e-commerce usability

Ziff Davis Internet's Evan Schuman warns e-commerce companies that they have to simplify. A new survey is giving evidence that complexity repels consumers. So has every other survey since the Web was born. Now will someone listen?
Consumers to E-Commerce Sites: Simplify or We Walk

Findings from an extensive survey analysis by the team reporting to Terry Golesworthy, president of the Customer Respect Group, an Ipswich, Mass.-based research/consulting firm:

• dial-up toleration for page download stops at about 77K. For broadband, that number increases to about 300K. "Only 13 percent of the Top 100 companies have a page size of less than 77K" and barely 20 percent have pages that would be acceptable even to broadband users
• Almost one in five business-site visitors told Golesworthy's team they would abandon a site if they found it too difficult—or insufficiently intuitive—to use.
• The survey found that 56 percent of people will not wait more than one day before they will write off an e-mail as ignored.
• the survey found that an impressive 87 percent of Web sites today are not resizable for different gadgets
• Another problem area for Web sites today is cookies. Cookies have morphed from being a site visitor convenience to often being essential.
• most sites are not sufficiently accessible to the visually impaired, despite the fact that one out of five Americans have such a hardship