As realms of business go, eCommerce is one of the fastest – and is populated by some very impatient people. You can have the greatest product in the world, but it won’t matter one bit if your pages load so slowly that interested parties leave, searching for faster waters. And as the speed of  the internet continues to increase, the patience of online shoppers will continue to decrease, leaving the savvy eCommerce owner no choice but to make sure his sleek, well designed website loads fast.

So here you are, the dedicated eCommerce operator, and after having invested a great deal of time into designing your online store, you notice that it still doesn’t look quite right. You can’t put your finger on it – after all, you designed a website that any consumer would want to visit, one that is open and honest and friendly, and still demonstrates to the customer why they should buy your products. If it feels like you have the general concepts of design down, but would like to get into the specifics, it may be time for some discussion about advanced user experience.

Over the years, as the world wide web has grown, it has come to encompass many aspects of a users life. While once it was used for nothing more than sending email between friends, making the rare purchase of an exotic, hard to find item, or venturing into a chat room, there are now billions of ways for people to spend their time online, including one of the more recent, but important, considerations for an eCommerce operator – social media.

The internet is a complicated place, and there’s a very good reason that the part it’s most widely known for is called the world wide web. Even if your website is brilliantly designed, and has an excellent product, there may be plenty of other companies and small business owners competing with you. So how do you make yourself stand out among these competitors? Well, one way is to remember that the internet is more than just HTML and FTP – it has a caste system, and at the top are the technologically elite. We’ll show that not only can these elite be your best spokesmen – they’ll often do it for free.

So we’ve talked about how to build a website people like, and we’ve talked about how to gather metrics, both of which are useful skills for any small eBusiness owner. But a question still remains: How do I know what my customers really like? Thankfully, there are ways to find this out, and in this article, we’re going to talk about one of the simplest: A/B testing.

Welcome to Maturing Web Analytics. This article is for everyone who, after reading Beginning Web Analytics, following the links, and setting up your own web analytics, now want to take the next step. You have plenty of data filtering in now, so the question becomes, how can I turn this data into profit?

For many people, web analytics is a scary term, conjuring up mental images of failed math classes. That’s probably what brought you here: You were pondering methods of bringing more traffic to your website when someone brought up the term “web analytics“, and all of the sudden those nightmares kicked in.

But when you recovered, as the serious eCommerce entrepreneur you are, you got online with the goal of looking the term up. And now you’re here, you’re interested, and you’re a little confused. What are web analytics? Are they really worth investing in? What are they going to cost me? How much time do they take?

You don’t need a degree in design to craft a strong user experience. While a professional may know a lot more than you do about crafting a functional and beautiful website – that is their job after all – not everyone can afford this expertise, especially when first starting out. However, instead of struggling along with a poor UX until you can afford to hire a design company, lets talk about a few simple ways you can make your website more user friendly.

Welcome to Beginning UX, a series dealing with the importance of crafting a strong user experience – and why, no matter how amazing your product is, it’s worth learning the techniques necessary to take your website from the most basic level of user friendly design all the way to incorporation of social media and more.