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Online record store - feedback appreciated!


sitandspin

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I've been fooling around with OsC and I'd like to hear the opinions of the forum experts. It's somewhat vanilla. Please give me some suggestions for improvement that will really make the site pop.

 

Sit and Spin

 

Ah - and I know the buttons look terrible, so I definitely welcome advice on that topic.

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I think your site looks cool. Especially your header image. I think your .infoBoxHeading and TD.headerNavigation need a different background color. I thought #660033 looked cool but that is up to you.

 

I think those buttons you have look good. Maybe a different color would be nice. All you really have to do is trim the corners off so they will blend into your background.

Other great Open Source (Free) programs: (Free as in free speech not free beer)

The Gimp - An image program. | Firefox - All you have to do is add the Web Developer add-on to make this web browser complete. | FileZilla - An ftp program. | Inkscape - A good program to create images with. | Thunderbird - An email program. | Openoffice.org - An office suite that is compatible with MS Office. | Abiword - Another office suite. | Audacity - A sound recording tool. | ddp's Picks | Wordpress - An easy to use blogging software. | Joomla - An easy to use CMS that has ecommerce plug-ins. | Drupal - Another CMS

How do I find these programs? Google Search!

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I think your site looks cool. Especially your header image. I think your .infoBoxHeading and TD.headerNavigation need a different background color. I thought #660033 looked cool but that is up to you.

 

I think those buttons you have look good. Maybe a different color would be nice. All you really have to do is trim the corners off so they will blend into your background.

 

An artist friend of mine drew the header image. I'll definitely try out the stylesheet changes.

 

I tried to color the corners of the buttons using photoshop, but they don't look quite right for some reason. I figured matching the corners would make them blend into the background, but for some reason, probably because I am a total photoshop novice, they don't blend in. I will try chopping off the corners. That makes sense.

 

Thanks!

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cool title.

are you considering a colour change from the grey/purply combo?

the purple vibrates a little....did you try black?

 

or you could also use the colour of the banner in your shop style, like light blue/baby blue background and mid-dark blue body.

 

nice site anyway, good luck.

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There are a lot of cool buttons in the contributions that are transparent.

 

Here is a link to one. I am not sure if they will match your store.

 

http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,2398

 

You can put an image as your infoboxheadings. If you like what I did on my store I will tell you how I did it.

 

http://www.shiplinux.com

Other great Open Source (Free) programs: (Free as in free speech not free beer)

The Gimp - An image program. | Firefox - All you have to do is add the Web Developer add-on to make this web browser complete. | FileZilla - An ftp program. | Inkscape - A good program to create images with. | Thunderbird - An email program. | Openoffice.org - An office suite that is compatible with MS Office. | Abiword - Another office suite. | Audacity - A sound recording tool. | ddp's Picks | Wordpress - An easy to use blogging software. | Joomla - An easy to use CMS that has ecommerce plug-ins. | Drupal - Another CMS

How do I find these programs? Google Search!

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cool title.

are you considering a colour change from the grey/purply combo?

the purple vibrates a little....did you try black?

 

or you could also use the colour of the banner in your shop style, like light blue/baby blue background and mid-dark blue body.

 

nice site anyway, good luck.

 

I'm always considering changes. I did have the color of my banner (#bbc7d3) in the infobox headings and navigation backgrounds, but I switched it to purple this morning on a whim. I'll keep trying different combinations until I find the right one.

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There are a lot of cool buttons in the contributions that are transparent.

 

Here is a link to one. I am not sure if they will match your store.

 

http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,2398

 

You can put an image as your infoboxheadings. If you like what I did on my store I will tell you how I did it.

 

http://www.shiplinux.com

 

Thanks, I'll try those buttons out.

 

I once had an image for my infoboxheadings, but I didn't like it very much. Your infoboxheadings look very nice, I may take your guidance on that matter.

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This is my includes/boxes/categories.php:

$info_box_contents = array();

$info_box_contents[] = array('text' => BOX_HEADING_CATEGORIES);

 

//new infoBoxHeading($info_box_contents, true, false);

echo '<table border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">

<tr>

<td height="17" class="infoBoxHeading" style="background: url(images/infobox.gif) top repeat-x;"> ' . BOX_HEADING_CATEGORIES . '</td>

</tr>

</table>';

$categories_string = '';

$tree = array();

 

I commented out the new infoBoxHeading. Then I added a table below with the box title and the background image. It's not very difficult.

Other great Open Source (Free) programs: (Free as in free speech not free beer)

The Gimp - An image program. | Firefox - All you have to do is add the Web Developer add-on to make this web browser complete. | FileZilla - An ftp program. | Inkscape - A good program to create images with. | Thunderbird - An email program. | Openoffice.org - An office suite that is compatible with MS Office. | Abiword - Another office suite. | Audacity - A sound recording tool. | ddp's Picks | Wordpress - An easy to use blogging software. | Joomla - An easy to use CMS that has ecommerce plug-ins. | Drupal - Another CMS

How do I find these programs? Google Search!

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I would add Chemos Ultimate SEO URLS, maybe a links manager Contrib, and tell your friends about our site contrib.

 

I like the colors but I think the grey is a little too dark. Your form areas are a little hard to find. It could be easily by passed by someone else.

 

I like the myspace info box did you hard code it or is there a contrib for it?

 

I see you have SSL I like seeing a logo or something letting me know who and what kind you have.

 

Other than that looks good. I also like your style of music no Slayer or Anthrax :(

 

Hope this helps,

Happy Sales,

Eric

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Okay, I hate to be a b***h, but as a consumer viewing your page, I think you should make at least 3 levels of categories. For example,

 

First Level: LPs

Second Level: A-F

Third Level: A, B, etc.

 

Having only the 2 categories with all those items impacts the sites overall asthetics, in my humble opinion. Plus, it'll help your customers get right to where they want to go faster, without having to thumb through all that. Also, naming your top CD and then a sub CDs-A (and all other sub-cats respectively) is something I would personally change.

 

Other than that, I think the site is pretty nice. Good luck with your endevors!

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I would add Chemos Ultimate SEO URLS, maybe a links manager Contrib, and tell your friends about our site contrib.

 

I like the colors but I think the grey is a little too dark. Your form areas are a little hard to find. It could be easily by passed by someone else.

 

I like the myspace info box did you hard code it or is there a contrib for it?

 

I see you have SSL I like seeing a logo or something letting me know who and what kind you have.

 

Other than that looks good. I also like your style of music no Slayer or Anthrax :(

 

Hope this helps,

Happy Sales,

Eric

 

I've got Ultimate SEO URLs installed. I'll check out the other two you mentioned.

 

I agree, the grey might be a touch too dark. I think I might reverse the colors of the site.

 

The myspace thing is a contrib - Myspace infobox

 

Slayer and Anthrax are forthcoming. I don't care for Easy Populate (aka I can't get it to work at all or the way I want it to work) and I'm adding everything by hand. It's not fun, but we are an actual brick and mortar retail store and we keep our store database in Microsoft Access, and it seems like our format doesn't want to play nice with the OsC/MySQL setup.

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Okay, I hate to be a b***h, but as a consumer viewing your page, I think you should make at least 3 levels of categories. For example,

 

First Level: LPs

Second Level: A-F

Third Level: A, B, etc.

 

Having only the 2 categories with all those items impacts the sites overall asthetics, in my humble opinion. Plus, it'll help your customers get right to where they want to go faster, without having to thumb through all that. Also, naming your top CD and then a sub CDs-A (and all other sub-cats respectively) is something I would personally change.

 

Other than that, I think the site is pretty nice. Good luck with your endevors!

 

Excellent idea. I'm going to implement it immediately.

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My only comment is to change a few things about your checkout.

 

You should give customers the option of proceeding directly to checkout without having to creat an account. Alot of people get turned off by this (and it has been proven in case studies). But if you don't want to make that change, I recommend moving your privacy policy to a position where it can better be seen when someone lands on the checkout page.

 

Alot of people are going to be averse to putting down an email address because 1) they can't see your privacy policy 2) they don't trust the internet 3) they especially don't trust your site (maybe the bald guy at the top looks like the kid who egged their house on holloween). Move your privacy policy up, or better yet, below the field where you ask for their email address, put a sentence that says 'we value your privacy' with a link to your privacy policy.

 

Overall, the site looks very good though.

Best Regards,

 

 

Victor Wise

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I've got Ultimate SEO URLs installed. I'll check out the other two you mentioned.

 

I agree, the grey might be a touch too dark. I think I might reverse the colors of the site.

 

The myspace thing is a contrib - Myspace infobox

 

Slayer and Anthrax are forthcoming. I don't care for Easy Populate (aka I can't get it to work at all or the way I want it to work) and I'm adding everything by hand. It's not fun, but we are an actual brick and mortar retail store and we keep our store database in Microsoft Access, and it seems like our format doesn't want to play nice with the OsC/MySQL setup.

 

 

Cool, What kinds of issues are you having with Easypopulate I may be able to help. I used it all the time in my old store. I found that is easiest to use a tab delimited file rather that a CSV file. The suplier I had used a "Shift+6" or "^" file I had to finigal that around everytime I had to update products which was about 3-4 times a week. But let me know if I can help.

 

Eric

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My only comment is to change a few things about your checkout.

 

You should give customers the option of proceeding directly to checkout without having to creat an account. Alot of people get turned off by this (and it has been proven in case studies). But if you don't want to make that change, I recommend moving your privacy policy to a position where it can better be seen when someone lands on the checkout page.

 

Alot of people are going to be averse to putting down an email address because 1) they can't see your privacy policy 2) they don't trust the internet 3) they especially don't trust your site (maybe the bald guy at the top looks like the kid who egged their house on holloween). Move your privacy policy up, or better yet, below the field where you ask for their email address, put a sentence that says 'we value your privacy' with a link to your privacy policy.

 

Overall, the site looks very good though.

 

Thanks for the suggestion. I think that's a valuable tip. I think the whole "create account" thing is too complicated. Perhaps I'll give that Purchase Without Account contribution a try.

 

I'll try hacking up the create_account.php with your privacy policy suggestion. I'm a little afraid to try it because I just spent the last 5 hours screwing up the site in several ways and now I have put Humpty Dumpty back together, so to speak.

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Cool, What kinds of issues are you having with Easypopulate I may be able to help. I used it all the time in my old store. I found that is easiest to use a tab delimited file rather that a CSV file. The suplier I had used a "Shift+6" or "^" file I had to finigal that around everytime I had to update products which was about 3-4 times a week. But let me know if I can help.

 

Eric

 

Every time I tried to use EP my line endings weren't working, like EP wouldn't read the EOREOR. It would import a line like this:

 

1000 | product name | whatever | other junk | whatevs | i hate life |

 

and then I'd look at my products page in the appropriate categories and nothing would show up. I even tried it on a "dummy" vanilla OsC install set up separately from my regular store and had the same wondrous results.

 

At any rate, I like to put some HTML in the descriptions occasionally, so I use the TinyMCE wysiwyg editor when I'm putting things in by hand. I like that. I would, however, love to download the catalogs from distributors and just plop them online and watch the sales roll in, which is the undelivered promise inherent in my attempts to run EP. If you have any advice on how to get it working properly, I would appreciate it. One of my distributors uses the caret ^ delimiter, and I understand how to configure EP to accept a caret, but EP does not understand how to work on my site.

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You should give customers the option of proceeding directly to checkout without having to creat an account. Alot of people get turned off by this (and it has been proven in case studies).

I dont agree with that. More and more sites not only require that but stress the fact that you have to have an account. Ex. Amazon, and NewEgg, those are some pretty serious sites. Grant it even if you are a brand new store I would want to have an account, and I would print all receipts and all. I have only seen a few that didnt require an account. Stressing your privacy policy would be good all around.

 

Eric

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Every time I tried to use EP my line endings weren't working, like EP wouldn't read the EOREOR. It would import a line like this:

 

1000 | product name | whatever | other junk | whatevs | i hate life |

 

and then I'd look at my products page in the appropriate categories and nothing would show up. I even tried it on a "dummy" vanilla OsC install set up separately from my regular store and had the same wondrous results.

 

At any rate, I like to put some HTML in the descriptions occasionally, so I use the TinyMCE wysiwyg editor when I'm putting things in by hand. I like that. I would, however, love to download the catalogs from distributors and just plop them online and watch the sales roll in, which is the undelivered promise inherent in my attempts to run EP. If you have any advice on how to get it working properly, I would appreciate it. One of my distributors uses the caret ^ delimiter, and I understand how to configure EP to accept a caret, but EP does not understand how to work on my site.

 

I could post you my old ep file its a tab setup and I always changed it from ^ to tab. once I got everything on there all I had to do was change a few things. As far as html goes you can still use html in your EP files as long as you have no spaces/tabs between the html code.

 

Eric

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I dont agree with that. More and more sites not only require that but stress the fact that you have to have an account. Ex. Amazon, and NewEgg, those are some pretty serious sites. Grant it even if you are a brand new store I would want to have an account, and I would print all receipts and all. I have only seen a few that didnt require an account. Stressing your privacy policy would be good all around.

 

Eric

 

 

I think the requirement to register for a new account is probably a business specific issue and not a uniform rule. On a similar subject, there was a discussion in the monster commerce forums about the screen you see where you either have the option to create an account, or proceed directly to checkout. Many of the merchants removed that one screen (so you wouldn't have an option to create an account and go directly to checkout) and then recorded any change in their shopping cart abandonment rate. The concensus among the merchants was that by just eliminating that one screen, shopping cart abandonment decreased slightly (many said 10% as I recall). However, many of the merchants said that they were going to switch back regardless, since they made most of their money from return customers.

 

I think Amazon requires registration so that they can retain repeat customers. This is just speculation, but I bet conversion rates for first time customers are not as good for them as it would be with optional registration. However, this loss is acceptable since they are making more profit in the long term. This is because 100% of their customers have accounts, as opposed to 50% or 70%, and people with accounts are more likely to buy their next book at Amazon as opposed to elsewhere.

 

In my opinion, I think that the options or requirements you have for a customer to register should be based upon how likely it is that person will be a repeat customer. Sitandspin - how many of your customers are return customers? If some of them are going to come back, keep the registration an option. If they are likely to come back again and again, then maybe required registration will make you more money in the long term. If you will never see one of your customers again (except in court), then I wouldn't even offer the registration screen as an option since its another step.

 

Victor

Best Regards,

 

 

Victor Wise

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its an interesting site but the colour is too dreary for my liking.

 

is there no way you could ad samples of music to your store allowing customers to listen before buying? And what about digital downloads?

Upon receiving fixes and advice, too many people don't bother to post updates informing the forum of how it went. Until of course they need help again on other issues and they come running back!

 

Why receive the information you require in good faith for free, only to then have the attitude to ignore the people who gave it to you?

 

There's no harm in saying, 'Thanks, it worked'. On the contrary, it creates a better atmosphere.

 

CHOOCH

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its an interesting site but the colour is too dreary for my liking.

 

is there no way you could ad samples of music to your store allowing customers to listen before buying? And what about digital downloads?

 

I may try to liven up the colors a bit.

 

Adding samples of music to the store would probably suck bandwidth or redirect the customer to another site. It's a good idea, but I haven't had the time to figure out how to incorporate that in the most efficient way possible. I don't know anything about the legality of digital downloads, so I'm not getting into that. Furthermore, I own a record store - I want people to buy and collect music, display it on a shelf, show it to friends, not sit idly on a computer in mp3 format! Illegal dowloading is killing my retail end already.

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Hello again,

 

Its too bad about the effects of illegal downloading on your industry.

 

I was looking at your website again and had another thought as how to possibly improve your conversion rate. According to research, the characteristic that affects consumer buying from a website most is trust.

 

I like your website and the underground feeling it has to it ? however, I imagine some people (especially older clientele) would avoid online transactions simply because they are afraid to trust you with their money or credit card information. I know this sounds ridiculous, but it?s the truth. However, I think you have many options. For one, at the top of the checkout page and in the ?view cart? page, you might want to put a big graphic of a padlock and text saying ?SSL 128 bit encryption?. Displayed at the right time, these things can make a difference.

 

So you have an actual physical store? Can you take orders over the phone? I would highly recommend that you place your phone number in a more prominent place on your website and during the checkout. Having a phone number displayed makes people trust you more, they know that they can reach you if need be. The generally accepted guideline is to put your phone number on the top left of your site below your logo. I would also recommend displaying your phone number on the ?view contents page? and during the entire checkout. Make sure to include a blurb saying something like ?rather order by phone? Call 555-555-5555?. Your total sales would probably be increased.

 

Victor

Best Regards,

 

 

Victor Wise

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Hey dude, there's another thing I just noticed...

 

Now you should copy or link at least a dozen items from your 3rd level category directly into your 1st level category so that you will have items show up should you customer click on the 1st level (ex. CDs). Right now its empty. I'd do put a mirror of all of your products, but that would take time or a contribution. There is one out there that will let you mass copy here:

 

http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contri...delete+products

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Hey dude, there's another thing I just noticed...

 

Now you should copy or link at least a dozen items from your 3rd level category directly into your 1st level category so that you will have items show up should you customer click on the 1st level (ex. CDs). Right now its empty. I'd do put a mirror of all of your products, but that would take time or a contribution. There is one out there that will let you mass copy here:

 

http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contri...delete+products

 

Good idea. Do you know of any contribution that would pick them at random and stick them in the top level categories? Or, do you know of a contribution that will dynamically pick items to be shown as the category image for that category?

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