Why selling on the web is hard

We are currently on our fifth full iteration of our website. And when I say iteration, I mean full gut wrenching, throw everything out and do it again iteration. That works out to over one full iteration per year.

We’ve used the simplest e-commerce system you can use, called Mal’s-ecommerce, through a PHP based cart and then eventually to our current system based upon Elastic Path.

Trust me, it’s hard. But, that isn’t the hardest part of e-commerce. The hardest part on the web is trust. Trust is way harder to imbue in your visitors than anything else.

The whole trust issue was reinforced to me yesterday. My sister’s PC got infected with spyware. As the family IT guy I got the call. Of all of the tools to cure the problem, all of the ones I’d heard of didn’t work. So, how can I figure out which of the remaining tools I can trust? Well, you can’t. You just have to guess.

Thankfully I guessed right but I had no real information to go on. The bad ones look just as good as the genuine ones.

How to go about imbuing trust in your website I will leave for another day.