Sloth
Although this sin is my personal favorite -- particularly on a Sunday afternoon during football season -- there are a number of ways sloth manifests itself online and hurts your business. First and foremost is the technical side of sloth:

• Does your site take a long time to load?
• Does the design of the site, including the inclusion of rich applications, create a slow, frustrating experience for your visitors?

Sloth can also be fairly literal, as in laziness in responding to your customers. Recently, I sent an email to the customer service department of a big online retail chain through a link on their site (a link that was difficult to find, by the way). By the time the company responded, four days later, I'd already deserted its site and purchased my item from one of its competitors.

But perhaps most important -- and certainly most prevalent -- is the lazy tendency of businesses to treat online visitors as if they are all alike. Today, excellent technologies exist to provide a targeted, relevant experience to visitor segments. Visitor segments can be defined by a host of criteria (e.g., how they got to your site, demographics, location, time, day, etc.). It is frankly just slothful not to take the relatively small amount of time, energy and money required to provide the best experience for all of your visitors. Improving customer targeting and engagement alone will make a dramatic improvement in your online business.

Anger
While it is fairly self-evident that a company should not show anger toward its customers, we sometimes see companies patronizing or scaring their visitors. The former often manifests when a company's site is too pushy or tries to hard-sell its visitors. For example, the website of Lenox Financial Mortgage proudly states, "It's the biggest no brainer in the history of mankind." Really? I'd hardly call a mortgage the biggest no brainer in the history of mankind. Even before the current financial meltdown, this was a ridiculous statement. Never talk down to your customer. Once a visitor sees a headline like this, the company immediately loses credibility, and the visitor goes elsewhere.

In the context of scaring customers, website optimization experiments have shown that negative assurance language (e.g., "no spam" or "no spyware") often decreases conversion rates. This negative assurance language may only inform visitors of a problem they didn't know they had and make them think twice before buying. By the way, our website optimization tests show that positive assurance language like "satisfaction guaranteed" tends to work.