So-called E-commerce Experts and self-awareness

Credibility is important. I just dropped my RSS feed to E-commerce Times, as I just read a horrible article by a "so-called expert" complaining about the way Amazon and other retailers their shopping experience. I didn't see any justification for his complaints, just that "it's not like what brick-and-mortars do." If this is their definition of an expert (and this is the level of advice they give), then I can't justify taking time out of a busy day to read their articles.

About the article, I find it amazing that a "Creative Director", apparently in the e-commerce space, doesn't understand customer intent and context in their shopping experience, and the difference between brick-and-mortars (where this is a customer cost component to get to a brick-and-mortar that must be overcome) and online shopping (where the cost of participation is very low which drives lots of one-off sales... hence the success of woot.com). Do Creative Directors really not perform contextual studies to understand customer behavior? I assumed that was a prerequisite to expert advice on design.

By this person's logic, woot.com cannot possibly be successful because no brick-and-mortar store sells only one product and a different product every day at that.

Instead, this Creative Director would do good to study these success stories and learn from them. It is not the e-tailers that don't get it, it is he that doesn't get it. Self-awareness is important, and a reason it is key to good Emotional Intelligence.

I feel bad for his clients, who are getting bad advice from a so-called expert.

By the way, this is my favorite interview question when I interview designers: why do successful online entities to apparently "stupid" things according to design theory? The answer, of course, is that they have data to justify their decisions.