Last week Pakk reached a major milestone. Of course there have been many others: our alpha launch, our first live customer site, their first order etc. This one, however, was really big, both on a personal and professional level. This is the story of how that milestone was reached and what it represents — right from the very beginning. It’s a reflection on the past and future, on business and entrepreneurship, on technology, software and web development, on commerce and e-commerce. Mostly though, it’s about life: my life, our lives and life in general.

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If you’re just getting into e-commerce, there’s a high chance your top priority when shopping for a platform is “having a great looking store”. Are you finding yourself browsing through template galleries and customer portfolios? Obsessing over image carousels? Considering contracting a designer to help put your store together?

Sure, I get it, it’s natural for a business owner to want a “great looking store”. Wouldn’t we all? Why would we set out to build an online shop and not want to make it look as good as possible? I’m here to tell you though, that having a great looking store, even a good looking store, is not as important as you think. And I can prove it with one word: Amazon.

Nothing wrong with the aesthetics of Amazon — it looks, well, OK, but it’s not going to win any design awards — I think we can agree on that. So why is the way your store looks not all that important? Well, there are actually quite a few reasons.

What looks great today, might not look great tomorrow

The web changes. Fast. If you look back at web trends over the past 15 years, it’s mind bending how quickly styles have come and gone. If you’d have created an ‘on trend’ site in 2005, you’d probably have had to completely overhaul it 4–5 times by now to keep current. That’s expensive and tiresome.

Flashy things often bog a site down

It’s no coincidence that half the web is bust and the other half slower than a broken down bus. Often, in a misguided attempt to make their site “flashier”, designers and store owners load them up with widgets/plugins/carousels/themes or any other manner of digital cruft. Mostly it just gets in the way of the shopping experience. Then it ages badly and you’re back to point 1.

E-commerce visuals have become standardised

Ever noticed how easy it is to tell apart a small-business online store from one of the big players? The small store is the one with the black background, wood-panel-effect header, handwriting font and video carousel. The big ticket store is the one that looks, well, like every other big ticket store.

Will your site look good on a smartwatch, viewed underwater at a distance of 20 meters?

OK, that’s a complete exaggeration, but you get where I’m going with this. It’s hard to make a site look good across the modern gamut of devices. Not “design hard”, but “engineering hard”. You might be happy with the store you’ve created when viewed on a desktop with a lovely big monitor — but you also need to be sure that it looks that great on any of the 1000 handheld devices your potential customers might be using.

So if I’m saying you shouldn’t obsess about creating a great looking site, then what should you obsess about? I think it’s quite simple. Design-wise, this is what I would obsess about:

• Clean, minimal, timeless style — doesn’t need to be updated yearly
• White background across the whole site — few exceptions
• Simple, high quality product shots — white background, high res
• Subtly branded — think one or two colours, logo and font
• Readable font size — if in doubt, go bigger
• No moving or rotating elements — e.g. carousels, sliders
• Prominent main product navigation menu — 5–7 main categories
• Everything where you’d expect it to be — don’t make the customer relearn e-commerce layout just for your site.

I won’t go into all the different elements of functionality — that’s for another day. I think it’s enough to stress that aesthetics should take a back seat to efficient functionality. Go simple, fast and clean over flashy, gaudy and “custom”.

Unless you’re selling diamond rings or custom-designed travel experiences, you don’t need to tell a story — you just need to present your product catalogue in the most efficient way possible.

A year ago, a little man with round glasses rang our doorbell and asked me if would be interested in buying some cherries. I was in the attic and busy with work so had to run down to front door, phone in hand. “Bloody annoying salesman,” I thought, and sent him on his way. Despite one’s natural tendency to treat any travelling salesman these days as a con artist (although a fruit-based scam would be almost worth going along with), I was just too busy to give him any time.

Fast forward exactly one year and the same little chap rings my doorbell again. Again I sprint down to answer the door, pen behind ear, dog barking in excitement. This time he holds out a full box of bright red, fully ripe cherries and says “Look what lovely cherries I have – would you like some?”. I looked down at the cherries and my mouth watered slightly in anticipation. I was sold. “Well how much are they?” I asked. “It’s a 2 kilo box for 5 Euros”. I’m no expert on fruit prices, and probably would have bought them at double the price, but 5 Euro for a full box of ripe cherries seemed like a bargain to me, so I paid him and took ownership of my fruit.

As is custom in Spain, we chatted for a while, eating ripe cherries in the sunshine. “They’re from my land in El Bierzo,” he told me. I had assumed that they were from the south, or imported, like most of the fruit in Spain. “Picked ‘em myself this morning with my daughter,” he said, showing me, at close range, his filthy fingernails as proof. Of course, I was delighted: I’d bought 2 kilos of locally-grown, same-day-picked cherries, direct from the farmer and his daughter (who was 6 or 7 years old in my mind – I pictured him holding her up to pick the cherries off the top of the tree (Do cherries even grown on trees? Spot the London boy). Alas, when she drove round the corner in the van, she turned out to be middle-aged and definitely unhoistable without mechanical aid).

I called over to my neighbour who was doing some work in the front garden. “Hector, look at these fantastic cherries,” I shouted, “they’re local and fresh picked this morning”. He strolled over, tried one and bought a box too.

So just a lesson for vendors really. Ask someone to buy your cherries, and they probably won’t. Show someone your lovely, fresh, bright-red cherries in their best light and you might just sell two boxes.

If you managed to get past the title of this post and are still here then this article could potentially be of great help to you.  If you’re bemused by the title but have stuck around thinking this might be an entertaining read, leave now – you are horribly mistaken.

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We often think of our small businesses as growing and developing gradually and consistently.  We look at typical business indicators, such as revenue and profit curves, customer metrics or website hits and what we see resembles a car journey.  Sometimes it’s a motorway, and progress it fast.  Sometimes its a windy country lane and progress it erratic, at times rapidly accelerating, at times braking hard.  Sometimes you’re stuck in a dead end and just have to reverse.  And sometimes you’re just parked.  But it always looks like the same journey in the same car.

In the software industry, development traditionally takes the form of major and minor releases of applications.  Version 1 comes out – it’s not perfect, but it’s usable.  Bit by bit, the developers nail down the bugs and the functionality glitches, gradually releasing updates and patches – Version 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 etc.  By 1.6, it’s a perfect app – it does exactly what it’s supposed to do with no bugs.

But any good software company doesn’t stop there.  In fact, the minute Version 1 came out, they were probably already thinking “Hey, this app does x, but wouldn’t it be good if it did y and z too”.  So a year or two after Version 1 came out, they release Version 2.  It does more, it does it slicker, it does it bigger and it does it better.  It’s not compatible with Version 1.  You might even have to buy it again if you bought Version 1.  It’s not an upgrade, it’s fundamentally different.

Look at how we’ve come to think of and call the current phase of the internet ‘Web 2.0′.  It’s not just a geek thing either.  In our hearts and minds we know something has changed in Web 2.0.  Perhaps, if you’re not a techie, it’s hard to put your finger on.  But back in 1999, in Web 1.0, your grandma wasn’t keeping up with your shenanigans on social networks was she?  Most of the software you used was on your operating system, not through your web browser, wasn’t it?  Web 2.0 is different from Web  1.0 in many, many ways.  But the key is that they add up to a step change.  A fundamental shift in the way we use and perceive the internet and the way it shapes society.

Now what if we were to think of our businesses this way?  What if we went from major version to major version rather than just notching up an endless string of minor versions? What if your business was ‘Your Business 3.4′, rather than ‘Your Business 1.87′?

In fact, such a conceptualisation is incredibly empowering.  Thinking of your business as a serious of ‘major version releases’, each of which is fundamentally separated from the previous version by a step change, can only motivate you to push forward to the next iteration.  And in my eyes, step changes are not (or at least they don’t have to be) sharp jumps in metrics like sales or profits.  New major versions are triggered by changes that are fundamental to what your business really is, what it represents, what it offers, how it operates and what it brings to or takes from your life and that of others that are involved in it.

I’m not going to go into details here of of my own business (that’s for another post), but just as an example, we went to ‘Our Company 2.0′ to ‘Our Company 3.0′ the day we first stopped doing the physical warehouse work ourselves and moved to a contracted-out logistics solution.  This was a fundamental change for us – it changed the way the company operated, it changed what we could offer, it changed what we did on a day-to-day basis and it changed how we thought about our company and its prospects.

Major versioning is not all about the past though.  Of course, with the help of hindsight, you might look back and easily determine where your major versions were, and if they were positive, or even planned.  But really, major versions are all about the future, about where you’re going.  Don’t ask yourself where you see your business in 5 years – who knows what shape the world will be in in 5 years.  Better to visualise the next major version of your business – what it will look like, what will be fundamentally different about it, how it will change your life and the lives of others.  Does it excite you?  If it doesn’t, you’re jaded.

So why not get started ‘major versioning’ your businesses.  Look back to the past and then look towards the future.  Ask yourself the following questions:

• Starting back from My Business 1.0, how many major versions have there been?
• What major version am I at now?
• What were the characteristics of each major version?
• What will the next major version look like?  How will it be characterised?  How will it be fundamentally different?
• When will the next major version be?
• How many more major versions will there be?  Does the project have a ‘final version’?