Great article...its really something people need to remember. You may want the PERFECT website, but all the "perfect" websites that you are comparing yourself to, have spent close to a decade progressing to the current status. So its better to launch early, even if it looks like crap, just to see what people say.
If "crappy design" is the only negative comment your site gets, you know you are on your way to big bucks. Because you can always update the design at a later time
That's the advantage of the sort of analysis in this article, though - testing ideas by looking at other web sites is almost like implementing them yourself and then evolving.
This article and comments came at a good time for me just now - I'm working on a cart thing and trying to answer some of the same questions. One area I'm worried about - patents. As if good UI and software development wasn't hard enough, the whole patent mess makes it much more complicated. Aside from technical limitations, from a legal standpoint what can I do and what can I not do? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-click
I once worked for a web analytics company. One of the very popular presentations was an overlay of the customer's page which showed counts and percentages for every link and button off the page. It was a simple visual that showed what was converting and what was not. You should try to collect this data even if you are not using an expensive service. It facilitates little optimization experiments.
I use Google Analytics on several sites. It's got the same view you're talking about. We like it a lot although there are other things I'd like to change about GA. Can anyone suggest alternative web/ecommerce analytics?
Interesting - thanks. I have a friend who used to work at Coremetrics. I didn't realize it was so expensive. Maybe it wouldn't seem like so much if we weren't all seduced by the free Google stuff.
If "crappy design" is the only negative comment your site gets, you know you are on your way to big bucks. Because you can always update the design at a later time