Feedback please

[nromain]

Hi Entrepreneurs and Web Developers:

 

What do you think? Your feedback is appreciated!

 

North American Tuning

 

Note to the moderator:

"Powered by osCommerce" shows in the "catalog" part of my site, which is the only part that uses osCommerce. I've built the rest in Dreamweaver from scratch.

[abra123cadabra]

Sorry, maybe I missed something, but it looks like the out of the box osC to me. You added your logo and products and changed the buttons. That's it.

 

No business address, no phone number.

 

Maybe tell us a bit more about what you modified. Otherwise I would recommend reading the feedback others got in this forum and start applying them to your own shop, if you want to change it.

 

abra

[nromain]

Sorry, maybe I missed something, but it looks like the out of the box osC to me. You added your logo and products and changed the buttons. That's it.

 

No business address, no phone number.

 

Maybe tell us a bit more about what you modified. Otherwise I would recommend reading the feedback others got in this forum and start applying them to your own shop, if you want to change it.

 

abra

 

 

Ulrike,

I did not know that 57 installed contributions were a requirement to get feedback :) but that's OK.

I have spent a good amount of time on Paypal IPN, SSL, finetuning the look and feel, etc but again, any professional website is a constant evolution, so you are right, I still have a lot of work to do, and so does all websites, including yours. Consider this Phase I and that's where I need reviews before I implement Phase II. There is a logic to it. As for the address and phone, I take your point. However, I wonder if it's required. Do you think it adds credibility? To me, SSL is more important as a shopper.

Next step is to continue to add products but again, I'd like to hear other comments, good or bad, from the others.

Thanks.

[nromain]

Hey Ulrike:

Thanks for taking the time to review.

I took at look a your store. Nicely done. Lots of mods.

Nick

[abra123cadabra]

Hi Nick,

 

I didn't say you need to add a lot of mods or any at all but ususally the feedback give here is on the functionality and design and not on the products. And concerning this, your site still looks like the original osC. A lot of modification cannot be seen as they are on the backend.

 

As for the address and phone number I really think they are important. Just look at it in another way. How do customers come to your shop? I guess it will be via organic search, ie. google. They will land on any page, not the index. So I might be looking for a special part for my Mustang. Here I go, I find the part. Next thing is, how do I get it here. I'm in Ireland and you are.... where? USA, China, Australia? Don't you think I would like to order a bit closer to home? Ok, so you are the only supplier for that part I can find but how much is it going to cost me?

 

Maybe I want to make sure you are reliable. First thing for something bulky like car parts would be to send you an email or even call you about shipping costs. If I can speak to a real person, that answers the phone with the business name I see on the website, that's a big plus on the trustworthyness scale that you have to build up with me. I have to rely on your promises, ie. send me the part that I order in a certain time in a good condition. Maybe I know someone in your city that I can ask to drop by your real shop. That's almost the jackpot for trustworthyness.

 

So yes, I really think it is important. I would even go as far as check the whois to see if registration and website address/phone/name match in any way and how long the domain is registered. We talk about trust in a time where where are gazillions of new online shops that might just take your money and run or rather do nothing and you can't get in touch with them because you have no address or phone number.

 

It happened to me recently with a big only printshop where I ordered business cards. Simple thing, I recommended them to a friend and she didn't receive her order within the specified and paid for time frame. Tried to contact them. Only way was a contact_us page where nothing happened. No phone number, no address. Not in the golden pages. Nothing. Started to search the inet and found a lot of negative comments about this company like misusing your CC for some registration you might accidentally have subscribed to during the checkout process.

 

Finally I used their order confirmation email address to contact them again and received an autoresponse that they can only be contacted via toll free US number. Cool. Toll free US is expensive from Ireland. In the end, they send it out again but the negative feeling about them and the panic I started to feel is left. Would I buy there again? I'm not sure. Would I recommend them to my friends? Certainly not.

 

Sorry, I drifted away from the main topic, feedback to your shop. As your online presence is the only way to get customers trust, you have to give everything there.

 

I would certainly add Ultimate SEO URLs to your shop so that your products can be found more easily on search results. The way your shop looks right now, it's fine, doesn't look too "stock" as in "demo shop". The logo and images fit the blueish/gray infoboxes. All I'm saying is that there are a lot of things you can change to make it more attractive.

 

So you've looked at my store. Well, I think I'll never be done with this one. I wanted it to be different... that comes with a price. I'm working on it for more than 7 months now. There are still loads of things on my todo list. Quite a few on the frontend and a lot on the backend. I only once asked for a functionality feedback which gave me a lot of information of how different users are navigating through a site.

 

Anyway, I keep ploughing away, adding more products and information. If you need feedback on anything a user to your site can see/experience, let me know and I'll have a closer look at that.

 

abra