In Search of E-Commerce, from Mark Hurst and goodexperience.com

Table of Contents | About the Second Edition | Executive Summary | Introduction | Apple | Dell | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | America Online | Microsoft Expedia | CDnow | Outtakes | Creating the Good | Authors


About the Second Edition

February 1999

When In Search of E-Commerce was first published in June 1998, Robert Seidman and I had no idea if it would be successful or not. We had set out with the modest goal of evaluating, from the ordinary customer's perspective, the buying process on seven of the best e-commerce sites on the Internet. We were surprised to find "showstopper" problems in nearly every case, despite the millions of dollars being poured into each site. Still, at launch time, we weren’t sure if the report would have an impact on e-commerce, or even sell well.
 
Eight months later, the report is still selling to companies worldwide. More importantly, most of the seven sites have launched redesigns that fix many of the obstacles identified in the first edition. Whether our report played a part in these improvements, we can’t say. But we do know that these companies, after reading the report, made many improvements that we had suggested:

This second edition of In Search of E-Commerce contains all the text of the original edition, and it adds "Eight Months Later” sections for the five companies listed above to show how they made improvements suggested in the report. Also new in this edition is the executive summary, which compiles all of the "What to Learn From...” bullet points from the end of each chapter. (This was the most frequent suggestion for improvement from readers of the first edition.)
 
One final change concerns Good Reports itself. Originally a corporation co-founded by Robert Seidman and myself, it is now the brand of no-hype industry reports fully owned by Creative Good, Inc. With more Good Reports in the pipeline, and consulting projects with top corporate clients, Creative Good is quickly growing to become the leading customer experience firm in the Web industry. We couldn’t do it without your support... so, thanks.
 
I hope you enjoy the second edition of In Search of E-Commerce.
 
Mark Hurst
mark@creativegood.com
P.S. To get the free Creative Good newsletter about customer experience online, e-mail update@goodexperience.com.

Next Section: Executive Summary

Table of Contents | About the Second Edition | Executive Summary | Introduction | Apple | Dell | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | America Online | Microsoft Expedia | CDnow | Outtakes | Creating the Good | Authors