RE: UKNM: Realtime sharedealing's not us

[Robin Edwards]

On Friday, February 05, 1999 10:53 AM, Darren Wallace 

[SMTP:

darrencommercenet [dot] org [dot] uk

] wrote:

>

> On Monday I had my first experience of selling shares.


Thanks for sharing that with us Darren (sorry, sorry, sorry - couldn't resist)


It is a brilliantly illustrated point though. So often in our evangelising we 

(as a group) miss out on trying some of the poor examples of implementing 

e-commerce. There are so many examples of supposedly real-time systems wrapped 

up in red tape or clumsy navigation, even some of those that are held in high 

regard in terms of their (potential) commercial success.


So often it is a case of a beautiful online marketing job backed up by a 

dreadful web site. Right now I know of someone trying to generate hype and 

interest for a site that really should be a lot better :-(


In theory it should be an easy thing to spot in advance. If a web site is 

replacing or duplicating the functionality of an offline system, then during 

the specification, production or testing phase it will become apparent if the 

site makes the function more difficult to perform than the offline system. In 

reality I assume things like bad planning, time and budget constraints, and a 

general failure to actually try the thing out on a sample target audience first 

is what gives us our current state of affairs.


Anyone got any superb examples of online commerce? I've written about a few 

that have impressed me over the last 3 years for RetailWeek, but most have been 

better served by their offline counterparts.


What about online banking? Does anyone have good experiences with that? I.e. is 

it more convenient than phoning your branch or walking into town?


The most useful "sort of" commerce site I have come across in the last year or 

so has probably been Autotrader http://www.autotrader.co.uk

but even that can't bridge the inconvenience of not actually having the funds 

to purchase the car of my dreams...


Robin

--

Robin Edwards

Clockworx Design Limited

T: +44 1543 252370           F: +44 1543 420761

E:

robinclockworx [dot] co [dot] uk

     W: http://www.clockworx.co.uk/ 

********************

UKNM is sponsored by Excite UK, visit us at http://www.excite.co.uk.

Email Khalil Ibrahimi

khalilexcitecorp [dot] com (mailto:khalilexcitecorp [dot] com)

 to advertise on Excite.

********************

Change your UKNM subscription use http://www.chinwag.com/uknm.html