I don't have any New Years resolutions. I guess I am always New Year resolutioning even when it isn't New Years. Always a good time to consider the bigger picture I suppose and with each year the slider moves closer to the middle of my life spectrum so if I haven't achieved all I want yet then I should hurry up before retirement Golfing beckons.

Paypal and comScore have released their 8th Annual merchant survey which includes some extremely useful statistics regarding shopping cart abandonment rates. Canada needs to overcome two main hurdles before it can make eCommerce a more viable option to it's residents. The first is to reduce shipping charges and the second is to create more warehousing options on the West Coast to increase delivery speeds (and therefore reduce delivery charges to West Coast residents).

The overall abandonment rates were around 45% with these constituting a micro view.

High shipping charges: 46%
Wanted to comparison shop: 37%
Lack of money: 36%
Wanted to look for a coupon: 27%
Wanted to shop offline: 26%
Couldn’t find preferred pay option: 24%
Item unavailable at checkout: 23%
Couldn’t find customer support: 22%
Security concerns: 21%

This post will be short and to the point, just like your e-Commerce checkout funnel should be. In the first Movie of Lord of the Rings there is a scene in Frodo's house where Gandalf says to him 'Keep it secret. Keep it safe". He was of course referring to the Ring but the same could be a succinct way of summarising your check out process.

To help people make it through your checkout try to achieve that. Make them feel it is safe.

Here ends todays e-Commerce tip on behalf of Gandalf. Isn't he wise...

My mother-in-law sent me this and I have to say it made me laugh and look forward to Christmas this week.

My poor Son has lost his voice this week due to a cold. It is bad enough that he can't talk yet, but to then have his only communication method (shouting/crying) taken from him is a real tragedy. For some reason in the wee hours this morning I had the picture of the casual e-Commerce shopper arriving at your/an online store. On arrival there is no 'contact us', no live chat, no email address and poor usability confronting them. It seems that more and more people believe you can set up an e-Commerce store and leave it thinking the 24/7 nature of the internet will ensure sales. This is a basic failure on the part of any e-Commerce store.

Having customers wanting to connect, communicate and hopefully convert is brilliant. But if their voice is taken from them as they have no communication channel by which to speak through they will without doubt lose confidence, become frustrated and leave.

Sales lost, frustrated customers and bad word of mouth at the next coffee session with friends.

Be online with your customers is my advice. e-Commerce is not set and forget anymore than a bricks and mortar store is.

It is that time of year for me. I have no idea when I set my company up why I would choose November as year end. Pretty short sighted in hindsight.

There are only a few things in this world I fail to spend time on and that is year end accounting. Why? I don't see spending time on it as a valuable use of my time. There are a lot of better ways to become more efficient at what I do other than pushing my nose through balance sheets. Don't get me wrong - a sound understanding of what went where and how it can be financially improved is very useful. I am interested in the end result. But having an Accountant pull this information together for me makes sense.

Anyway...enough of that...back to compiling receipts for my Accountant...

With the upcoming arrival of my Martin OM-28L I am becoming much more guitar aware after a small musical hiatus during the Country move. Mozza has delivered the goods with a new site that answers the needs of any guitarist in Tasty Chops - www.tastychops.tv is a cracking site to absorb all the best Guitar chop videos found online. A personal favourite being Hendrix playing Machine Gun:
http://tastychops.tv/post/260383950/jimi-hendrix-machine-gun

Just spent some time watching a video at Nettuts (http://net.tutsplus.com/videos/screencasts/a-detailed-look-at-the-960-cs...) demonstrating the 960gs (http://960.gs) system for rapid CSS development. It is a small framework that offers really quick layout options. The question is, is it worth it for Drupal?

There is a 960gs Drupal theme available (http://drupal.org/project/ninesixty) but personally I think I will stick to Zen for now as I know it so well. It seems a really well developed project though so have a look.

If you are creating CSS layouts from scratch then I definitely recommend looking at the 960gs system.

The sketch sheets and templates really help speed things up and can help all those invested in the site (designers, developers, managers) with understanding how the layout works.

I love it when sites like fastcompany and The Economist make business decisions to switch their websites to Drupal, it just warms the ends of my cold wet Vancouver toes. But more than those I love it when the US Government makes decisions to make the www.whitehouse.gov website a Drupal site.

Thumbs up.