In their own words

“Spot Merchant provides small to medium businesses a way to easily and quickly design, manage, and create professional online stores without the need to know any programming or to install any software. We strive to make our services the best in the industry by focusing on ease of use and high performance.”

	Why it might be a killer

Spot Merchant’s easy to use interface- in terms of website creation, inventory maintenance, and eventual store experience for the customer- set it apart from the cluttered and confusing online stores so prevalent now. Small- and medium-sized web2.0 store owners don’t want to waste their time and money on expensive interfaces, and Spot Merchant provides them with an economical and functional alternative.

	Some questions

Attempting to understand the Spot Merchant product and installation experience on its website requires the user to scroll over poorly-defined boxes, click on random links, and switch between pages filled with information that ought to be linked together. A lack of a good, clean initial presentation may cause the viewer to avoid buying the product for the website’s navigational difficulty – entirely in opposition to the ease of use that defines the Spot Merchant product. I also question the placement of a row of categories at the bottom of all the storefront templates- a lot of the options are repeated elsewhere on the page, and spatially, it seems more logical to have just one row and one column.