Following yesterday's piece on e-commerce and marketing (and many thanks to Simon for pointing out my misreading of some of the source material) - a report from Secure Trading says 66 per cent of companies don't have a plan for e-business or if they do, their results aren't reflecting the business plan.
Secure Trading believes the problem is badly-designed websites which are difficult to negotiate and which value flash animation above clarity. Funnily enough I've always thought that was the secret of Google's success - when all the other search engines were offering news headlines and goodness knows what else, Google just put a box there for you to enter your search text and that was it.
Certainly the more complex a website gets the more difficult it is to get around; only yesterday my wife and I were looking for tickets to BBC shows, so we went into the site of one of the independents that produces one of our favourite comedy shows. Once the tedious but clever animation had stopped, we clicked on the 'tickets' section - and were offered a load of CDs and DVDs. The 'shop' page was identical - we spent ages and couldn't find tickets anywhere.
Anyone found any other examples of businesses failing to sell things because the website won't let you..?
