Also i never thought how important is to put in the right time all the payment systems for paying online.. now im aware of it, thanks.

> Design for the 20%

I agree, the design is not so important as “message”

Having read your post I went back through the sight and made a couple of changes. Thanks for the info, you know sometimes you cannot see for looking lol.

I recently got a traffic ticket and was required to take up a defensive driving course in California. I would like to shate my experience with you. I surfed through several websites, and finally subscribed with I Drive Safely (www.idrivesafely.com/California). In the process, I discovered following mistakes made by most of the websites.

Blunder #10: No “About Us” page or privacy policy

There were no privacy policies, disclaimer, or about us page. It made be skeptical that this company is for real.

Blunder #9: Where is the price?

I could not find price on most of these websites. I had to literally hunt around to find the actual price.
Although from a web designer perspective, this may be a good “feature”, it will only take a genius to figure out that they have google through rocket science before the price will magically appear on site.

Blunder #8: Design for the 20%

Most of the companies forget Pareto 80-20 principle, and design the website to account for all exceptional cases. I left many of the traffic school websites because of the time taken, and complexities involved in checking out.

Blunder #7: Weak Security

After going through all kinds of messages and disclaimers about how they valued their customer’s security, I completed the registration form in some of the websites. My confidence in that website disappeared when I saw the final thank you page. It said “Thank you for registering, please note your user ID and password for your records”. There it was – my password in pure plain text staring at me, on a non secure thank you page! I was enough for me to abandon my transaction.

Blunder #6: Excessive Mandatory Fields

Excessive mandatory field/ registration form in the middle of check out page is like adding speed bumps to a 60mph highway. It was one of the reason for me to abandon my registration in some of the websites.

Blunder #5: Clearing all the fields in case of an error

Many websites gave a clear registration form when entering any wrong mandatory filed. Unacceptable.

Blunder #4: Forcing customers to create an account before they can add items to cart

In the hope to register as many users as possible, some sites asked to sign in or register as soon i decided to purchase. It forced me to abandon the registration process.

In the light of these, the perfect site i came across was http://www.idrivesafely.com when registering to California Traffic School at http://www.idrivesafely.com/California

Very useful information for ecommerce site.

I also agree with Idris that the checkout process should be short.

Regarding payment methods, we recently added a paypal option and was surprised to see an immediate take up of the option.

Very good information. Thank You Jestep.

I think mistake #4 should be given a high priority. Do retailers make this mistake? Thanks again for mentioning it.
In addition to this i like to add few other mistakes that can definitely lower conversion rates.

No customer Support Service

Addition of unknown products in the shopping cart

Expensive Delivery costs. Retailers can experiment with lower shipping costs or free shipping over certain price reach.

Long checkout process .

As an online retailer you have to make sure that you don’t follow these mistakes.

I strongly recommend you to read 12 ways to Win Over Online Shopper.

http://www.retail-ecommerce.com/2008/05/12-ways-to-win-over-your-online-shopper.html