E-Commerce
http://www.webstyleguide.com/site/e-commerce.html

Lynch, Patrick J. and Sarah Horton
Yale University
1999

Abstract:

In e-commerce sites the crucial design parameters are efficient navigation and search, along with speed to the final 'place order' button. During the 'dot-com' market bubble many new e-commerce sites spent fortunes of their investors' money on elaborate Macromedia Flash or digital video presentations and quickly failed — some went bankrupt before the site was launched. Meanwhile, the Web's most successful commerce sites kept things technically simple and basic. Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, and other successful Web commerce sites use remarkably spare page design schemes and simple text- or tab-based navigation systems. Another area where e-commerce sites often fail is in providing search engines that are smart enough to 'degrade gracefully' when there is no exact match to a request.