Preface
PAINFUL LESSONS LED TO THE CREATION OF THIS BOOK.
In late 2005, I (Khalid) had the opportunity to lead the design and implementation of one of the largest ecommerce websites in North America, with a huge budget: $15 million. My team of 20 senior ecommerce developers and I built a “feature-rich” website that integrated with several external systems in a miraculous three months. While I pushed my team to work harder and spend more nights at the office, the marketing team assembled first-year revenue projections: $500 million!
Excitement built as the go-live deadline was approaching. However, I still had concerns: will visitors come to the site? On the go-live day, I sat with the other two architects to monitor the server’s performance. I was wrong. The website received tens of thousands of visitors during the first hour. Everyone was ecstatic. Yes, visitors were coming.
As the hours passed, though, my earlier tension built up again. Despite the site receiving tens of thousands of visitors, customers placed fewer than 10 orders in those first critical hours. Ten orders was all we had to show our client for their $15 million investment. It was a disaster.
Why weren’t these visitors converting into customers? Looking back, the low number of orders wasn’t at all surprising.
We worked with an ad agency to create the design for the website. During the three months of implementation, we never discussed conversions, or even orders. In most cases, a few technical people, with little usability ...