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Feedback and Suggestions, please!


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Hi @ll,

 

regular readers of this forum know it already, I decided to give my site a complete overhaul regarding layout and functionality. This process is not finished yet, but I'm ready for some feedback from the community.

 

I'm looking for comments and suggestions on usability right now. At the moment users browse through the product listings but rarely click through to the product details where a lot more info is available. Today I added a new link "More info..." to each product in the listings and I'll observe if this drives customers to the product pages.

 

Any ideas on how to get a customer to add a product to the cart in the first place? Most visitors browse through the catalogue but seem to be afraid to add something to the cart. Maybe they think they have to buy the items once placed in the cart?

 

When you shop for food products, what is your approach? Do you remember them by product name including brand (Knorr vegetable stock cubes) or rather by generic category (stock cubes)?

 

I know, I'm usually direct to the point with my feedbacks, so please feel free to do the same on my shop:

 

www.finefoods24.com

 

abra

The First Law of E-Commerce: If the user can't find the product, the user can't buy the product.

 

Feedback and suggestions on my shop welcome.

 

Note: My advice is based on my own experience or on something I read in these forums. No guarantee it'll work for you! Make sure that you always BACKUP the database and the files you are going to change so that you can rollback to a working version if things go wrong.

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You guys must be lost for words.

 

I would really appreciate your suggestions on my questions regarding how you shop for foods online and more important, how to get the customer to click through to a product.

 

Yesterday I saw a shop where the product name in the listings was actually a link that added one of this item into the cart. Didn't like that, just wanted to see some more info. Ok, there was another small text link underneath "more details" but I think it's pretty standard to click on the image or the name to get more info.

 

abra

The First Law of E-Commerce: If the user can't find the product, the user can't buy the product.

 

Feedback and suggestions on my shop welcome.

 

Note: My advice is based on my own experience or on something I read in these forums. No guarantee it'll work for you! Make sure that you always BACKUP the database and the files you are going to change so that you can rollback to a working version if things go wrong.

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Hiya abra :D

 

Quick look now and happy to look again but.....

 

Regarding customers not carting, take a look at this page

 

The add to cart button appears at this level and I for one (yes dumb) had to think about it very carefully until I noticed their was a quantity button! This might be confusing to customers and they are unsure of how to shop I guess. Customers will not put as much effort into the thinking bit - any confusion and they are off.

 

I can understand the logic of being able to select several items quickly but if so then perhaps change the message next to the shopping cart to suggest they need to select a quantity?

 

Regarding not going to detail, I suspect the assumption may be that because there is an add to cart button on this page that this is it and there is nowhere further to go. This may also be heavily contributing to the lack of carting items because as you say they are not seeing enough detail to make the buying decision.

 

best wishes

crazy

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abra sorry but just as I went back to close your shop.....

 

Why don't you rename your Catalogue section, perhaps Store or Shop ? Would seem more appropriate as Catalogue makes me think of clothes or seeds!

 

Also in my opinion this first page they hit here should be really nice and visual where at present it is text?

 

 

 

Just a thought......

 

 

By the way your header is very pretty :thumbsup:

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You have a point there.

 

I had the master products contribution installed and in use before which allowed adding multiple items to the cart. I rememer I added an error check if there was no quantity selected. Definitely have to put that in those listings instead of going to the cart.

 

Another thing stopping customers from adding to the cart might be that they think they are then obliged to buy it. So they look through all the pages and probably get tired to add the items they like.

 

Thought about the "add to cart" preventing them to see the details, too. I'll have to think about this a bit more.

 

Thanks,

 

abra

The First Law of E-Commerce: If the user can't find the product, the user can't buy the product.

 

Feedback and suggestions on my shop welcome.

 

Note: My advice is based on my own experience or on something I read in these forums. No guarantee it'll work for you! Make sure that you always BACKUP the database and the files you are going to change so that you can rollback to a working version if things go wrong.

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Maybe I rename it back to "Products". That's what used to be called before.

 

That default index page is in dire need of a visual upgrade. Most visitors don't see it as they are landing on either a product or category page (from organic search results) or on the brands or relevant manufacturers page (from PPC).

 

Thanks again for your input.

 

abra

The First Law of E-Commerce: If the user can't find the product, the user can't buy the product.

 

Feedback and suggestions on my shop welcome.

 

Note: My advice is based on my own experience or on something I read in these forums. No guarantee it'll work for you! Make sure that you always BACKUP the database and the files you are going to change so that you can rollback to a working version if things go wrong.

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Another thing stopping customers from adding to the cart might be that they think they are then obliged to buy it.

 

No I think generally customers are quite happy to cart if they have a possible interest and then alter or dump the cart!

 

We do become creatures of habit though and as i said don't like thinking too much.

 

My usual online buying process:

  1. Glance at the picture to see if it appeals
  2. glance at the price to see if it suits me
  3. read the detail to make sure what I am buying
  4. check the shipping page to see if they ship to me and at what price
  5. if still happy then I will press add to cart
  6. happy with what I have in the basket off I trot off to checkout

Notice all these are quick habitual actions and anything that interrupts or confuses my usual flow is a danger. I think customers will climb obstacles but only if very motivated to buy from you.

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Hi Ulrike

 

I liked your first shop but this one is even better. Well done. Alot of hard work & very user friendly. Love the colours too. A few points I noticed were:

 

The sign in button is smaller than the box it sits in. (Accounts)

 

The table after Economy (Shipping & Returns) confused me & I couldn't really see what matched which column. Might be easier if you could see the boxes? Also does x mean yes? x normally means no to me.

 

The Conditions of Use link at the bottom goes to the Terms & Conditions. That is fine but at the top you have called it Terms & Conditions.

 

I agree that shop sounds better than catalogue as this implies a paper document.

 

These are trivial points from my eyes, but it's a thumbs up from me. :thumbsup:

 

Julie

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My usual online buying process:
  1. Glance at the picture to see if it appeals
  2. glance at the price to see if it suits me
  3. read the detail to make sure what I am buying
  4. check the shipping page to see if they ship to me and at what price
  5. if still happy then I will press add to cart
  6. happy with what I have in the basket off I trot off to checkout

Notice all these are quick habitual actions and anything that interrupts or confuses my usual flow is a danger. I think customers will climb obstacles but only if very motivated to buy from you.

 

I totally agree with you. "Don't make me think!" is a very good book regarding website design and one of the thinks I try to achieve, too.

 

Usually I follow a similar order when purchasing online. This is what I have done over the last couple of days:

 

- added price in £. Most of my customers are in the UK and I expect the prices in Euro are perceived to be higher just because of the exchange rates. 1.10 € seems to be much higher than 0.75 £.

 

- added shipping cost for 2 kg underneath the header navigation so they can compare it to the fee they have to pay when ordering with my two competitors in the UK (they just have less items in their catalogue and are more expensive on a lot of items)

 

With this I should have covered your first four points on the listing pages for my UK customers: Image to check it's the product they want, price in € and £, unit size and info on 2kg shipping to UK. So there is most likely no need to go to the details anyway.

 

Next step is to see if I can offer even more competitive prices and to introduce specials.

I also want to add a discount on shipping when a certain order volume is reached. Plan is to make the coupon code available on the shopping cart page.

 

I also want to introduce after sales mails to encourage customers to rate the products they bought.

 

abra

The First Law of E-Commerce: If the user can't find the product, the user can't buy the product.

 

Feedback and suggestions on my shop welcome.

 

Note: My advice is based on my own experience or on something I read in these forums. No guarantee it'll work for you! Make sure that you always BACKUP the database and the files you are going to change so that you can rollback to a working version if things go wrong.

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Thank you for taking the time to look, Julie!

 

The buttons... kind of put them at the end of my todo list. I try to exchange most of the buttons with CSS buttons instead of using images. In some places (like the account), it's not possible and I have to make new ones. Got to do that over the weekend. Destroys the look of the site.

 

That table in shipping needs a bit of formatting (got lost with the new stylesheet) and, you are right, the x should be ticks. More images to create this WE.

 

Fixed the "Terms & Conditions". Thanks for spotting that!

 

Would you prefer the "Catalogue" to be renamed to "Shop" or rather to "Products"?

 

abra

 

Hi Ulrike

 

I liked your first shop but this one is even better. Well done. Alot of hard work & very user friendly. Love the colours too. A few points I noticed were:

 

The sign in button is smaller than the box it sits in. (Accounts)

 

The table after Economy (Shipping & Returns) confused me & I couldn't really see what matched which column. Might be easier if you could see the boxes? Also does x mean yes? x normally means no to me.

 

The Conditions of Use link at the bottom goes to the Terms & Conditions. That is fine but at the top you have called it Terms & Conditions.

 

I agree that shop sounds better than catalogue as this implies a paper document.

 

These are trivial points from my eyes, but it's a thumbs up from me. :thumbsup:

 

Julie

The First Law of E-Commerce: If the user can't find the product, the user can't buy the product.

 

Feedback and suggestions on my shop welcome.

 

Note: My advice is based on my own experience or on something I read in these forums. No guarantee it'll work for you! Make sure that you always BACKUP the database and the files you are going to change so that you can rollback to a working version if things go wrong.

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- added price in £. Most of my customers are in the UK and I expect the prices in Euro are perceived to be higher just because of the exchange rates. 1.10 € seems to be much higher than 0.75 £.

abra

 

Ah yes interesting. As a UK resident myself I actually have absolutely no idea what the euro rate even is! As you say it instinctively just looks more expensive and for me any sites in euros are a complete nuisance. I tend to know the dollar rate but euro only affects me if I travel.

 

We may only be accross the water and european but euros are mostly still just holiday money to most of us :lol:

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I guess I missed a lot of potential sales because of the prices in Euro. When I came to Ireland, I was used to the Deutsche Mark and everything in Irish Pounds seeme to be a bargain. German toast: 1.60 DM, Ireland only 0.80 £. Turned out it wasn't cheaper, sometimes even more expensive! So now I would guess the same happens with the UK and the Euro countries.

 

abra

The First Law of E-Commerce: If the user can't find the product, the user can't buy the product.

 

Feedback and suggestions on my shop welcome.

 

Note: My advice is based on my own experience or on something I read in these forums. No guarantee it'll work for you! Make sure that you always BACKUP the database and the files you are going to change so that you can rollback to a working version if things go wrong.

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- added price in £. Most of my customers are in the UK

 

abra if this is the case then why are you not mainly pricing for your target audience in pounds?

 

Is this for your purposes ie convenince or cost? I think you have probably found your adding to cart and not probing deeper into your site stumbling block as I have not to date considered buying from a site in euros and would find it a turn off.

 

Wierd as I happily buy in dollars. Familiarity I guess. Maybe I am not representative of other UK buyers but also possible there are others like me.....

 

best wishes

crazy

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Well, I'm registered in Ireland, currency is Euro. All taxes and price calculations are done in Euro. The Pound prices are only for reference.

 

It just turned out that most hits come from the UK rather than Ireland. There are just more Germans in the UK, I guess.

 

Maybe you are right about visitors bouncing because of the prices shown in Euro. Well, now both Euro and Pounds are shown. That should help to compare prices. Why didn't I have this insight a year ago?

 

abra

The First Law of E-Commerce: If the user can't find the product, the user can't buy the product.

 

Feedback and suggestions on my shop welcome.

 

Note: My advice is based on my own experience or on something I read in these forums. No guarantee it'll work for you! Make sure that you always BACKUP the database and the files you are going to change so that you can rollback to a working version if things go wrong.

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I have a feeling your gonna hate me and I apologise in advance if you feel i'm being too negative :blush:

 

Has a potential customer I'd personally be put off from going any further than the front page of your shop (unless I'd shopped before and found the quality of goods and service to be great)

 

I could be wrong here (that would be no surprise lol) but I tend to think that the majority of onlike shoppers are women ? and to my mind, women tend to like things that are asthetically pleasing, being faced with the amount of text on your main page makes me think I'll shop elsewhere.

 

The way I think of it is, if I'm shopping in town for instance, I will be possibly drawn to a large SALE sign in the window but more often it will be something stylish or eyecatching in the shop window, you need to make your online shop do the same in my opinion. You need to grab any potential customers by the scruff of the neck instantly and make them want to browse your store. I don't feel I want to do that !

 

Also, like madcrazygirl I have no idea of the exchange rate between pounds and euro's, through my own ignorance :blush: but I've realised through selling on an online auction site for some considerable time that people are really quite lazy and you have to explain practically everything to them !

 

It's not all bad though, I really like your header, fab colours and really eyecatching. :thumbsup:

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Just had another thought, maybe if you could continue the header as a border with trailing sunflowers it would break up the amount of text ?

 

I keep being drawn to click on News, Loyalty Points Programme etc with them being underlined, I instantly think these are clickable links.

 

Also, I notice that your buttons in Account are rounded and blue, when the others are orange ? the blue doesn't fit as well as the orange ones imho

 

When I get to 'Browse Through All Aisles' theres nothing there to tempt me ?

 

Other than the header, I really cant see anything else to attract me. Sorry :(

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Thanks, smellycat!

 

At least you like the header *lol*

 

I mentioned a bit earlier in this thread that the index page is not the first page visitors see from my site. And yes, I know it's in need of a revamp. I'll probably add some featured products there. Same goes for the all aisles page. It's only on the left, leaving the right for promotions and some further info on how to get to your favourite product.

 

You are also right for the underlined bits. I'll change the font size there and keep the underlining to links only.

 

That's all very valuable input for me.

 

abra

The First Law of E-Commerce: If the user can't find the product, the user can't buy the product.

 

Feedback and suggestions on my shop welcome.

 

Note: My advice is based on my own experience or on something I read in these forums. No guarantee it'll work for you! Make sure that you always BACKUP the database and the files you are going to change so that you can rollback to a working version if things go wrong.

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Yes, I really do like your site! How were you able to get the contrib used on product info.php - where you click on every tab and it gives you different infos about the product?

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Nice to hear that you like my site.

 

The contrib used on product_info.php is products tabs. I have modified it to use it with my field names and to display the content. The layout is done with CSS.

 

abra

 

Yes, I really do like your site! How were you able to get the contrib used on product info.php - where you click on every tab and it gives you different infos about the product?

The First Law of E-Commerce: If the user can't find the product, the user can't buy the product.

 

Feedback and suggestions on my shop welcome.

 

Note: My advice is based on my own experience or on something I read in these forums. No guarantee it'll work for you! Make sure that you always BACKUP the database and the files you are going to change so that you can rollback to a working version if things go wrong.

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Would you prefer the "Catalogue" to be renamed to "Shop" or rather to "Products"?

 

abra

Either really as they both sound better than catalogue.

 

I wasn't overwelmed by the amount of text on your front page. I thought it was well laid out. The points is a valuable insentive to customers I have found & you have highlighted it very well.

 

I'm not used to the Euro either, but we will get used to it sooner or later :-"

 

I was saying "that's good" & "I wish I had/could do that" ;)

 

Julie

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Hi Abra,

 

I like the changes you made to your site – very nice! If it were me, I would remove the add to cart buttons from your catalog pages and put the emphasis on 'view details'. With the drop down menu's, things are kind of confusing. Plus, if someone clicks 'add to cart' with 'quantity zero', they are taken to a dead end page and are forced to use the back button.

 

I think your site is the first store I have seen which uses blue text. Personally, I like black text better since that is what people are accustomed too - though I really don't know if it makes a difference in readability. However,there is an advantage of switching to black text; and that is it allows you to add more emphasis to your hyperlinks. Did you mentioned before that you wanted to funnel more visitor's to the 'view details' page? Changing all the page text to black; but putting 'view details' in underlined blue text would probably drastically increase the CTR rate to those pages.

 

 

 

Some other observations:

 

-On the ‘view cart contents’ page – the checkout button is below the fold. Putting it above the fold will increase the amount of people who start your checkout

 

-do you have a sitemap? In the webmaster guidelines, google requests that all pages be made accessible from at least one static text link. Not sure if that applies to you.

 

 

-You can easily add more contrast to your site, and draw people’s gaze to the center of the screen by, adding a background color to your template. This would probably increase readability.

 

- your product images are very bland. If you could obtain images of people actually using your products in some shape or form; whether cooking, making coffee, eating – it would probably go a long way to spice things up.

 

 

 

Its a very nice site all around. I would be interested in learning how your are driving traffic to it.

 

 

 

“blue is a bad color for food, but a good color for a plate” – random quote I remember from studying color psychology.

Best Regards,

 

 

Victor Wise

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Your site it great - I noticed that you were displaying queries and parse times and they are incredible, extremely efficient and obviously well tuned (I wish that i knew how to do that - part of the secret, I guess is not to have all of the normal osCommerce info boxes in action). Also, I looked at the source code for a page or two. Beautiful coding (again, I wish that I knew how to do that).

 

OK, now some criticisms - just a little inconsistency - Contact Us is called Information in the header and Contact Us in the footer. No big deal. But, you should add hyperlinks to it in the News section (top left quadrant) and the Let Us Know (bottom left quadrant) on the news page - it took me a while to find it in the footer. Also, on the contact us page, you list Registration Problem, Login Problem as two choices. I would change the word problem to question - if they are a couple of the very few choices in the list, then it makes it sound like problems are a primary issue. Also, do you really need the security verification for the contact us email? I don't have it and don't get spammed (although I don't get visitors either), and it is one additional step that someone needs to take to contact you.

 

The star rating system is cool, especially if you have a bunch of ratings. But, having no rating for a product is different than a zero rating as you show it - maybe you could do an if statement and show something like "be the first to rate this product" if there are no ratings rather than giving the product a zero. And, you don't want to show a bunch of zero or no ratings in your product listing, either. It implies that no one is buying or interested in the stuff.

 

The other thing that was confusing was the stock quantities - if you are an on-demand supplier and get stuff to people quickly (shipping within a day or two of the order), then you effectively have all of the stuff in stock. And, in your shipping info you should state "If an item is not available we will inform you by email of the estimated delivery time." and omit the "Our products are supplied to us on demand." As long as you get stuff to people quickly, the question of who warehouses the stuff shouldn't be presented. If it takes a week or two to get the stuff, then you should state that "Our products are bulk ordered and are generally ready to be shipped to you within 10 working days of your order." If this is the case, you really should stock much more than you do (what do your competitors do?). As it stands, it seems that there is too much info and not enough clarity. And, if you do keep the little stock indicator button, you should explain it everywhere that it is displayed.

 

As another poster mentioned, shoppers like color - when you click on the products link, you go to the aisles listing - which is totally plain. Even though it may not be a good choice, the brands listing is much more attractive. Also, if the cute little question mark represents a missing image, you should replace it - to me it seems like the product is an unknown entity rather than one without a photo.

 

Finally, it just doesn't look German.

 

I don't mean to be harsh, and you stated: "I know, I'm usually direct to the point with my feedbacks, so please feel free to do the same on my shop" And, I really do hope that you do well with the site.

 

Tony

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Hi victor363,

 

thank you very much for a thorough look. It's still morning here and I'm pondering over your observations and suggestions drinking my coffee.

 

Hi Abra,

 

I like the changes you made to your site – very nice! If it were me, I would remove the add to cart buttons from your catalog pages and put the emphasis on 'view details'. With the drop down menu's, things are kind of confusing. Plus, if someone clicks 'add to cart' with 'quantity zero', they are taken to a dead end page and are forced to use the back button.

Thanks for the general compliment. I personally quite like these bold lime green and orange colours. The dropdown quantity selection - interesting you should comment on it, as a friend of mine (not the ultimate computer savvy person) said exactly the same. She suggested to replace it with an input field. I'll have to think about this as it needs to be really obvious that people need to enter/select a quantity.

 

When I used the master/slave contrib (still implemented but currently not visible), I added some code to give a message when trying to add a slave from the list without quantity selected. Got to dig that out and throw it into the listings file.

 

Well, I guess, trying to get my visitors to dig further into the site to the product detail level was probably just my wish that they see the lovely details pages. A bit further up in this thread, we tried to analyse how visitors might make their buying decision. As I'm selling products my customers know already, it's more about confirming it's the product they want (image, name and unit) and that the price is right (hopefully fixed that with the £ price displayed). So there really is only a need to go to the details for further info like cooking instructions or info on ingredients etc. I'll stick to the add to cart button on the listings as I think they might just buy more like this.

 

My supplier requires to go onto each products detail page to add it to the cart. Very laborious and boring.

 

I think your site is the first store I have seen which uses blue text. Personally, I like black text better since that is what people are accustomed too - though I really don't know if it makes a difference in readability. However,there is an advantage of switching to black text; and that is it allows you to add more emphasis to your hyperlinks. Did you mentioned before that you wanted to funnel more visitor's to the 'view details' page? Changing all the page text to black; but putting 'view details' in underlined blue text would probably drastically increase the CTR rate to those pages.

Yeah, that blue text is a leftover from the first version of the page. I'm not happy with switching it back to black. I got so used to the very dark blue. Maybe I'll change it to a dark grey.

Some other observations:

 

-On the ‘view cart contents’ page – the checkout button is below the fold. Putting it above the fold will increase the amount of people who start your checkout

 

-do you have a sitemap? In the webmaster guidelines, google requests that all pages be made accessible from at least one static text link. Not sure if that applies to you.

 

 

-You can easily add more contrast to your site, and draw people’s gaze to the center of the screen by, adding a background color to your template. This would probably increase readability.

 

- your product images are very bland. If you could obtain images of people actually using your products in some shape or form; whether cooking, making coffee, eating – it would probably go a long way to spice things up.

 

You are right about the checkout button on the shopping cart page. I already moved the checkout line with the steps until the order is finished to the top on those pages. I'll move the button up the next days and make it more obvious that they proceed to the secure checkout.

 

Sitemap: got one for google and the dynamic one for the visitors, although the latter is disabled right now. I didn't like the way it generates the links. Needs a bit of playing around with the code before I can use it for my customers. Otherwise, all my pages can be reached through links. Best visitors right now on my site are google and yahoo.

 

Hm, the darker browser background. Makes the page very limited again. What colour would you suggest?

 

Product images. Good point but as stated earlier, I expect customers to know the products. It's a kind of "oh, I know this from my childhood" thing. They don't really need these products but in a way it helps them feel "at home" when they are not in Germany.

 

Its a very nice site all around. I would be interested in learning how your are driving traffic to it.

It's a mixture of PPC, organic search results (they search for special products) and word of mouth.

 

“blue is a bad color for food, but a good color for a plate” – random quote I remember from studying color psychology.

I like that one. Our favourite selfbaked childrens birthday cake is red, blue, yellow and green inside topped with a blue icing with lots of hundeds and thousands on top. Makes a small cake go a long way and it's great to watch the children how they react to blue and green food.

 

Thanks again,

 

abra

The First Law of E-Commerce: If the user can't find the product, the user can't buy the product.

 

Feedback and suggestions on my shop welcome.

 

Note: My advice is based on my own experience or on something I read in these forums. No guarantee it'll work for you! Make sure that you always BACKUP the database and the files you are going to change so that you can rollback to a working version if things go wrong.

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Hi tastar, thanks for taking the time to checkout my site.

 

The queries and parse time. I tweaked some of the queries. On normal osC sites it helps to remove the categories count as that infobox is on all pages and thus executed every time. I'm still not happy with the load time but that's more to do with the image size and again I might have added some database queries that are not efficient yet.

 

The coding. When I first started to change the layout on product_info I got trapped in all those nested tables. So I started to change the code with correct doctype declaration (browsers otherwise use their quirks mode) which lead to a challenge for a code that validates with the W3C validator and replacing lots of the layout tables with positioned divs. Most of the layout is done via the stylesheet now. It took me about a year to learn all this - trial and error and a lot of motivation does the trick.

 

Contact us. Good point with the dropdown list entries.

Security code. Absolutely vital. Just had a guest on the site a few days ago hitting the contact us page with the send parameter already set. Not sure if they used some way of adding an email address to the form before sending but without the security code this would have gone through. I think it's not that they spam us with our form but rather they send spam to others with our shop address being the spammer. You don't want that!

 

I'm working on getting more product ratings with after sale mails. Good point.

 

Shipping info. You are right there. I'll have to rework this information on the shipping page and everywhere else it appears. Stock levels are increased on most popular products. My competitors stock products but then again, they often stock items that are not in demand. The way I do it right now gives me the option to have a greater product range and to fill that gap where something is not available with my competitors.

 

Aisles. Totally agree with you. Waiting for an inspiration of what exactly to put there.

 

Qustion mark. Again, valuable point.

 

German. Well, it's German products and the question mark has the German colours. The site might also be expanded in the near future to sell Bulgarian products within the EU or even Irish products so I try to keep it flexible. And, honestly, I don't miss Germany at all. :-"

 

abra

 

Your site it great - I noticed that you were displaying queries and parse times and they are incredible, extremely efficient and obviously well tuned (I wish that i knew how to do that - part of the secret, I guess is not to have all of the normal osCommerce info boxes in action). Also, I looked at the source code for a page or two. Beautiful coding (again, I wish that I knew how to do that).

 

OK, now some criticisms - just a little inconsistency - Contact Us is called Information in the header and Contact Us in the footer. No big deal. But, you should add hyperlinks to it in the News section (top left quadrant) and the Let Us Know (bottom left quadrant) on the news page - it took me a while to find it in the footer. Also, on the contact us page, you list Registration Problem, Login Problem as two choices. I would change the word problem to question - if they are a couple of the very few choices in the list, then it makes it sound like problems are a primary issue. Also, do you really need the security verification for the contact us email? I don't have it and don't get spammed (although I don't get visitors either), and it is one additional step that someone needs to take to contact you.

 

The star rating system is cool, especially if you have a bunch of ratings. But, having no rating for a product is different than a zero rating as you show it - maybe you could do an if statement and show something like "be the first to rate this product" if there are no ratings rather than giving the product a zero. And, you don't want to show a bunch of zero or no ratings in your product listing, either. It implies that no one is buying or interested in the stuff.

 

The other thing that was confusing was the stock quantities - if you are an on-demand supplier and get stuff to people quickly (shipping within a day or two of the order), then you effectively have all of the stuff in stock. And, in your shipping info you should state "If an item is not available we will inform you by email of the estimated delivery time." and omit the "Our products are supplied to us on demand." As long as you get stuff to people quickly, the question of who warehouses the stuff shouldn't be presented. If it takes a week or two to get the stuff, then you should state that "Our products are bulk ordered and are generally ready to be shipped to you within 10 working days of your order." If this is the case, you really should stock much more than you do (what do your competitors do?). As it stands, it seems that there is too much info and not enough clarity. And, if you do keep the little stock indicator button, you should explain it everywhere that it is displayed.

 

As another poster mentioned, shoppers like color - when you click on the products link, you go to the aisles listing - which is totally plain. Even though it may not be a good choice, the brands listing is much more attractive. Also, if the cute little question mark represents a missing image, you should replace it - to me it seems like the product is an unknown entity rather than one without a photo.

 

Finally, it just doesn't look German.

 

I don't mean to be harsh, and you stated: "I know, I'm usually direct to the point with my feedbacks, so please feel free to do the same on my shop" And, I really do hope that you do well with the site.

 

Tony

The First Law of E-Commerce: If the user can't find the product, the user can't buy the product.

 

Feedback and suggestions on my shop welcome.

 

Note: My advice is based on my own experience or on something I read in these forums. No guarantee it'll work for you! Make sure that you always BACKUP the database and the files you are going to change so that you can rollback to a working version if things go wrong.

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I'm working on getting more product ratings with after sale mails. Good point.

 

Good morning abra :)

 

You say that your customers are buying products they already know and are familiar with so it occurs to me that you may therefore have a really hard time getting them to rate them.

 

There seems little motivation to do so as they are not trying something new? Also your products are low value and I assume they buy a few products at a time rather than single items so they are unlikely to go to the trouble of rating several items?

 

All this considered I suspect you may do better with customer testimonials where they can rate your store and service. These comments are far more likely to persuade future buyers than the odd rating next to an individual product which they know and so is unlikely to influence their buying decision anyway.

 

As well as being more useful it would also have the added benefit of really cleaning up your pages so that the customer can focus on the product and get on with the job of buying! The stars are real pretty and hopefully you could find another use for them but lots of zero ratings is not a helpful thing to see and it just gives the impression that you are new.

 

Sorry just me rambling on again lol

 

best wishes

crazy

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