Stats, Ecommerce and Real Life

There's a new ecommerce site abandonment thread at cre8asiteforums discussing another shopping cart abandonment article. To be honest, I find many of these articles lacking and suspect that, in the quest to automate everything, something vital is left out: real people. Those same ones that visit your website.

C'mon. How many times have you visited Adobe or Macromedia to see what they had? And you made a purchase every time?

I sometimes think a background in sales — heck, even a part-time job as a store salesperson on commission — would help. Now, while that sounds like a smart-alec remark, I don't intend it that way at all. It's just that there is a LOT of value in learning how to deal with people, and learning how to sell. Especially when your income depends on it.

There's more to sales than just automating everything and tracking all them "visitor units" through an online store to arrive at some kind of conclusion as to what's really happening. Tunnel vision with bean counting and stats. That's what I call it.

Aw, heck, what do I know. <wink>