How Can an E-commerce Go Further

Just visited a outdoor furniture online store searching for patio furniture. While browsing through the site my mind start wondering to the usability side of the web again. I’ve mentioned in other posts couple of times that the online e-commerce seems lag behind all those web 2.0 social network sites. I would think these profit driven sites should be more into RIA technologies and enhance usability. Take the CedarStore.com site as an example, there are some places can improved to make it more attractive and increase convergences.

• Photos - I’d like to have some close-up look at those furniture. If I can drag and rotate the 2.5D photo to have different prospects that will be much better for my decision making process. 
• Gallery - I’d like to quickly browser through the similar type of offers. It’ll be very helpful that a slider put in place to go through the pictures fast.
• Yard background - It’ll be great if there are many choices of yard background so that I can overlay furniture picture to evaluate the sitting effects.
• Comments - Comment sells. I’d see the comments from other buyers. People have gotten used to buy books from Amazon based on comments and reviews. It’ll help sell furniture too.
• Live Chat - In addition to live telephone representative, how about live chat. People tend to not trust phone service anymore. Chat gives sense of fast services.

Good thing is that an e-commerce site doesn’t have to do all these by itself. There are lots of web 2.0 company or RIA site developers out there help out. Only thing they need to do is to make decision and reach out.