I’ve been asked numerous times for business help (offline and online) and now is the turn of eCommerce store owners to ask me for advice in ways they can increase sales revenue, profits and their store generally.

So instead of all the tips and advice how to do things the right way, here’s a list of 10 simple ways to creating your very own bad store with the aid sarcasm! :)

Step 1. Keep Your Shopping Cart’s Default Layout!

This look is brilliant! There’s a reason they distributed it as the main layout in the first place! Ignore the fact your store will look like every other lazy shop owner who decided that product presentation was overrated and the fact that it has no coherence, style or the fact that you’re appearing as someone trying to make a quick-buck and run.

Remember you don’t need design because, if were to make nice designs you wouldn’t be trying to sell whatever it is you going to sell online because, you’d sell nice designs instead. Forget the fact you can get a ready made store template or a custom one for under $200 because, you picked a FREE cart because, those people who say you have to spend money to make money don’t know what they are doing, right?

Step 2. Who Needs Thumbnails?

Successful shop owners say better images sell more products but what do they know that you don’t? Ignore the fact that your ecommerce script has the ability to use thumbnail or has a contribution allowing the option to do so because, you can then laugh at those people who talk about “site optimization” and “load times”

Step 3. Keep Your Images As They Are!

Leave your pictures at their original huge dimensions because, if you don’t your using up your time, your valuable time! Who care’s if your going to make the customer download numerous massive images for each page because at least its not your time your wasting! Because, we all know that customers love to wait to buy your products.

What the heck, go for it here’s a little challenge for you see if you can make your images for your store the biggest online!

Step 4. Make The Checkout Process As Awful As Possible!

Customers love filling out lots of forms before they can purchase anything. Actually, what you have now isn’t even enough, throw in a few more pages to suprise your customers when they think they’ve finally bought something because, to be fair you really do need the customers gender, age, marital status, name of their pets, name of their children and everything else you can think of so you can write an autobiography about them! 

Step 5. Ignore Your Market!

Don’t invest time or money in market research or unique products and/or services. As well as that, don’t even consider developing a unique selling proposition (USP).  Just bang out a site, which sells everything the same as your competition and ensure your store sells products more expensive!

Step 6. SSL Certificate Isn’t Needed!

SSL certificates cost money and you’re on a budget. So forget the fact that they enable a 128bit encryption between customers’ computers and your payment processor. Just treat your customers like their important information their providing you with is useless after all, all they can do is sue you for identity theft. Remember $50 is a lot of money for security and peace of mind!

Step 7. You Don’t Need Terms of Use/Privacy/Conditions of Sale Pages!

Customers don’t care about your return policies because, they don’t want to know what to do if they receive a broken product or what to do if the size they ordered is wrong. As your customers are hardly going to get a lawyer because you’ve sold them something wrong as everyone on the planet knows that customers don’t sue complacent companies for easy money!

Step 8. Remove Product Descriptions Now!

As well as this use your own arbitrary part number scheme too so your customers can’t search for the product and find out the information and at the bottom of the image of the product you’re selling place “The above image is actually a demo. Actual product may vary” to ensure the customer doesn’t know what they are going to receive so, when you send them a piece of paper with “HAHA” on they can’t complain.

Step 9.  Add As Much Flash & Java As Possible!

Flash introductions are so good, that you should add at least two of them and make sure you keep that ”skip intro” away from them too because, if you did that nobody has the pleasure of experiencing your awful flash skills.

After a finally gets a customer who sits through your numerous introductions to your store they want to see a flash product menu, header and buttons all over the page. This is because, page animations and moving text equate directly to your site quality and site usability.

Now, if all that Flash doesn’t slow your site down to a crawl add the following products the need to be installed for customers to use your site properly:

Java, Flash, Windows Media Player, QuickTime, Comet Cursor, ActiveX dialler installer and a few others to increase the customers loving your site as they love to wait to spend money on your products and install compulsory ad-ware downloads!

Step 10. Keep Your Address And Phone Number Private!

The customers don’t want to get hold of you. Why do you think they are buying online?Another benefit of this is that if they want to complain they can’t get in contact with you other then via email and its not really hard to ignore them is it and as a result, you can claim customer satisfaction is 100% because nobody will ever be able to contact you to tell you otherwise.

Another thing, make sure you ship your items from the shipping store or the post office so there is never a return address on the box! So when you get a call from the credit card company about a charge-back, you can tell them the customer never called and complained and you never received a return.

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