Here are my two cents:
- Search is a must if you have lots of products
- Must have good navigation. Often this includes a toolbar menu with drop downs, a "cookie crumb" along the top to indicate the path navigated and hyperlinks to backtrack, AND a left side frame for an outline style. Don't make me drill through six layers of navigation to find something and then to change I have to back out
- As another poster said, give me some INFO about the products. I hate it when you see five similar products at different prices and no info about why I should spend $30 per mag instead of $10. At a minimum copy the text from the manufacturer, but add your own expertise/observations.
- Really nice to have links to review pages. These could be pages on another site, or articles you arranged to have permission to place on your own pages. Further down the road you could add the ability for customers to add their own comments. I love this capability and research products at Amazon (and often buy there) mainly because of the excellent input from other consumers.
- Consider using AJAX for your data controls if you have long selection lists and are changing the display based on selections. AJAX controls will directly interact with the server database without having to wait for the web page to be refreshed. The controls and page performance are much better.
- Make it font size browser scalable friendly. Many of us older guys have more money to buy stuff, but declining near vision. I like to change my browser to use larger fonts. But if you are placing text inside frames at absolute positions then the larger fonts cause the text to run together and overlap. Make your web page friendly to various display sizes and font sizes by keeping everything relational not absolute positioning and sized.
- Also, to help those of us with poor near vision, make sure the font is a good contrast to the background. Some sites like to use a lot of black background and blue or red text. Yuck! very bad for some of us. Most high volume sites have figured out that a mostly white background is not only the clearest to view but also very fast to display. Nothing wrong with white background and black or navy blue text.
- Use thumbnail pictures for the main page and allow those to be clicked on for a larger image to keep performance up and save on page real estate.
- For the few large images on the main pages (company logo, etc.) you can use some version of Flash graphics which display quickly and don;t take a huge amount of space.
Basically you need to decide if your site is going to be popular because it delivers products at the cheapest price, or whether you iff a competitive price but superior customer experience. If your boss is using low price as a competitive differentiator, than you can;t afford to spend a lot of effort and equipment on the web page. Keep it simple and invest more on search and navigation.
But, if customer experience is the differentiator, than think about what your company has to offer in terms of information and knowledge that can help the visiting customer. for instance, if some parts are often used together than TELL US THAT. I hate going to sites where you want to buy parts that are supposed to work together, and you may not know what are all of the parts that should be included. If you know it, then tell your customers. Even package it as an optional kit, but at least say something like, if you are buying Part 100 then you might also want to get Part 101, 102 and 103 as they are often used as a subassembly. You could even post instruction on how to use certain parts or equipment.
If customer experience is important and not so much on price, then make sure you have parts IN STOCK! and a selection to choose from, and pictures of them and info as to why someone would want to buy one item versus a similar cheaper one.
For instance, I was browsing for AR15 and M!4 mags. You wouldn't believe the number of sites that just list "AR15 mag, 30 rd. green follower" OK, but why do I want the $12.95 version with a orange follower rather than the $9.95 version with a green one. same with the M14, but in this case there is a huge difference and much lying about whether an M14 mag is USGI, current CMI milspec production, or third party knock-offs. In this case I would like to know for each mag:
- Is it USGI milspec? Who is the manufacturer or importer?
- What is the country of origin (I won't buy made in China and am willing to pay a premium for US made, or at least German made)
- What are the distinguishing features? (Is a green follower more or less reliable? Why would I want steel versus aluminum mags, etc.?)
For each item, pretend I walked into your store and said something like "I need to get some parts to do such and such, what do you recommend and why?" If you assume I know exactly what I want then the only thing you can compete on is selction and price.
