install Open Cart and contact the vendors circled in the picture above. It would be as simple as that.

How Does The Store Rank in Search?

The next question is whether this store already gets any traffic organically through search and whether it ranks for any keyword terms. Thanks to tools like www.spyfu.com and SEMRush, this is relatively easy to do.

By bringing up this online store in SpyFu below, it becomes immediately obvious that this site probably doesn’t make many sales or garners much traffic at all.

First off, the owner of this site has not used any PPC marketing services at all to generate any traffic. Second, this shop has zero keyword terms on the front page of the search engines.

Third, this shop doesn’t even show up in various traffic ranking sites like Compete, Quantcast etc… You put the three things together and that probably means the site gets very little traffic and makes very little sales. In other words, the site probably doesn’t make any money.

What Does The Backlink Profile Look Like?

But just for good measure, let’s take a closer look at this Pet Supply shop’s backlink profile using Open Site Explorer. If look you look closely, this website is very weak and the only backlinks to the site are from some crappy website directories. No wonder this site is not ranking in search!

Breaking Down The Value

So I’ve already established that the site is definitely not worth $2000 but how much would it cost a normal person to make an exact replica of the site? Here’s the breakdown of costs. As you can see, the total cost of creating a similar website would only be about $70.

• Create an account at BlueHost for $4.95
• Follow the directions in this video to install Open Cart for free
• Follow the directions in this video and install an SSL certificate and credit card processing. Approximate cost for an SSL certificate is about $13.
• Follow the directions in this video and install a shopping cart template. Approximate cost $20-$50
• Contact the two vendors mentioned above and establish dropshipping accounts with them.
• Using the vendor’s spreadsheet and photos, upload the products and product descriptions onto your website

Thank You

To sum it all up, I just wanted to thank Randy for submitting this question to the blog. Remember, I’m going to start featuring questions like Randy’s on a regular basis now so please send me whatever problems you may be facing. But please be specific.

If your question is too broad or too open ended, you will most likely not get an answer. Thank you and I look forward to hearing from you.

So What Should You Do?

Rather than focusing on your product and your brand, you focus on your customer. As I like to say, you go to the people.

Photo By JDN

Let’s take another look at our boutique store analogy. The footfall past your premises is low. The simple fact is that if you take no action in going to the people, you will never gain any kind of traction – regardless of how pretty and well-stocked your store is.

You need to head out, find your target consumer, and bring them back to your premises. Not physically – I don’t want you to head downtown and start loading people into the back of a van – but you do need to place your brand in front of people.

That is never going to happen whilst your store is on a side street, so you have to make your brand “portable”. Advertise in local publications, do mail shots, and walk around the local mall handing out flyers. Go to the people.

Related: The Best Way To Attract Customers To Your Online Business Or Ecommerce Store

This applies to any business model – from blogs to bakeries. How you do it depends upon the business model – with a blog you would focus on guest posting and networking with well-established bloggers, and with a bakery you might place your premises within a high footfall area frequented populated by office workers who will be looking for their lunchtime fix five days a week.

The Importance of Relevancy

The point is, simply having a good product isn’t enough. How effectively you put that product in front of the right people will define the success of your business.

Don’t try selling ice to eskimos – put your product in front of people who will actually give a damn. If your boutique store sells expensive tailor-made items that cannot be found elsewhere, your target market is not likely to be found at Walmart. You will likely be far better served by working in partnership with other bespoke product stores that your ideal customer is likely to frequent.

A great example of how going to the right people works beautifully is the Firepole Marketing blog. Its main author, Danny Iny, wrote over 80 guest posts on other related blogs during 2011. He found where his target audience already was, then placed himself in front of them. Starting in January 2011, this was how traffic to Firepole Marketing was affected by Danny going to the people:

The Power of Effective Marketing

Having said that, I am keen not to touch too heavily upon specific examples in this post, as what you are reading is a basic fundamental of effective marketing – the concept that you should go to the people applies in every line of business, without exception.

There are two simple equations that apply to pretty much any business you care to mention:

1. Poor Product + Great Marketing = Success
2. Great Product + Poor Marketing = Failure

You will of course find exceptions on either side of these equations, but the fact is that if I had to choose between them, I would always pick the first. People can only like something they can see, so an awesome product that is marketed poorly will only ever do so well. On the other hand, a poor product with great marketing is going to get so much exposure that sales will be generated, despite the lack in quality.

How Do You Promote Your Business?

There are a multitude of ways in which you can promote your business, but if you keep in mind the core concept of going to the people (and by extension, the right people), you can’t go far wrong.

With that in mind, tell us – how do you promote your business? Do your methods adhere to the basic principle of going to the people? And have you found success in your methods? Let us know in the comments section!

This post was written by Tom Ewer who writes for the blog Leaving Work Behind. He’s an incredible writer and I’m happy to say that he will be a regular contributor over here at MyWifeQuitHerJob.com.

Entrepreneurship

Qualifications – Chris Guillebeau provides a truly inspirational story about how he started with entrepreneurship and why qualifications don’t matter. This is an older article but a must read!

Caines Arcade – A heart felt video about how a little boy created an arcade out of card board boxes. Just watch it!

How To Change Yourself And/or Your Life – Justine reveals some very personal stories in this article and gives some inspiring examples of how to change yourself and deal with adversity.

The New American Family: Flexibility and Unconventional Lifestyles to Make Ends Meet – Glen’s wife writes about her life after choosing her children over her day job.

Single Income Family: How To Survive And Thrive – Rob over at Boomer and Echo talks about how to survive with a single income family.

The Dirty Truth About Working From Home – Geoff
discusses the pros and cons of working from your home office.

Is Striking It Rich the Main Reason to Start a Business? – Kevin provides some insight on the proper motivations for starting a business.

Blogging Can Be A Great Side Income Or Full Time Job: How To Get Started – Peter talks about his success blogging for extra money and how to get started.

How to Figure Out Your Business When You Don’t Have a Clue What You Are Doing – Erin talks about some of her experiences with her business and provides some great advice.

Women: Are You Leaving $500,000 on the Table? – Miranda is one of the most prolific writers I know. Here she provides some helpful advice to both men and women(despite the title of the article).

Lonely Entrepreneur: Battling Isolation when You Have a Home Business – Starting a business from home doesn’t have to be lonely.

Finding a Job After School In a Terrible Market – This one isn’t about entrepreneurship in the classical sense. But the author gives some great advice to students who are graduating to a terrible job market.

My Career As A Work-from-home Hermit – David talks about his experiences as a work from home hermit.

Have a great weekend!

What Do I Do For A Living?

In order to understand why I still work, you have to know what I do for a living. First off, I’m proud to say that I work in technology as an electrical engineer.

In a nutshell, I’m one of a handful of people at my company that designs low level computer hardware that is used in a wide variety of consumer devices today. In fact, our technology powers digital cameras, cell phones, digital printers etc… You name it and our technology is probably inside in some form or another.

I absolutely love what I do for a living and there’s no way that I’d be able to continue designing computer hardware without the infrastructure that my company provides. I also have the luxury of working as an engineer knowing that I do not need the money at all. As a result, I can be a little more picky in deciding what I want to work on and why.

The other aspect about my job that I enjoy is that my company is very flexible about where I physically do my work. Because I can login to my computer from anywhere there’s an internet connection, I can work from home if I have to in case there’s an family matter that requires my attention.

The World Is Becoming Dominated By Tech

Besides loving what I do for a living, I also work at my day job so I don’t become obsolete. The world of technology moves very fast and if you stop to take a breath, then it can easily pass you by.

So while selling wedding linens online, running my blog and running my online store course is fun and very lucrative, it doesn’t really exercise my brain to the same extent that my hardware design job does. In fact, my day job allows me to stay on top of technology trends in both computer hardware and software that would be difficult to follow otherwise.

But why do I care? After all, if I don’t really need the money, then why work? Why should I bother keeping up with technology?

If you stop and think about it, more and more service professions are being taken over by technology every single day. For example, I just did my taxes last month. But instead of paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to an accountant, I filed my taxes using a computer program for only about 50 bucks.

Instead of hiring a graphic design artist to create logos or manipulate graphics for my blog, I now use Adobe Photoshop. Instead of opening a brick and mortar store and hiring workers, I now have a computer server take orders for me online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The other day, I shopped at my local grocery store and noticed that 90% of the checkout aisles were now populated with self-checkout machines. These new self-checkout machines enable just one human worker to oversee 8 or more checkout lines simultaneously! And I’m willing to bet that some supermarket workers got laid off as a result!

If you take a moment and look around, you’ll realize that technology is creeping its way into every part of our lives. And if you are not careful, your profession or business could be replaced by a piece of technology as well if you stop paying attention.

Don’t Underestimate Technology

So how do you stop this from happening to you? In a nutshell, you have only 2 choices. You can continue to ignore everything that is happening around you, or you can embrace it!

A byproduct of running my blog is that I receive emails from readers every single day asking for business advice.

“Steve, I want to make money online with an online store but I don’t know anything about websites or computers. Can you help me?”

“Steve, I just want someone to set everything up for me and focus on the business. Would you be willing to do it?”

Much to my dismay, the majority of emails that I receive are from readers who are either afraid of or want absolutely nothing to do with technology. In fact, the most common question I get asked is…

I just want to sell things online and make money. Where can I find someone to do all of the computer stuff?

Wanting to focus on the business is all fine and good, but if you are opening an “online” business, shouldn’t you at least understand the basics about how the “online” portion works?

Here’s what usually happens next.

• Entrepreneur pays a lot of money to a developer or service to create a website for them along with some custom features.
• Entrepreneur has very little grasp about the extent and work involved in making certain changes. He or she ends up wasting a lot of money on features that are not well thought out
• Entrepreneur’s lack of knowledge leads to a major delay in launching website.
• Entrepreneur finds some bugs and has to contact the developer each time there’s a problem. Meanwhile, potential business is lost
• Entrepreneur contacts developer for every little change that needs to be made. The costs start to add up and the turnaround time is extremely long

I have a friend that found someone on Elance to make some small edits to his online store. And while the developer implemented the features he requested properly, he did it in such a way that the code was extremely fragile and unmaintainable. Therefore, every time he needed to make any minor change, he was forced to pay the developer’s hourly fee.

How To Stay Relevant

So how can you avoid this situation? The answer is that you need to invest some time to learn the basics! After all, if you want to run a business online, you should at least understand how things work! That is why I always advise the students of my class to read up on the fundamentals of html/css and how websites work so they get a feel for what is going on.

You don’t have to become an expert, you just need to possess a working knowledge of how to read the language of the web! Most importantly, you must have the right attitude. It’s never too late to learn new things and you have to be willing to try.

Money Now Is Not Money Later

So where am I going with all of this? While my wife and I make a good deal of money selling linens online, we both realize that our business could become obsolete if we are not careful. If we don’t keep up with the trends, we can be overtaken at a moments notice.

So by living and breathing technology on a day to day basis, we hope to stay on top of things and anticipate the next set of changes we need to make in our business and daily lives.

Is there anything truly special about my day job? Probably not. But my day job is my hedge against the future. After all, technology can’t replace me if I’m the one creating the technology right?

• How We Doubled Our Mobile Sales By Designing A Mobile Version Of Our Website
• How To Design A Killer Mobile Ecommerce Website That Will Boost Sales
• 3 Ways To Design A Mobile Optimized Ecommerce Website And The Tradeoffs You Must Make

In today’s article, I’m going to discuss the most important elements of mobile website design. One of the hardest parts of designing a mobile optimized website is that the screen is so darn tiny. In most cases, you have as little as one-tenth of the screen real estate compared to that of a desktop or a laptop, yet you still need to convey the same level of information to your potential customers.

Because the discrepancy in screen real estate is so large, you need to make some hard choices when designing the pages and navigation on your mobile site. And it becomes even more crucial that you utilize each and every pixel on the screen to its full advantage. Here’s how I made some of the design decisions with our online store website.

Designing The Header And Footer

The header and footers for your mobile website are probably the most important parts of your entire design. Why? It’s because the header and the footer is shown on every single page of your website. And since they both take up valuable screen real estate, it’s crucial that you use this space wisely.

If you’ve been running your shop for long enough, you should already have an idea of how your customers navigate through your shop. In my case, I used Crazy Egg to tell me which links and navigational elements were used the most. Below is a heat map of the customer activity on my online store.



First off, what is heat map? A heat map is a graphical representation of how a customer interacts with a website. The brighter the spot, the more customers clicked on that particular link. Looking at the heat map for my online store, it becomes pretty obvious what the hottest navigation points are.

The most glaring hotspot that I see is the search bar. Most customers are not willing to randomly navigate through your shop and as a result, they go straight for search. And if they don’t find what they are looking for on the current page and they can’t find the search bar, they are going to abandon your website. It’s that simple.

The other hotspots that stand out are the “About Us” page, the “Contact Us” page, the “View Cart” page, the “My Account” page and the various other content pages that I have on my online store.

How I Decided To Organize My Header/Footer

So based on this information, I came up with the following header and footer design.

Due to constraints on screen real estate, I obviously couldn’t just shove everything into the header.

So what I decided to do was split these links between both the header and the footer.

Ultimately, I placed all of the shopping and checkout related navigation in the header and included all of the informational content about our store in the footer.

This turned out to be a good compromise because all of the most visited links for my shop can still be found on every single page of the site without too much trouble and it doesn’t look too cluttered.

Designing The Product Pages

How you choose to organize your product pages on your mobile website is extremely important as well. Why? People on mobile phones don’t like scrolling down very far in order to add something to their shopping cart.

So while it’s all fine and good that you have very detailed product descriptions, chances are most customers will not want to read a lot of text on their tiny phone screens.

Therefore, it’s essential that you make all of the content elements on your product pages collapsible.

When a customer first arrives on a product page, by default they should see nothing but a high level description. And if they choose, they can click on a collapsible link to see the rest of the information.

In my mobile design, the picture to the right shows what a customer sees when they first land on a product page. If they click on “Description”, the paragraph will expand and they will get a more in depth description of the product.

However by default, if all they want to do is see a picture of the item, they can add it to their shopping cart without scrolling down at all.

The other key element of my product page to make a note of is the breadcrumb navigation at the top. At any point in time, the customer can backtrack through the exact path that they took to arrive at the current product.

A breadcrumb makes navigation through the website much more convenient.

Optimizing General Navigation

Overall, one of the main differences between a desktop and a mobile site is that there should be as few text based links as possible on a mobile site. Text links aren’t necessarily bad as long as you keep them well spaced apart but in general, you want to use more substantial navigational elements.

The key is to think of someone you know with fat fingers and pretend that you are optimizing your website for that person. In a nutshell, all links should be large buttons or images.

In the picture to the right, all of my category and product level navigation links are large buttons that contain a picture of the product or the category and the name.

As a result, there is very little chance of someone tapping on the wrong link by mistake.

Optimizing Checkout

The checkout process for a mobile customer is much more tedious than a desktop customer because mobile users don’t have full mechanical keyboards. As a result, you need to make life easier for them by minimizing typing as much as possible. Here are some general guidelines on how to design your checkout pages.

• Use pull down menus instead of text fields – For example, instead of making a customer type out their state of residence, use a pull down menu instead.
• Limit forms to just the bare essentials – Don’t ask for any more information than you need in order to complete the sale.
• Use checkboxes and pre-populate fields if possible – For example, instead of making a customer type in their city and state, you can infer this information from their zip code.
• Offer Paypal Express – What’s nice about Paypal Express is that a customer’s address information can automatically be loaded when they log in to their account which reduces the amount of typing during checkout

All of the practices above also apply to a regular desktop ecommerce site but become even more crucial on a cell phone.

Conclusion

There are many tradeoffs and design changes that you need to make if you want to convert a mobile customer. And unfortunately no matter what, the mobile shopping experience is always going to be worse than shopping on your desktop.

Your goal as a mobile web designer is to minimize the negative impact of a small screen and a slower internet connection. Fortunately, every design element that I’ve described above can be easily implemented using JQuery Mobile. And the best part is that the JQuery Mobile framework is completely free.

To be honest, I’ve only scratched the surface of what JQuery mobile can do. So if you are interested in creating a mobile optimized website for your online store, you should definitely check out their website. The world is moving towards mobile whether you like it or not and you can either jump on that wave or miss the boat.

My Implementation Goals

To understand what was going on in my head through this whole process, I’m going to start off by talking about some of my goals and priorities. After all, you can’t discuss tradeoffs unless you know the priorities. Here were my main criteria for designing the mobile site.

• I wanted a highly usable site with an emphasis on great navigation and usability.
• I did not want to have to write or edit any complicated code.
• I wanted the mobile site to be easily maintainable and upgradable.
• I didn’t want to touch the functionality of the main site. As many of you probably already know, our store is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and we make money constantly. Therefore, I didn’t want to take the chance of accidentally breaking my desktop site during the mobile development process.
• I wanted both my main site and my mobile site to share the same database and images. In other words, both the mobile and desktop versions of my site had to share product and category data from the same source.
• I didn’t want to have to deal with cross browser and cross phone compatibility. I had a nightmare dealing with IE6 during the early days and I didn’t want to relive that experience.
• I wanted to reuse as much of the product descriptions and verbiage as possible without affecting the mobile experience.
• I wanted to complete this project within a month. At some point, I debated whether to outsource this whole project but decided against it after assessing the complexity. It would easily take a month in itself to write a detailed design spec and find a competent developer.

To sum everything up in the list above in plain language, I wanted to get a good mobile site up and running relatively quickly without requiring a lot of maintenance and without disrupting sales. In a nutshell, I had 3 choices on how to proceed.

Choice #1: Keep Everything The Same And Change The Stylesheet

I can’t tell you how badly I wanted this solution to work. In most cases, when you run a content heavy site or a blog, you can make your site mobile by simply modifying your CSS style sheet and changing the way your site is displayed on a mobile phone without touching the source files.

For example, I could easily optimize MyWifeQuitHerJob.com for mobile by removing the menus and ads altogether and displaying all of the content in one skinny column. In fact, there are several free WordPress plugins out on the market that do precisely that.

The beauty of the “stylesheet only” solution is that very few lines of php code need to change. You can simply modify the CSS, have your content wrap and the user never has to scroll sideways on their cell phone. If I were to adopt this methodology, I could easily finish up my mobile site in a week or less.

But the big problem here is that ecommerce stores require extremely efficient navigation. You can’t just wrap everything up in a skinny column and hope that a customer will buy from you. The layout of a desktop site and mobile site is completely different in that you have to make much more efficient use of your screen real estate!

Even still, I messed around with the stylesheet of my online store for a few hours before I decided that this methodology was not going to work without heavy modification of the source code.

In reality, I probably could have forced things by conditionalizing certain parts of the code to display differently for mobile but it would have violated several of my main criteria.

• No touching of the main site source. Might break the desktop site
• Doesn’t address cross browser compatibility
• Not easily upgradable as new mobile standards are introduced
• Pain in the butt to maintain

Choice #2: Use A Mobile Plugin For My Shopping Cart

Once I shot down choice #1, I started scouring the net for good mobile plugins for my shopping cart. Under most circumstances, buying a mobile plugin is the best of both worlds. One, you get a website that is mobile ready that works out of the box. And two, you don’t have to do that much work except for customizing the plugin.

There were several plugins for my particular shopping cart that were available for download, but after playing around with them for awhile, I realized that there was no single plugin that matched exactly with what I wanted to do. In other words, I was too anal retentive and couldn’t find anything I liked.

I thought about making custom changes to the source code for the plugins I tested but the code was very hard to read and probably would have taken me a good amount of time to modify correctly.

Plus, there was a risk of inadvertently breaking other features. Here were some of the things that I didn’t like about the mobile plugins I tried.

• I wanted the option to display an abridged version of the descriptions to mobile users and full descriptions to desktop users
• I wanted full control over how products and categories were displayed. In particular, our store sells personalized items so I wanted the user interface for that category to behave differently from the rest.
• I wanted full control over all aspects of the navigation. In other words, I was very particular about where I wanted certain elements to be placed such as the search bar and breadcrumbs.

The problem with using a shopping cart plugin is that the mobile experience is very cookie cutter. Because the plugin developers have to cater to the general public, you will rarely find all of the necessary features that pertain to your specific shop.

Overall though, it was an extremely tough decision. On one hand, I could get up and running right away. But on the other hand, the mobile experience wouldn’t be quite what I wanted. The real question was whether it was good enough…

Choice #3: Design My Own Mobile Site

I’ll stop the suspense here and tell you that this was the choice that I ultimately made. But to be honest, everything about this choice didn’t make sense in the beginning.

For one thing, I didn’t know jack about how to design a mobile website. Two, I wanted to finish my mobile site within a month. With two kids, a full time job, an online store, a blog and an online store course, my time was extremely limited.

And three, I didn’t know jack about how to design a mobile website. By the way, did I mention that I didn’t know jack about how to design a mobile website?

Thankfully, while I was doing my research, I came across a mobile design framework called JQuery mobile. If you’ve never heard of JQuery Mobile before, I recommend that you check out their website.

In a nutshell, the JQuery mobile framework allows you use pre-built constructs that are guaranteed to work across multiple mobile platforms in designing your website.

In other words, by using the framework I didn’t have to worry about my mobile site being compatible on different phones. The maintenance of my mobile site would be minimal because I could simply upgrade the JQuery framework files and not my source code when new features were available.

In my next article, I’ll go over the exact features that JQuery mobile offers and how I used these elements with my mobile site. What’s nice is that JQuery mobile allows you to be a competent mobile web designer without having to deal with a lot of extra overhead. Since I knew my shopping cart extremely well, I was able to easily adapt my website to the JQuery mobile framework.

Conclusion

Ultimately, I managed to design a fully custom mobile website in 3 solid weekends of hard work. Just to illustrate the tradeoffs that I ultimately made, here’s a list of things that I had to concede.

• I ended up with 2 completely different sets of source code, one for mobile and one for desktop. Once I started, I knew that this was inevitable. However both websites use the same exact database and the exact same images so maintenance is minimal. I also ended up modifying the database slightly to optionally include separate product and category descriptions.
• I ended up having to write a lot of code. The bright side of all this is that I now know the ins and outs of how to create a mobile site. Plus, I finished it in under a month!

If I were to do this all over again, I would still go with Choice #3 for my online store. However, most shop owners can probably get by with a mobile plugin as long as the shop does not require too much customization. The main thing is to decide up front which aspects of mobile design are important to you and to decide on the tradeoffs.

One of my greatest weaknesses is that I like everything the way I want which sometimes ends up being a lot more work. But in this case however, I still managed to meet my scheduled goals thanks to JQuery Mobile. In my next article, I’ll go into more detail about specific design choices that I made with my mobile site. Stay tuned!

Tailor Your Mobile Design For People With Fat Fingers

The first problem that mobile users face is that clicking on links using a finger is much less accurate than with a mouse.

And in order to create an effective mobile website, you have to understand the difference between “tapping” and “clicking”.

I’m not going to lie. I didn’t really fully comprehend the concept either until I watched my little 4 year old daughter shop on our site.

One day, I decided to show her what Mommy did during the day by directing her to our online store website on my iPad. So I handed her the tablet and watched closely as she navigated around the site.

Me: So if you touch right there, you can see our “About Us” page. And if you click there, you can see some really pretty products that we sell in our store

Daughter: I want to see some pretty products Daddy.

Me: Okay, go ahead and touch “Bestsellers”

(Daughter taps the wrong link)

Me: You have to pinch to zoom in first and then touch it

Daughter: I’m sorry Daddy, my fingers must be too big.

Big FLASHING RED light! How the heck could my 4 year old daughter’s fingers be too big? In fact, she found the first problem with our desktop website. Our text links were too hard to tap!

The main problem with mobile users is that they don’t use mice so they can’t tap on links very precisely. Therefore, all text based links must be converted into large buttons that can easily be pressed without accidentally hitting an adjacent link.

Never Make A Customer Scroll Sideways

This one is actually pretty obvious, but for some reason I never saw the big deal until I actually tried to shop at my online store on my cell phone. Having to zoom in to click on links followed by zooming out to see the pictures was a major pain in the butt.

Therefore, creating a single column website that automatically adjusts to the width of a cell phone screen was my number 1 criteria. In addition, I also discovered some areas on my desktop site where I used mouse hovers to enlarge pictures from a thumbnail. Because there’s no mouse on a phone, these images were either not getting blown up properly or taking up the entire screen when someone accidentally did tap on it.

Make Crucial Navigation Elements Accessible

This is probably one of the hardest parts of mobile website design and I’ll go over all of the tradeoffs that I dealt with in a future article. But in a nutshell, you have about one eighth of the screen real estate as you do on a desktop and you still have to manage to cram all of the important navigation elements onto a 4 inch screen.

In order to figure out the most important elements of your site, you have to rely heavily on your analytics. Figure out which pages a customer looks at the most and make those pages the most easily accessible on your site. Any filler pages or non-crucial content should either be pushed all the way down to the bottom or removed in its entirety.

If you thought that the search bar was important for your desktop site, it becomes even more crucial that your mobile site has a search bar present at all times. People get frustrated easily on a phone so the easier it is to find a product, the better.

Mobile Sites Need To Load Quickly

With mobile connection speeds and mobile processors getting faster and faster, this will probably become less of a factor as time goes on. However, right now phones are largely limited by processing speed and connection speed. Therefore, it’s important to create a mobile website design that is leaner and faster to load than your desktop site.

According to the Gomez Group, mobile customers expect their page to load in under 5 seconds or they are outta there.


Right now, my desktop site loads in a little under 2 seconds on a cable modem connection. Since phones have much higher latencies and slower bandwidths, that means I need to cut down on the image sizes for my mobile site. Phone screens are only 4-5 inches anyways, so there’s no reason to send a customer a high res photo when a small photo will work just fine. Here are some other ways to make your website load faster.

Too Much Text Will Overwhelm A Customer

When I first designed my desktop site, I made sure that I wrote a decent amount of verbiage for every category and product description.

Not only was this good for providing a customer with more information about my products but it was also beneficial for SEO as well. On mobile however, the problem is that when you take a whole lot of text and compress it into one skinny column, you get a ton of pages to scroll through.

When shopping on a phone, pictures are much more important than text and you absolutely don’t want to have someone scroll through pages and pages of verbiage just to get to the “Add To Cart” button. The best way to deal with this problem is to use “collapsible” elements in your design.

Give a customer the choice of whether they want to read the descriptions or not. Provide as little information as possible up front, and let the customer explore your products on their own volition.

Conclusion

What I described above pretty much outlines most of the goals that I wanted to achieve with the mobile version of my online store website. In my next article, I’m going to talk about some of the many tradeoffs that I had to make in order to complete this mobile project within a reasonable time frame.

Unfortunately in the real world, it is not always possible to get everything you want without a lot of sacrifice. As with any task, you have to weigh the development costs with the potential gain. My next post should be interesting so stay tuned!

Click on the picture above to check out my mobile site!

Now my mobile ecommerce site has been up for a few months now and the reason I haven’t mentioned anything about it until this point was because I wanted to gather at least 2 months worth of data before reporting the results.

So while I’m going to show you some actual data taken from my mobile ecommerce site along with some of my observations, today’s article is actually just part 1 of a multi-part series about my experiences in the world of mobile website creation.

In my next few articles, I’m going to describe to you all of the thought processes and tradeoffs that were involved in creating my mobile ecommerce site along with a description of exactly how I approached the problem. Now on to the results!

On Site Engagement Metrics

Before I begin talking about my data, I wanted to give you a brief outline of what is being compared in the tables below. First off, all of the data being presented below is for the iPhone only.

Personally, I don’t consider the iPad a mobile device since it performs the same or better than a desktop device. Therefore, it’s usually better to show iPad users the full version of your website.

The reason I’m not showing you any Android phone data is because the number of iPhone shoppers far exceeds Android users according to my stats.

The data for the “full site” vs the “mobile site” was gathered at different times. For example, the “full site” numbers were taken during November and December of last year which represents our store’s busiest time of the year.

The numbers for our “mobile site” were taken during the latter part of February and all of March. Of course a better test would have been to do A/B testing on the two versions of the site, but I didn’t really see a benefit to doing that since I already had a gut feeling that the mobile site would perform better. In any case, here are the numbers

Full Site Engagement Metrics


Mobile Site Engagement Metrics


Overall, the numbers weren’t exactly what I was expecting. The bounce rate for the mobile site was actually slightly higher than the regular site and the time on site metrics were roughly similar.

However, one metric that did stand out was that mobile site users browsed 4.86 pages per visit as opposed to only 2.97 on the full site for cost-per-click(cpc) users.

Note: Comparing the cost per click data in the tables above is a better apples to apples comparison since all of the traffic is completely targeted to what I sell on my online store.

So what does this tell me? Because our mobile site is faster and easier to browse, customers are more likely to browse more products and take a more in depth look into our store. The more pages a customer browses, the more likely that he or she will make a purchase.

The Conversion Numbers

What’s the point in having a separate mobile site unless it improves the conversion rate? Let’s take a closer look at the conversion numbers for both versions of my store.

Full Site Conversion Metrics


Mobile Site Conversion Metrics


As you can see in the data above, the mobile site has a 2X advantage over the full site in terms of the conversion rate. This is exactly what I was hoping for!

While a 2.11% conversion rate isn’t nearly as good as what I get for iPad and desktop users, this is much better than what I had before. Personally, I think that mobile phone shopping is still at its infancy.

Experts are projecting that in just a few years, mobile ecommerce traffic will exceed that of desktop computers which means that my percentage of revenue from mobile devices will continue to grow.

Why The Data Doesn’t Surprise Me

Have you ever tried shopping on your mobile phone? Have you ever tried browsing a full blown desktop website on a tiny touch screen? The experience pretty much sucks. Here’s why you are shedding customers by displaying your full website to mobile visitors.

• Any time a customer has to scroll horizontally, you’re probably going to lose that customer
• Any time a customer has to pinch to zoom, you’re probably going to lose that customer
• Any time a customer miss clicks on a hyper link because they have fat fingers, you’re probably going to lose that customer

If you’ve ever tried to shop on your phone (which is something I spent a lot of time doing while designing my mobile site), the experience is bad enough as it is without having to scroll around. The more user friendly your site is, the more likely a customer will shop and actually make a purchase.

With the number of mobile shoppers increasing exponentially every year, this is an issue that you can no longer avoid. In my next article, I’m going to talk about some of the design decisions that I made in creating my mobile site.

Unfortunately, it’s not a cake walk and there are many tradeoffs that you have to make upfront depending on how well you want your site to perform versus the amount of work and maintenance involved. Stay tuned!