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Old 01-15-2008, 01:00 PM
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Dubbya Dubbya is offline
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Default Re: Why No Conversions?

Ultimately, your's is a design/usability issue.

You'd be doing yourself a favor if you picked up Steve Krug's book "Don't Make Me Think vol. 2".
Advanced Common Sense Home

It's a bargain at twice the price and a book every ecommerce store owner should read. Get it, read it, then move on to fixing your site.

If you want to fix this quickly, hire a professional web designer. Preferably one with Yahoo! Stores design experience. If you've blown the budget on all the back end services and/or you feel you want to tackle a redesign yourself, start by checking out your competitors.

If you want an inexpensive fix, find a site template and implement that. It'll be better than what you currently have available.

In the meanwhile, I'll provide a few items you might want to work on.

Shotgun site evaluation (in no particular order):

For one thing, you're running an ecommerce site and this is your home page.

IF AT ALL POSSIBLE, PROVIDE FEW, IF ANY, EXTERNAL LINKS FROM YOUR HOME PAGE.

Clean up your left column. Get rid of anything and everything that does not need to be there, anything unrelated to your site or that might serve as a distraction by simply adding clutter.

You'd be much better off to create a "Links" or "Resources" page and put the external links there. In addition, you're giving away most of your page rank.

You've provided scads of opportunities for your prospective clients to leave the site when you should be focused on how to funnel them through your shopping process.

The site is very plain, bland in fact. The overall design is lacking because you've relied too heavily on text, which might help get traffic to the site initially, but does nothing to keep users interested.

The page area that's "above the fold" contains little, if any information that's beneficial to a casual shopper browsing at a screen resolution of 1024x768. When a user hits your home page, they see little more that "GIANT SCREAMING TEXT".

Post your telephone number (toll-free if possible) and your business address at the top of the page. Build your corporate image and lose the "business in the basement" image you're currently projecting.

Your page needs breadcrumb navigation.
Quote:
You are here: Home / Category / Subcategory / Product page
In addition, if they decide to tough it out and actually click on a category, you've got too many products listed per page. You really need to add some pagination. Break the products up according to brand or features and allow the user to page through about ten products at a time.

Get rid of the repetitive "Customer Testimonials". If you feel you must have them, restrict them to just one or two per page, using just a title with a "Read More..." link and allow your users can access them on a separate page.

.02
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Last edited by Dubbya : 01-15-2008 at 01:04 PM.
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