My all-time favorite e-commerce store is ThinkGeek. I could spend hours here, not only because I’m a nerd, but because the user experience is just awesome. If you’ve got an ecommerce store or are even selling a service based product, here are some lessons learned from the Geek Overlords.

#1 Fun to read product descriptions

Not only are standard, straight-from-the-manufacture product descriptions death for search ranking (duplicate content multiplied by however many resellers are selling the product), they are also usually pretty boring to read.

As a reseller, your job is to find a niche, find products that your niche audience will like, and then spin the benefit of those products in a way that is dead-on with your audience. ThinkGeek found a way to make a red Swingline stapler interesting and slap on a price tag of $21.99 (yes, I purchased this). Who really wants to read lame, generic product descriptions anyway?

#2 Customer Action Shots:

The customer action shots are probably the most effective aspect of the ThinkGeek website in my opinion on the site. It let me know that other people like this site. It showed me who the target audience was and the images said a lot about their sense of humor.

#3 An Open and Honest ‘About Us’ Page

An About Us page is a fantastic opportunity to connect with and engage your visitors. Sure, people will buy something if you don’t have one, but you’re more likely to sell more and earn repeat business if the people coming to your store feel like they actually know you and like you.

ThinkGeek’s About Us page has a page rank of 8- not that page rank matters entirely, but obviously, this is a pretty important page on their site. This crew is big on providing a serious level of transparency. They have even gone so far as to set up webcams in their office.

All of these ideas can be transformed to fit any type of website- not just an e-commerce site. If you sell something to someone, you can find a way to work these ideas in to fit the flavor of your website.

In case you didn’t see this in the Wednesday, June 20th edition of USA TODAY, I thought that you may find it interesting.

U.S. online business grew by 25% in 2006.

Top online retailing categories, in billions:

Travel 73 Billion

Apparel, accessories and footwear 18 Billion

Computer hardware/software 17 Billion

Autos/Auto Parts 17 Billion

Home Furnishings 10 Billion

Does the list surprise you?  Does it give you any ideas?  Wow, what about travel?  It blew away everything else.

“Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.” George Eliot

How do you view failure? Opportunity? It’s all over? There’s no hope? I’ll try until I succeed? Please feel free to comment.