It sounds so simple, really. But, as I watch companies flailing around with their electronic commerce initiatives, spending a lot of unnecessary money on fancy graphics and merchandising gimmicks, I return again to the principles I’ve learned from the most successful ventures: Put something up quickly, listen to what customers tell you, and use their input to prioritize your efforts.

Customers usually won’t tell you they don’t find your site esthetically pleasing. They’ll tell you whether it wastes their time. They won’t tell you whether or not they are interested in this month’s special deal. They’ll tell you they couldn’t find the answer to a question on your Web site and were aggravated by that experience.

Take Cisco, for example. Cisco did over $1.2 billion of business on its Web site in 1996. The company began its electronic outreach to customers in 1990 with FTP sites for software downloads. Later, it added bulletin boards for technical support. By 1993, it was accepting and tracking service calls on the Web as well as in the call center.

How did Cisco evolve its customer support site into the world’s largest business-to-business site? Was it based on a strategic grand plan? “No,” says Mark Tonnesen, Cisco’s director of customer advocacy. “As we built our Web site, we surveyed customers constantly and asked them what they needed. They said, ‘I can’t find out the status of the order I placed.’ ‘Your price lists are out-of-date and useless.’ ‘No one can figure out how to configure your products.’ ‘Your ordering process is horrendous.’ So we addressed each of these issues one by one.”

First, Cisco posted order status information on the Web. Almost immediately, 70 percent of the 10,000 calls per week Cisco had been receiving moved from the call center to the Web. Customers obviously found that ....