Hi Aidan,
Check your Google Analytics stats for clues in where your problem areas are.
- Are your sales expectations realistic? What's your conversion rate?
- Where are customers abandoning your site?
- Where are customers dropping their carts?
- How much traffic are you getting each day?
- Which pages get the most traffic?
- How effective are your keywords/keyphrases?
- Are you reaching your target demographic?
Following are a few areas that I see as contributing factors to lowered conversion rates and site abandonment.
The single biggest problem I've found is that users don't see a "View Cart" or "Checkout" link unless they're on the cart page. That's pretty much suicidal!
Unless they add an item to the cart, they'll never see it and when they "Continue Shopping", they can't get back to it. I shop, add a product or two, "Continue Shopping", read an article, watch a movie then want to check out. Now I've got to add another item to the cart just so I can get back to it, then delete the item I just added because I didn't really want it.
Once you get there, I find the cart is great up to the checkout page. Listing all the products the cart contains seems like a great idea but it's distracting and more importantly, requires that the user scroll down to fill out the billing/shipping information. I'm using FireFox at a resolution of 1280x1024 and I can't even see the form, so I'd consider that apretty significant issue.
Why can't I find a "payment methods" information page? I want to order over the phone or send an order in by fax. How would I do that?
Let's say I'm not happy with my purchase. Do you provide any satisfaction guarantees? Where would I find that information?
There's a lack of conformity in terms of your "Add to Cart" buttons and links. Some use text, some are pill shaped, others are larger and rectangular. Additionally, the product layouts seem cluttered without space between images and text.
Be sure that your font faces match. I found this and couldn't understand why it wasn't using the same font as the rest of the site. It just looks odd.
Quote:
Thank you for ordering from The CLEMMER Group! Please ensure every field with an asterisk * is filled out completely to avoid any ordering problems, and double check your credit card number and expiration date as you enter it.
If you have any problems, please call us and we'll be happy to help you with your order. Call (519) 748-1044 or send us an e-mail to service@clemmer.net.
We offer substantial discounts from just 10 copies - click here for discount details - Books, Tapes & CDs
Enjoy your materials!
Jim Clemmer
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The scrolling client list is extremely annoying. It's much to fast to be read, so what purpose does it serve? It'd be better to slow it down and display it one line at a time so people can read it or simply do away with it entirely.
Take a look at a "Learn More" product information pages. The movie window jiggles around if you resize the page and the columns containing text don't expand or contract horizontally to take advantage of all the white space on the left.
Your paragraph text would benefit from more space between shorter, easier to read sentences. They're practically screaming for line breaks. When it comes to writing for the web, remember that less is more. You can always use a "Read more..." or "Continue..." text link to another page focused on the topic at hand.
Your paragraph text links are much too long. They look spammy, clutter up the page and contain words that are of no benefit anyway.
Quote:
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Practical resources, filled with advice anyone can use to improve their team and organization almost immediately!
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Take a look at the "Leadership Quiz" on the home page. The line spacing is so tight that it looks like one giant spammy link.
Clean up the clutter in the page footer which contains links already listed in the sitemap and top navigation menu.
Take a look at your meta descriptions and keywords. Several pages use duplicate Meta descriptions when they should be specific to each page. The same could be said about keywords. Restrict the meta description to a maximum 160 characters and use no more than eight keywords per page. This is where you can really make some progress in organic rankings.
Want to evaluate your results in the SERPs? Take at look at what your prospective clients see before they even get to your site. Based on your search query, take a look at the wording and ask yourself if you'd click the link.
Overall, I think you're pretty close to having a knockout site. Do what you can to improve the overall focus to a point where it's quite self evident and simple to use. Tackle some CSS layout, formatting, navigation issues and reduce page clutter and you'll be on your way to living the dream.
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