eCommerce Blog

Practical eCommerce recently published one of my articles on crowdsourcing. I think some of these resources would also be helpful to Commercewiki readers, therefore I thought of mentioning the article on this blog as well. Here is the link to the complete article but if you are only interested in the summary, here are some key points:

1. Crowdsourcing taps into the collective intelligence of online communities to complete business-related tasks that a company would normally either perform itself or outsource to a third-party provider.
2. There are several opportunities to leverage the wisdom of crowd in performing activities at a significantly lower cost, comparing to hiring a third party agency to perform those activities.
3. Some of the very interesting opportunities that I really like are
   1. Naming your business (Squadhelp.com) – you can get 30-40 domain name suggestions for as low as $10.
   2. Designing a logo or design (99designs.com) –great designs submitted from designers across the globe.
   3. Testing – uTest.com or usertesting.com for functional and usability testing.

In today’s world, it is extremely important to maximize the return from every investment and I believe crowdsourcing offers a significant opportunity in reducing the risk and maximizing the quality of your online business offering.

In the offline world, imagine walking into a store and you see clutter everywhere – the only thing that is clearly visible is an exit sign. However good the pricing is, if the store is not organized in a presentable manner, you are likely to walk straight through that exit door. Similarly in the online world, a lot of online retailers do not focus on getting objective feedback from external users on site usability. This is true especially for the small and medium size retailers who feel that things like usability testing are for the big guys who have a lot of money at their disposal. Not any more – there are several cost effective tools available now that would allow you to test and improve the usability of your site in an objective way, without causing a dent in your wallet. Here are 10 low cost ways to understand and improve the usability of your site: Read the rest of this entry »