Month: November 2017

The 5‐step program to get out of an abusive commerce relationship

The following is the 5 steps program to a stable and healthy commerce website. The following steps will show how to secure and log users actions on the website. Logging the failures and errors will allow identifying the frequently encountered bugs. Next reviewing and improving key areas of the website will create a user friendly, powerful, professional and fast website. The improvements will focus on search, checkout, user registration and user self-service applications. After the program is complete the company will increase sales, reliability and no emergency phone calls on the holidays.

Step 1) Secure your website and set up logging to record failures
Every website has the possibility of a data breach or hack. It is important to audit your website and identify any security issues as soon as possible. You do not want to have a data breach and find out you forgot to lock the doors. The company leadership will lose trust in your ability. Go to and read how to secure your website.
The challenge with websites vs a physical store is a online user shopping experience provides no feedback unless you have the infrastructure to record and audit the shopping experience. In the past, I have found the Dynatrace product to provide the best out of box support with minimal customization. With Dynatrace setup you can get an average user experience score for each session. The session score is based on how fast the website displays with the goal of less than a second and any request that generates errors in the logs or returns failed web service. At a high level, this is the best method without customizations to quickly identify failures.
Step 2) Log and triage major bugs
Once the website is secure and logging has been set up it is important to triage the bugs. If you have an abusive commerce website with a lot of failures you need to look at the bugs that impact the most users and focus on improving the user experience. During this time it is import to record all the bugs and triage the bugs. Not all bugs are created equal and some bugs impact more users than other bugs. Work smart and efficient when dealing with a unstable website.
Step 3) Audit and resolve your search page
If your company sells more than 5 products it is important to have an outstanding search page. The search page needs to be fast, accurate and relevant.  Search results need to be returned and displayed to the user in less than a second. The results returned need to be accurate for the specific user. Display accurate information on inventory availability and user-friendly marketing content. You need to be selective with what data you display. Less results displayed is better when dealing with search. Search results need to be relevant for the specific users. Display the customer specific price and support sorting by the customer specific price. The search page needs to be accurate and relevant using high value data.
Step 4) Audit and resolve your checkout flow
The checkout flow is a very import part of the commerce website. The checkout process allows to order and pay for the company products and service. Companies expect the checkout process to be reliable, fault tolerant and quick. The checkout process needs to be developed on a stable platform with a overall architecture. Frequently checkout process is built from a ad how approach. This causes the checkout process to have frequent failures. Each failure experienced is going to reduce the revenue due to lost sales.
Step 5) Audit and resolve your user registration, login process and my account
The ability to create user account and user register needs to be 100% reliable process with no depenedency on the back end systems. The process needs to be fault taulerant and accurate. The process needs to be as simple as quick as possible. Each additional page you add to a registration will cause 10% to abandon the process.
After completing the program you will have a healthy and stable website. Your website will track and notify when online shopper have failures. The search and checkout experience will be simple, accurate and quick. Your companies revenue will increase due to reliable website and increased sales.

Best Practice for Search Suggestions

Search is the lynchpin for a commerce modern website. A customer will not buy a product if they cannot find product on your company’s search. A major improvement in users experience from a search page 10 years ago vs today is the intelligent search suggestions. Search suggestions allow you the ability to recommend the best search and direct the user to the correct page. The following recommendations allow you to create search suggestions that will be fast, relevant and provide the correct results with analytics.
The first recommendation for search suggestions is to log and analyze all search executed on the website. The goal is to identify automatically what search is a successful and failure. An example of a successful search would be if the user purchases a product or downloads the product marketing material. If the user attempts a search and then starts another search without adding to the cart two minutes later we consider the first search a failed result. The reasoning is because the user would have stop searching if analyzing this search history allows us to identify what search that is successful or failure.  This is the approach Google uses to recommend a search suggestion and implement spell suggestions.
In addition, search suggestion needs to remember what each specific users search history and recommends search that is frequently executed by the user. If the user liked it in the past it is best to remember and offer the same suggestion. This is the same strategy a waitress at the restaurant will use if the customer orders the same items frequently. By remembering the standard order and offering what they frequently purchase at the beginning you are providing a customer-specific experience.
Next, we need to be careful to only display the right data. Show a result with products that are not relevant will cause the user to leave. To display relevant search results it is best to only display results after three characters are entered. One or two character does not give enough context to make a good guess. If some searches for “b” or “ba” we have no idea if they are searching for a bat, bathroom or bathhouse.
Another approach is to only display a select few categories on the page. My rule of thumb is to display the only top five categories. The first category will only display the top three subcategories. If you are selling products I would recommend showing the top five products in the search suggestion. Each product should have a product image, marketing product name, short description, and user purchase price.
The final search suggestion is to only display a suggestion if the customer has access to see the product. You never want to recommend a search where no results are returned. This is important if the company will sell select set of products to a only a few customers. Another scenario is when the company will sell the unique product for a geographic region or for a specific country. If your company limits what products are sold to each customer it is important to suggest search where the user will see at least one product.
Implementing the above steps for your search suggestion will allow you to have an excellent search experience. The above suggestions focus on providing a customer-specific experience and only display relevant data.

The dummy version to test your website security

Security is something that is important when the public has the ability to access the services. The ability for people to penetrate a network is dummy proof and my grand ma could do it with guidance. I do not want to show someone how to do this. The reason is because that will just increase the amount of people trying to penetrate the network.
My personal goal is to increase perception and help teach people to lock the doors to your servers. The problem is IT needs to approve a reason to spend the money. Identify specific security failure and risk help to justify securing your computer infrastructure. It is easy to justify a few thousand dollars expense if you are not the next target with a average of 4 million dollar cost due to a hack.
Cross site scripting error
import proper password storage
– default password (ask you vendor and verify this is not used)
– security gardening steps
lack of vpn and firewall
legal requirements based on jurisdiction
If any of the above security check fail you need to get a security audit and resolve the security failers right away. Treat the failure as a warning and assume you have additional issues. The failure is the bird in the coal mine. Each day you wait to fix the issue is another day you can be attacked. Each day is another oppurtiny for your company finance and data to be attacked. Fix your security and focus on security for all new development.