Need Feedback Badly, What's stopping customers from buying?

[Guest]

Hi everybody,

 

I launched my website about 2 weeks ago, I changed the look extensively, but I don't seem to be getting any decent conversion rates (running adwords + forum advertising), I know it might be early, but any insights on changes I should make would be great. Anything from design to text to the way the items are listed.

 

Thanks in advance for any help!

 

My store: [Removed]

[Guest]

Hello!

 

I checked out your site and it's not bad. My only issues are the two spots that keep flashing. Personally, I don't care for sites that flash things at me, I find it too distracting when I'm trying to read other things on the page. People seem to think it attracts attention, however I think it just distracts. I love the fonts you've used. The background colour to the page is a little dull and dark, perhaps if you lighten it at little to let the main shop page shine through. Like I said, my major issue is the flashing things. I wanted to read what you had to say, but they kept distracting me.

 

Patience is paramount in this game. The first two weeks I went live, I barely had any hits despite having Google ad words. Tons of impressions, very few hits and definitely no sales. Online purchasing is a trust thing. You've thrown your virtual doors open but that doesn't mean that the orders are going to start right away. People have to get to know you first before they'll take the plunge. I figure, the longer you've been around, the more exposure your company/website has, the more people are bound to trust you and buy from you. I would continue to try to spread the word as much as possible about your website and not worry too much about not having immediate sales. Naturally, we all want sales as quickly as possible, but I was reading in a marketing book that it can take a person seeing an ad 20 times before they pay attention to it and decide they need to buy the product! The important thing is to have a marketing plan for your website, set time frames for your marketing and stick to it. Don't change things just because you don't get immediate results. Perserverance and eventually you'll have them beating down your door!

 

Great prices by the way...I might buy some chocolates from you, but I have to get to know your company first! :lol:

 

Denise

[Guest]

Wow, great feedback, thanks a lot! Thank you for taking the time. I was wondering about the flash as well, maybe if the transitions were smoother instead of abrupt?

 

A little about the website, we've been a local supplier for some time (hence the good prices) and I personally decided to try selling some of our chocolates on the internet since there's absolutely no web presence for these. I guess I'm stressing for nothing, it's hard not to when you have coworkers telling you it's not going to work! We did get several orders, but I definitely was expecting more.

 

Again, I really appreciate any feedback!

[Guest]

Hi. I just looked at your site, and it looks pretty good. It's clean and simple.

 

I agree with Burgundy about the Flash. It is a bit distracting. I'd look at changing the transitions using a smooth crossfade, or get rid of it entirely. Would your target market find value in Wawel's "109 years of tradition"?

 

With regards to your marketing, how targeted are your AdWords campaigns? Are your keywords specific to the chocolates you sell (brand names, specific flavors), or are you bidding on general keywords like "chocolate"? If you have AdGroups for specific chocolates, are you sending visitors to your homepage or directly to the relevant page? These factors will make a difference to your conversions.

 

Are your running some kind of analytics program? If not, get something like Google Analytics and set up some goals and funnels to track, as this can help you find out if and where customers are abandoning their shopping carts.

[tastar]

Great site - it looks tempting, but I'm on a diet. The photos are great, the descriptions are great, the look and performance are great. You have obviously put a lot of effort into it.

 

One problem with a large selection is figuring out what to choose. Maybe a grab bag sampler for people who aren't familiar with Polish chocolates, would be a good idea - like for 9.99, 19.99 etc.

 

If someone wants to try a couple of items, 4.99 for shipping really adds to the cost - especially if they want to make sure that you are legit before spending more money (as previous posters have mentioned). You could take a hit for a month and do free shipping on everything (hard to charge for it after you do that), or make it cheaper so that small initial orders don't double in price because of shipping (like 1.99 or 2.99).

 

A nice contrib that gives you a lot of flexibility for providing deals (like free shipping codes, discounts, etc.) is Credit Class & Gift Vouchers. You could mix some of this stuff into your Google AdWords to attract the some of the massive number of internet bargain hunters.

 

Since you are advertising your address in About Us, add it to the contact us page. And since you are a local supplier, with a phone number (I guess), add that to the site as well.

 

Your header could be more compact - it seems like it takes up too much real estate - so that on my 768 pixel high screen, I have to do a lot of scrolling to see product details, etc.

 

One thing that is misleading is the way that you display the stuff that is sold by weight - from an initial glance, it seems like the item's price is based on the number of 6oz packages that you get at x.xx each. But, your prices are really much better if larger weights are chosen. Effectively, you are advertising your highest prices. So, for the stuff that is sold by weight, you could show Weight: Please Select Below [or, don't show Weight], Price: Choose your Quantity [right above the attribute pull down]. Of course, this complicates what price you show in the category listing page where the comparison price is helpful for making a specific selection.

 

Like previous posters have mentioned, and from personal experience, it really seems to take a while for things to take off - I'm personally still on the runway, but getting closer. You have done a great job so far, just persevere.

 

tony

[Guest]

Hi everybody,

 

I launched my website about 2 weeks ago, I changed the look extensively, but I don't seem to be getting any decent conversion rates (running adwords + forum advertising), I know it might be early, but any insights on changes I should make would be great. Anything from design to text to the way the items are listed.

I think you're lucky it's only 2 weeks. Make sure your sessions retrieved by spiders. Setup the osc admin sesssions properly as I see now the links generating sessions regardless of visitor type.

 

Your "weekly hits" box or whatever that is hard-codes urls. This means customers who use the cart and click any of those will lose the session if cookies aren't getting through.

 

As of the site exposure you have no back-links from other sites so it shows a pr0 at the moment. Use some of the seo contributions since it's a new store and provide meaningful links to spiders for your categories/products.

[Victor Wise]

With regards to your marketing, how targeted are your AdWords campaigns? Are your keywords specific to the chocolates you sell (brand names, specific flavors), or are you bidding on general keywords like "chocolate"? If you have AdGroups for specific chocolates, are you sending visitors to your homepage or directly to the relevant page? These factors will make a difference to your conversions.

 

A cursory look seems to indicate that non of your product pages or catalog pages match the keywords people are typing into google. Taking this one step further, you might be able to sell your products to satisfy needs inherent to other keywords.

 

A usability problem I notice is that you may want to more clearly signify the choices a user can make on your category pages. On the preceding page, I could see some users bailing on your site because they didn't realize they could click on the images.

[Guest]

Great Comments! I would like to really thank everybody that took the time to comment. I've done a lot of the changes people suggested. It's great to have so many different outlooks.

 

I'm glad victor363 mentioned something I have been trying to improve: The catalog pages. You can click on a subcategory from the menu OR you can click on an image of a candy in the category description. I wanted to make sure people understood their choices, but I can see how it can be confusing. Any suggestion on improving the useability of pages like: http://www.chocoladka.com/index.php?cPath=41 or even the index page with clickeable candy.

 

I would like to say that orders are definitely picking up, I really hope the trend continues. Keep the comments coming!

[Victor Wise]

Any suggestion on improving the useability of pages like: http://www.chocoladka.com/index.php?cPath=41 or even the index page with clickeable candy.

 

I recommend trying to emulate this type of category page. The thing about web 2.0 is that you should never have to say things like: 'click here', 'click on the category below', or 'click on a picture to view'. This isn't the 90's - the design of your site should imply what can be clicked on or even encourage it through a strong call to action.

 

 

Aside from emulating VJ's site, a very quick way for you to increase usability could be changing all hyperlinks to underlined blue. Your customers are conditioned to immediately recognize this as a hyperlink, why not take advantage of it?

[abra123cadabra]

Nice looking site.

 

I have to agree with the previous posters about the real estate at the top of the page and the categories pages.

 

So this is the first time I see your site. I realise, it's about eastern european, probably polish sweets/chocolates. Now I want to buy some. Where do I click to see the products? There are lots of buttons but none titled "catalog" or "products". The closest I see is "sweet makers" where I would expect to find information about the makers.

 

Anyway, this is the only choice... leading me to a new page with lots of text in the main page area with the logo of the maker. Looks like info about the maker. Hm, not what I was looking for right now. No sweets to add to my cart in sight. Scrolling down shows some boxes etc. and a hint: click on a box which leads me to a new category page with more text on some of them and, scrolling down again, products which I can add to the cart.

 

The category box in the left column is designed in such a way that I completely overlooked it (although I'm really experienced with reviewing osC shops). It looks as if it has only a few more lines of "useless" info about the maker and doesn't contain links to the sweets of this maker. Maybe underline them, add a > or change the subcategory names to "boxes by xyz"?

 

Your prices are very competitive but I can only add one box or one amount of sweets to the cart. Why not add a quantity dropdown list to add more?

 

I had a look if I can see one of your adword ads but obviously I entered the wrong keywords. Another check with google shows that almost all your pages are indexed with session ids. If you haven't done this already, you should fix this immediately.

 

Hopefully this helps you to optimize the shopping experience for your customers.

 

abra