I was reviewing feedback left for a Marketplace seller. Here are a couple of snippets:

“Great book for new moms to be!

“Excellent book!”

“Great book…”

“Great quality…”

“Great product…”

This person is a book seller. He doesn’t publish books or sell e-books. So if a person buys a book from him and the book stinks, does that mean the seller is bad, too? If you’re thinking the person could be describing the book’s condition, there are better ways to say that like these:

“As described…”

“Great condition…”

“The order arrived in a timely manner, however the book had water damage…it was listed as almost new.”

“Item arrived well packed and in great condition.”

I always forget where to find the feedback page and the product ordered page complete with its condition. You can’t find these in the same place.

The Recent Transactions page (you get there from Your Account > Amazon.com Payments: View All Your Recent Purchases > Sign in > Search transactions or click “Recent Transactions.”

The Transaction ID/Order ID page has the buyer’s shipping address, items ordered and price, payment date, and transaction activity.

The Listing ID shows the item information, seller, seller’s ratings, condition seller listed, and seller’s comments.

Leave feedback is not reachable at any of these pages. It took me five minutes to find it again. I had to click on “Where’s My Stuff” from the Your Account page.

Why can’t all of this be in one convenient place? Perhaps, Amazon’s huge and complex backend may limit its ability. When I got stuck in the Marketplace account pages, I had to email the company because the Help didn’t help.

If I want to see my friends’ wish lists or check to see if I reviewed something, I click on “Your Wish List” > “Your Amazon Home.” It sounds like “Your Amazon Home” should be in the global navigation and this could take you to your accounts and everything else. Yeah, you can get to the account pages and “Where’s My Stuff” if you scroll to the very bottom of Your Amazon Home. It would be nice to get to this page in one click instead of two.

Wow. I’m ranked in the 1200s as a reviewer. You don’t get any awards for hitting top 1000 or top 500 reviewers, but the info appears by your name. Just have to get a few hundred more votes and I’m in. I haven’t been top anything for years.

The main purpose of the book is to help businesses increase their conversion rates. Conversion, and there isn’t a better word to describe it, means action that leads to the results you want. It could be increased product sales, more newsletter subscriptions, contacting the business, or more registered users. Call for Action is about improving the rates of what you want users to do.

Many books covering Web design address usability and making it easier for the user. But no book that I know of shows how to get your users to take the action you want. A usable site doesn’t guarantee action. Call for Action moves beyond helping users find things easily and focuses on persuasion so your business can see an increase in its bottom line. Overstock.com experienced a five percent conversion increase by fixing one thing based on the authors’ advice.

The categories that make up persuasion design include planning, structure, momentum, communication and value. The book begins with an overview of the entire process and then digs in to each category along with its perspectives, strategies, examples, and conversion tips from experts in search engine optimization, online marketing, and usability.

Researching and understanding the customers plays a vital role in this process. An example of this: you create a profile of three customers who have similar demographics, but come to the site for different reasons. After arriving on the Web site, these three customers go to a different part of the site. The challenge is to address the needs of all three on the landing page and then help them along to the next step through “scent of information” (leading the user to where he wants to go based on his persona).

You won’t find theories in the book. Instead, expect practical advice on online marketing so you can make the most of your users’ time on your site. While most of the concepts are practical, it has heavy-duty stuff, too. Those more experienced with e-commerce will appreciate it. If you skip the more challenging concepts, the book quickly pays for itself with the implementation of an idea or two. I like the case studies, especially the before and after examples for both design and content. People who learn from examples will appreciate the diversity of examples covered in the book.

Call for Action thoroughly covers many concepts proving a challenge to provide you with an overview of what it’s about. Anything you can think of having to do with online marketing and Web design is likely included. Rather than treating Web design and marketing as two entities, the two work together as one and it leads to better results. Marketers, designers, search engine experts and information architects will definitely benefit from this book. The Eisenbergs are among the few who focus on what the business needs to do to reach its goals with its customers in mind.

The price of the book is a great deal considering it’s a hardcover.

Title: Call to Action
Author: Bryan Eisenberg and Jeffrey Eisenberg
Publisher: Wizard Academy Pr
ISBN: 1932226397
Date: May 2005
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 326
Price: Cover: USD$13.95 Amazon:$11.16
CDN$: 14.04
UK£: not in stock