Comments on: Ecommerce solutions fail their customers

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 08:24:00 +0000

Thanks for sharing this wonderful information. It’s just too good.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 16:33:00 +0000

I can’t leave a comment without having JS turned on .. oh the irony! ;)

By: Troy Dean

Troy Dean — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 10:52:40 +0000

I must correct Bardia on his claim that BC have become religious about accessibility. This is just not true. Or if they have, they failed to implement any of their new found religion into the actual product. Sprouting rhetoric will not make your product better. Using tables to achieve design with the form builder and web app and online shop layouts will not help your cause either. As a premium BC partner, I can assure you from first hand experience that the standards built into the html of the product do not stack up. What's really disappointing though is how their marketing and sales collateral make it look so easy to deliver complex solutions to clients. If only the product delivered what they promise. And Adobe's purchase of them has had no positive impact on support or the product as far as I can tell.

Sorry.

By: infradawn

infradawn — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:12:03 +0000

As designers we have limited control over the capabilities of the devices that render our efforts. The limits of those capabilities are often determined by feature sets which are archaic, flawed, or simply user disabled. And while it is laudable to speak of designing to a baseline that accommodates as many of these disparate client environments as our conscience requires, that baseline moves inexorably forward as technologies become established.

eCommerce is a revenue channel subject to the same economics that underpins all business activities. Just as the advertising budget seeks to deliver maximum bang-for-buck by understanding and exploiting the customer demographic, so too the eStore. Part of requirements capture is to fully understand how the customer is reached, how they are engaged, and how they are retained. This is no place to define arbitrary functionality thresholds under the banner 'progressive enhancement' or any other. Bang-for-buck is rarely increased by adding unnecessary resiliency and the CEO may not be as enthusiastic at the increased cost of providing it as you are committed to delivering it.

Target your customer demographic. Period.

By: infradawn

infradawn — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 13:56:42 +0000

eCommerce is a revenue channel subject to the same economics that underpins all business activities. Just as the advertising budget seeks to deliver maximum bang-for-buck by understanding and exploiting the customer demographic, so too the eStore. Part of requirements capture is to fully understand how the customer is reached, how they are engaged, and how they are retained. This is no place to define arbitrary functionality thresholds under the banner 'progressive enhancement' or any other. Bang-for-buck is rarely increased by adding unnecessary resiliency and the CEO may not embrace as passionately the increased cost of providing it as you are committed to delivering it.

Target your customer demographic. Period.

By: James Gaunt

James Gaunt — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 19:05:32 +0000

I totally disagree with most comments here. Javascript is a core technology of the web. We left behind the world of static pages or full page post back years ago... why should we continue to hold back and slow down development for a mere fraction of users?

The 5% figure is bogus, maybe 5% of web queries come from non javascript enabled devices, but that is not the same as saying 5% of real (i.e. sentient and likely to pay) visitors to e-commerce sites have JS disabled.

This is the same argument that we should be doing more to make sure people who are too lazy or ignorant to upgrade their browser in the last 7 years can access the site.... maybe we should be bending over backwards so people who haven't even got the intelligence to turn the PC on can still use the web... anyone care to make up a figure for what % of customers we lose there!!

By: Keith Wolf

Keith Wolf — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 05:37:52 +0000

I think it's safe to say that Google Maps is an exception to this rule (however, go ahead and go to Google Maps with JavaScript disabled. It's heavily limited but functionally works (in that there's no errors, and allows you to view the maps... but doesn't let you ask for directions)).

The important thing with this particular blog post though is that he's talking about an Ecommerce solution, something that can (and should) very easily be implemented with no JavaScript and still maintain usability. Javascript can then pretty easily be added (not just "bolt[ed]-on") to improve the overall experience of the majority who gladly have access to Javascript (which, as I mentioned in another reply is not always the case thanks to many corporate environments).

It isn't (and should never be) a law that requires compliance on EVERY website, but when doing business it's critical to at least keep accessibility (regardless of the "disability") in mind.

By: Keith Wolf

Keith Wolf — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 05:00:11 +0000

There are a number of reasons to support non-JS users. One of the biggest reasons people have it disabled is beyond their control, usually in a corporate environment. I used to work for a major retailer whose intranet uses a proprietary knock-off of IE6 which had major problems with AJAX (so I would have to click the "basic HTML" link to use Gmail). Proprietary browsers are common in corporations because they control use/access/security.

Those who intentially turn off their JS are usually those that you described, who use the internet so little that their only experience "javascript" (as they've been told) are the negative uses of it such as popup ads, etc. They turn it off because they think that's the only purpose for JS and then don't understand why the rest of the internet sucks.

As developers we are responsible for making things work for everyone (doesn't have to be pretty or perfect for the JS-lackers, but at least functional as a fallback).

By: Keith Wolf

Keith Wolf — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 04:41:14 +0000

Yeah my bank (US Bank) is very similar but at least displays the home page, the error is thrown once you try to log in. Fortunately I'm in the ~95% category.

By: Mike Healy

Mike Healy — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 01:44:13 +0000

It's not just progressive enhancement that eCommerce packages get wrong. I've always found this area incredibly frustrating when you spend time installing and evaluating a piece of software to find that it does stupid things. Like using full size product images as the thumbnails, resizing them only in the browser (great for multi-megabyte listing pages). Or having a non-functional checkout process in a 1.0 release (with or without JS).

Choosing an eCommerce system is pain.

Btw, Paul (3/3/10) — I think you make some good points.