Differentiation, difference and ecommerce success (Guide to Small Business Ecommerce Strategy)

Linda Bustos had an excellent piece last week showing how to conduct checkout process split testing. A comment in that post led John Quarto von Tivadar (such a cool name!) at GrokDotCom to demonstrate the value of split testing. Genius. Both.

John gets it exactly right when he says, “Customers don’t care if what we have behind-the-scenes is simple or complex. All the customer cares about is how simple and enjoyable — or not — the experience is for them.”

Every site – every business – has differences. In fact, you must differentiate yourself from your competition to succeed. Your product might be different, your service might be different, your message might be different. But your customers’ goals are the same: to accomplish what they want to do. So if you’re different because you’re differentiating yourself, that’s one thing. But if you believe you’re so different that you can’t learn from what works, you’re not just different. You’re foolish.