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Jeff Bezos recently said in Charlie Rose, what people want in online shopping are basically three things:

1. Low Prices
2. Vast selection
3. Accurate, Fast, Convenient Delivery

It’s a great insight, since business entities tend to focus on the differences between the markets, but there are fundamental needs of human being which can be similar across the world. What I do find true, however is there are some factors not included above are also critical and general across multiple markets.

1. Trust

People won’t buy products or from places they don’t trust. It’s a matter of security as well as reliability. Because they are payinig for something, because they are giving their commitment, they must be able to trust the seller, the product, the shipping & handling companies.

It’s interesting to note that how much we underestimate trust in online shopping, and it’s precisely because it comes before everything else. No matter how cheap the product is, how vast the selection is, or how “perceivably” convenient the delivery is, people won’t buy things from places that they cannot trust.

Fortunately, Amazon.com has a great brand reputation that people do trust, so even if the sellers providing the items to Amazon have not earned such trust yet, they can benefit from supplying their products through Amazon.

2. Relevancy

This may seem to dissent from “vast selection,” but ultimately, it’s not. What it means is, people don’t want to buy 100 different cars or 100 different mp3 players. They want the one that’s right for them, but because we don’t have the necessary technology or service adequate enough to address this problem, we offer them bunch of things to choose from instead.

It’s meaningful to remember that since customers don’t necessarily benefit from vast selection, and that it also hurts the sales for the sellers, one of the most important problem for commerce sites to solve is relevancy. Jason’s recent post on the problem of having to choose from too many “similar looking” printers shows this point.

Since roughly 30% of the sales at Amazon comes from recommendation services, this is a good place to start.

3. Good After Service and Refundability

After service is like a safety net. This may not seem like a big issue (it is for people who had much hassle in their previous shopping experiences), providing good A/S or at least notifying the customers of such will help sales and loyalty. As a matter of fact, Samsung is well known for it’s great A/S (at least in Korea). Whenever you buy a monitor, whatever the problem it may have, they will come to your house, pick up the product, get it fixed or replaced, and re-delivered to you all within just few days.

If you are committing yourself to purchasing something and you know the seller will be there when you have problems, and you know that they will have their money ready when you don’t want to keep the product, you are much more likely to purchase the product without much second thought.

This also helps the sellers because (unless they have a crappy product), customers usually stick to their choices, and if their experiences match up their expectations, they build loyalty toward your products and brands.

4. Ease of Payment

Too many countries in this world still lack much e-commerce, because of this problem. It’s still too darn hard to pay for something that you want. Mobile payment is an easy way to pay for small things on the go and it is quite common in some parts of Asia, but it’s still very hard to find in some of the western countries.

Sellers must provide the shoppers with as many payment options as possible (with simple interface of course) and as securely and reliably as possible.

When I was working at NCsoft, I looked through the way people pay for online games, it was clear that the more payment options you give to the customers, two things will happen:

1. Customers will pick an easier way to pay for services and life-time value increases (for example, if someone was paying via money-transfer manually every month, they are more likely to stay as a customer when they find out that they can pay by credit-card automatically, obviously).
2. New customers appear. Some customers in the “grey area” are triggered by this new found easeness and they will begin to spill over to the side of paying customers.

Online shopping and commerce in general has one of the longest history in the areas of the internet, but there are still many problems to be solved and many values to be served.