You may see a familiar name in the article: Alex quoted a few of my tips on e-commerce.
Excerpt from article:
3. Be different. The problem isn't that all furniture website look the same, it's that they are all offering the same content as everyone else. Jason Solarek, CEO of Bridge, a website solutions company, points out that every Facebook account looks the same, yet it has 25% of the world's traffic. "Shoppers love having consistent navigation and layout," he says. "The problem is the same content on these sites, not the actual look."
He also warns of mistaking an e-commerce website for entertainment. "For most stores, websites are tools," he says. "Their primary purpose is get an action done. i.e. to buy an item quickly, search quickly. etc. Most e-commerce websites are 'hammers.' They are not entertainment. When stores start to confuse their site for some entertainment site, they quickly make navigation confusing, waste money on needless things and overall make the shoppers suffer. The best thing a store can do online is make their site easy to navigate—even if that means having it be the same as their neighbor’s site. Function trumps form online."