Sometimes when your really involved in a project its easy to get stuck in “cant see the wood for the trees syndrome”. In this zone its easy to become obsessed by adding new features, new site designs and continual revisions to copy that you feel are going to improve your sales enormously.
On the wall next to my desk I have a piece of paper with my simple rules of e-commerce which I always revisit to remind myself whats really important.
Here’s my 5 simple rules:

Rule 1: Its not about you, its about them
Its wrong to use your site to tell people how great you are and how great your products are. Its been proven a million times before that talking in terms of your customer works better. Look at your site or the products and ask “Whats in it for me?”
Rule 2: What is remarkable?
What are you really good at? Can you offer the best delivery times in your market, the latest ordering, best returns policy, cheapest prices, latest products. What do you do well enough that somebody would write about you on another website or tell friends.
Rule 3: Get found.
I spoke to somebody the other day who proudly claimed to be “Northampton’s best kept secret”. What an idiot i thought, you don’t get rich by being a secret. Get out and about, speak to people, promote. If you have rule 2 sorted properly then shout about it as loudly as you can.
I ordered an item just last week from a really ugly site, just because it was the only one I could find that sold what I wanted.
Rule 4: Don’t give them a reason not to buy
How many times have you visited a site and it looked great and the prices were good only to find checkout was a pain and it wouldn’t tell you what the delivery price is until you log in. Show the site to some friends and see what they think when they use it. Have a look at these reasons why people leave you.
Rule 5: Remember that thing you did that worked really well on another site?
Its painful sometimes to keep doing the same things over and over again. But its less painful when your profits skyrocket because you stuck to something that’s proven to work. I’m not advocating stopping new ideas here, but new development is expensive and time consuming. Better to start quick with an old idea than never get going with a new one.
In my opinion, if you follow these basics methods you cant go too far wrong.