A Lesson in User Interface Design

As a new site without a major advertising budget and a set of principles that prevent me from spamming the bejesus out of the Internet to try and draw attention to Mall of Erotica, getting potential customers to the site is half the battle. The second half is getting them to actually buy something.

I carefully track all site interactions through my own code and database. I know most people would opt to use Google Analytics but I have the following reasons for not doing so:

• It's always a great learning experience to write your own code, and analytics data capturing is easy; it's the fancy reporting that Google Analytics does that makes them worthwhile
• I have full access to all the raw data in real time to report on it however I like
• The browsing habits of my users are nobody's business but mine.

That last point is an undervalued one, in my opinon. Google Analytics may be free, but you and your customers give up a fair bit of privacy to Google's ever-watching eyes. And when you run a fetish website people expect their privacy to be maintained so I do my best to keep it all a secret. That's the main reason that the entire site uses secure-sockets layer (https) instead of only during checkout.

Anyhow...as I said above I track all interactions through the site and this past week alone I've seen several people add items to their carts but never checked them out, resulting in a potential loss of revenue of about $56.00USD. Now that doesn't sound like much, but when the average product sells between two and six dollars, $56.00 is a big chunk of change. And a good businessman should always endeavour to get a sale from everyone who steps inside his store.

Now there could be many legitimate reasons for why those people didn't check out their items, such as having a change of heart, or people who just clicked the "Add to Cart" button to see what would happen, but having so many happen in such a short time bothered me.

I took a good look at my product page and realized a major flaw in the design: there was only one "Add to Cart" button, it was located under the main image thumbnail, and once the product was added to your cart you had to go to the top of the page to get to the "View my Shopping Cart" link toc check out. While it made sense when the site was developed I quickly realized that it might not be obvious to the average porn viewer how to actually pay for something once it is added to your cart.

To fix this, I reworked the product page to display a "Check Out" button under the "Add to Cart" button (but only when there are items in the cart), as well as included those buttons under the "Buy" panel on the right side of the screen (which up until today had consisted solely of the word "Buy" and the price):

 

I don't know if these changes will increase my sales, but if it reduces confusion for one shopper and they complete a transaction then it was worth it.

 

The lesson learned from all of this is "when testing, approach your website as if you have never seen it before. If it isn't obvious from a quick glance at the screen how to perform a function it probably won't be obvious to your users".

 

Some free development advice for you :)

eBooks Galore and more!

It's been an interesting week.

Back when I was doing my pilot project in May/June, I was approached by Rachel & Carl from Rachel's Lace E-Rotica about participating. They didn't join the pilot but I re-contacted them to see if they were interested now that we were live and had some sales and other content providers. They were interested and proceeded to create our first eBook store: Rachel's Lace: e-rotica! And while I expected them to only have a couple of books to put up, they've put up 11!

And that's not all! They also invited two other eBook authors who have begun the process of setting up shops...so the site is growing and that's great news!

I've been making little changes to the appearance of the products page and added some additional functionality to the shops page. I'll be turning my attention now to allowing multiple files associated with a product (currently it's just one). That way it will allow eBook authors to provide the popular various formats (ePub, .mobi, etc.) to the customer when they buy the item!

eBooks and More

So my first eBook content provider will be opening shop in the next day or so. It's exciting and it's been a learning experience as I've gotten some good feedback on how eBook authors would like to use the site and the sort of changes I need to make to better support eBooks.

I also got an email from an EU-based erotica producer...they had several questions that my FAQ's didn't answer which was good to get as just about all my content producers have been American and didn't require the same type of information as he did. So I've been updating the FAQ to include his questions (and the appropriate answers). Unfortunately the draconian cotent restrictions I presently have to abide by are hurting his ability to publish a lot of his content at Mall of Erotica.

One of the interesting challenges from the eBook community is the ability to have several formats of the book (epub, mobi, html, text, etc.) available for download by purchasers of a single product. I hadn't originally considered this and as such the data model is currently "one file per product". I can change it, but it will require a fair bit of recoding and data conversion, but maybe now is the time to do it, as it's early enough in the game to be making big changes like that.

Besides, it'll end up being more normalized, and normal is good.

Coming Soon

This week Mall of Erotica will be launching a new store exclusive to MoE: Mistress Trish's Domme Shop.

I've gotten to do the post-production of Mistress Trish's first product, an audio file where Mistress Trish humiliates and emasculates the listener. It's been a lot of fun to work on it and a good technical learning experience.

I've also been making minor updates to facilitate administering the site. I've still got a couple of big items I'd like to release to help support the shopkeepers and users in general, but I want to make sure they're working perfectly before promoting them to production.

Stay tuned for further announcements. We'll also be announcing it in Twitter, so if you aren't already, please follow us: @MallofErotica.

An Introduction

Two and a half months. That's how long Mall of Erotica has been live. It's been scary and nerve-wracking, trying to break into an industry that I really should have tried to get into 10-12 years ago and I'm hoping that this all works out.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

My name is NiCheng. I am a software developer who first started programming when a forward-thinking teacher introduced me to Applesoft BASIC in 1991. Discovering an aptitude for it I excelled and quickly out-learned the teacher by the end of the school year. I begged my parents for a PC and when they finally gave in a few years later I taught myself Visual C++. I wasn't properly schooled (as "Dummies" books didn't exist yet) and I knew no one with a strong background in programming to guide me, but I muddled along. The aptitude evolved into a passion and now I can't imagine a day going by where I'm not trying to solve a problem or invent new code in my head or on a computer. It is truly my calling.

When I first got access in 1995 the Internet was a simple place. You used Lycos for searching the 14,000 or so websites in its directory and websites were largely static and put up for informational purposes only. Despite all the interesting science stuff and conspiracy theories on the early 'Net the thing that shocked me the most was all the content about sex and erotica. Best of all, the mainstream world didn't know the World Wide Web existed yet and it was all free.

I was raised in a relatively conservative Christian household and had limited exposure to anything sexual. The "sex talk" was a very minimal technical talk focusing on abstinance and the public sex-education at school didn't really explain a lot for me other than "insert tab A into slot B". Encountering female nudity was largely restricted to the occasional boob shot in a movie. I had no sex drive (I didn't masturbate until a girlfriend showed me how when I was 18) but was fascinated by the female body. With the new discovery that people were posting nude images of celebrities and amateurs on the Internet, I set out to see every female celebrity and ethnicity/body type/etc. nude and collect and catalogue as much of it as I could.

By 1999 I had written a custom database program running in Windows 3.1 that catalogued over 3000 photos. Finding no end to my desire to see females nude, I discovered appreciations for fetishes like light bondage, superheroines in peril and humiliated, and anything to do with what would later be known as ENF (embarssed nude female). I started expanding my image database to include these and other fetishes that piqued my interest. Over time I converted my custom software to a MySQL database and then to a Sql Express Database on my private PC where it exists to this day.

All this was done in secret given my conservative family, and for all the shame I felt about it my curiosity and desire for erotica would not abate. As the first few mainstream adult sites started popping up on the Internet I wished I could have somehow been involved. A news story in my paper about a local guy around my age who was making $10,000 a month from his website by linking to adult sites (back when you got paid-per-click) made me upset that I couldn't openly pursue it. By the time I finished my university degree, got a job and was able to move out on my own, the dot-com bubble had burst and I resigned myself to a fate of never being able to combine my love of erotica and my love of programming for anything more than a personal hobby database.

Despite the bubble pop and the start of the US financial troubles the porn industry had emerged relatively unscathed. And when I found myself out of a job and needing to find a way to make ends me, I placed one cold call to an adult website to offer to convert their static HTML site to a dynamic PHP one. They accepted and I got a contract that kept a roof over my head for the next 7 months.

The adult site I worked on was fun and the client was great. In fact, one time when I called his house to talk to him his wife (the star of the site) answered. It was quite the feather in my cap at the time.

When the project was over I started hitting up other adult websites for work. While I was never as successful as I was with my first cold call, I made some contacts in the industry and even better I learned enough about the business to believe I could build my own adult site.

In 2009 I contacted the lovely and talented graphic designer Slipperychik to collaborate with me, and at first she was on board, even knowing a girl who wanted to break into online adult modelling. I did all the research and planned everything out but life changes with Slipperychik and me prevented us from getting together to make it happen.

Then in late 2011 I was faced with some new recurring expenses in my life and found myself frustrated with the lack of money I was making at my day job and a disatisfaction of the work in general. I decided I had gotten tired of seeing other people make money off my work and it was time for me to live the dream: I was going to create an adult website.

Unfortunately my personal life is still quite conservative and the idea of finding models and becoming an out-and-out pornographer was an issue. However after talking to a few of the contacts I made in the industry I found a need for a high-quality, feature-rich online erotica website, where content producers can create shops, upload and define products, set the products price then sit back and let the site earn for them. I had the expertise to make it happen and I decided that was the sort of site I was going to make.

I called up Slipperychik (who had sadly moved 2000km away) to get her to collaborate with me again. This time she was on board and in discussions about the purpose and naming of the site I said "Well...it's kind of like a shopping mall, except it's for erotica. A mall of erotica", and thus the name "Mall of Erotica" was born.

So after a lot of coding and design work, getting a pilot group together, and going through the craziness of getting a merchant account...Mall of Erotica went live on June 15th, 2012. It's been two and a half months, and they've been quite scary and nerve-wracking. And that's where this post started.

For those who have read this introduction looking for information about started up an adult website, I would recommend the helpful people at Go Fuck Yourself. They have tons of useful articles and posts, and the huge community of adult webmasters are always willing to answer noob questions. I wish I had found them before I started Mall of Erotica...I probably would've done some things differently.

A poster on GFY recommended that to increase traffic to your site and search-engine ranking, to create a blog and post links to your site. I'm not sure if they were advocating fake blogs, but I've seen some people mention that they create blogs on behalf of some of their more popular models. To me, that feels a bit dishonest. I realize that getting traffic to your site is the way to make money, but I don't want to have to trick people or search engines into coming to me site...I want people to find it, think it's awesome, and tell their friends.

The site is still new, however, and it isn't as awesome as it will be. I recommend you check it out and maybe you'll see some erotica you'll want to buy. Maybe you'll open a shop and sell your own erotica there. Either way, my success starts with you, so c'mon down!