Please critique my online store

[Monkeyleg]

My website is now getting 350,000 to 450,000 visitors a month. I figured it was time to convert some of those visitors into extra income, so I added an online store.

Right now I have just a few items that I sell, as I'm just testing the waters to see if this is something that will work. The main page for the online store is here..

I'm ranking well on the search engines for various terms related to Crimson Trace grips, GunVault safes and so on. I'm also running Google AdWords ads for some of the products. The links from the pages on the search engines and the Google ads don't go to the online store page, but either to the brand page (Crimson Trace, for example) or to individual models of the brands.

If anyone has time to look at these pages, I'd appreciate any critique you might have to offer. Specifically, is there anything about any of the pages that puts you off? Do you see something that would make you uneasy about buying?

I guess what I'm asking is if the way I've presented the products is done as effectively as other gun-related online merchants.

Thanks for any replies, and thank you, Oleg, for allowing this thread.

 

[bogie]

My gut reaction would be to include a thumbnail image of each product with the link - that way, you can see what you're about to get a closer look at.

Separate the "buy" button from the "we take this kind of plastic" image.

 

[sithanas]

Your cart code apparently spawns a near-invisible popup window - this is blocked by my browser and so your cart silently fails (and will probably fail for most other firefox users, too). Also, your stylesheet doesn't render correctly under Firefox/Safari (the black section at the bottom is several pages long).

Are you using a prebuilt shopping cart system? You may want to consider another solution - there are several very nice free/open source software solutions, some in ASP and some in PHP. (OSCommerce is a good one.) Several of those have a very nice "store" like feel to them. If you polish your checkout you should attract business pretty well, but the key is how your checkout and cart look. Shady looking shopping carts make people think of shady websites and won't induce them to give you their CC details. Polished carts make people want to spend money.

 

[Sylvan-Forge]

Monkeyleg,

I like how you have shipping (included) in your pricing and I like the clean look of your site.


Some hasty types of customers will do a fast price comparison and may jump to your competition without noting that shipping is (free), though these are usually non-repeats anyway.

So as not to appear disingenuous, maybe change the term to 'included' and give the statement a different color, boldness, italic... something to bring it out, make it a little more notable. There is Value here.

This is a personal thing, but why don't people just round to the nearest dollar?
I think the economy is well away from the days when a penny or even a nickel was worth, well .. a penny or a nickel
Round up or down, make life a smidgen simpler for balancing the books and lend more weight to your 'straight shooter' intro.

This needs better delineation:

CRIMSON TRACE LASER SIGHTS, GUNVAULT GUN SAFES, NIKON BINOCULARS, EOTECH SIGHTS, TRIJICON SIGHTS

The loooonnnnggggg page needs to either be trimmed up, or have a funny/silly payoff at the bottom


Good prosperity to you, Monkeyleg!

 

[BruceRDucer]

It's Okay

MonkeyLeg:

Your overall layout and organization seems good, orderly and clear.

My only criticism is that all of your text print is small, and I do not do small. Your type size is smaller than The High Road's forum text size, so....

 

[Monkeyleg]

Thanks for the critiques. Keep 'em coming, please.

The little popup window was something I had to install in order to track conversions from the http pages to the https pages. Since I'm not tracking that way anymore, I'll have to remember to delete that bit of javascript.

The long scrolling has always been an issue with the design of the site. The black box at the bottom and the gray vertical box and verticle line on the left need to "float" in depth with the amount of text on the page. As it is now, the only way to fix that is to set the depth of all three layers the same. That would have to be done manually, and there's 1700+ pages that would need to be adjusted.

I've tried to find a java script that would stop scrolling at a certain point, but so far no luck. The only other solution I can think of is to completely redesign the site.

sithanas, what about the look of my site makes it look "shady?" Anything, or are you just commenting on sites in general? Are there other sites with shopping carts you think I should take a look at that are better?

Sylvan-Forge, it's not only sites that hide the shipping costs until the checkout page that frustrate me. There's one big online seller of laser sights, night sights and so on that advertises a low price for particular models of Eotech sights, laser sights, etc. But when you click on their link, you get a page with a different model, say an Eotech 512. Well, you were looking for an Eotech 552. They have the 552 on the page with a radio button. Check the button for the 552 and--surprise!--the price is a couple hundred dollars higher than what their ad said. I'm amazed nobody has reported them to Google for that.

BruceRDucer, I don't do small type, either. I'll have to look at how THR's style sheet is set up.

I appreciate the criticism, and am eagerly waiting for more. What I'm hoping to hear is reasons why someone would hesitate to buy from my site.

I started out in 2004 with a couple of thousand visitors a month, and now I'm over a third of a million. I thought that online selling with that number of visitors would be easy. It's not. Maybe there's something with us gun folks that's different from other buyers.

 

[VirgilCaine]

My only criticism is that all of your text print is small, and I do not do small. Your type size is smaller than The High Road's forum text size, so....

Uh, you know you can change the size text is displayed at in your browser, right?

BTW, Monkeyleg I was surprised Crimson Trace didn't have any grips for the High Power.

Other than the issue with the huge space at the bottom of the page, your site looks clean and professional.

 

[bogie]

Gun people can be real cheap.

Plus, at one major gun show, that lasts three days, we've got three different groups...

Day 1 - serious buyers. Day 2 - they poke, and ask stupid questions. Day 3 - they ask if we want to pay them to take stuff home. And it is distinctly different groups of people too... Day 1, generally neatly set up, even if they may have dreadlocks and a nose ring. Day 2, some of them still have most of their teefies. Day 3, older folks who think they're dressing for bidness.

If you are offering free shipping, emphasize the heck out of that.

 

[sithanas]

The only issue I have really is the buttons - you should find some template ones (iStockPhoto can be a great resource) or something so they don't look hand-drawn. Everything else looks pretty good as far as that's all concerned. I'd say to make sure that nothing is default fontface, good buttons used, etc etc. The SSL guarantee you have is good - make it a little more prominent on the page.

http://demo.oscommerce.com/shopping_cart.php <-- That's the shopping cart from the OSCommerce system I was telling you about. It's a good system, and a good basic idea - a little more totally commercial than what you're looking for, but it's a good enough package that it's become sort of an informal standard.

Oh yeah, and CSS can seriously suck. A good trick is using float:right; and changing the order of the DIVs, but Internet Exploder usually hates that. Or a dynamically generated container DIV that adjusts to content size? Or just putting a hidden message vertical-align:bottom; so people have a payoff.

 

[bogie]

Hey 'leg... How are those safes for semi-disabled operation? Jen's deaf, and I'm wondering if they require some sort of heard cue...

 

[Monkeyleg]

Bogie, the audio alerts on the safes can be turned off. Opening the safe requires pushing the buttons in whatever order you program in.

I've been implementing a lot of the changes suggested here. I'm getting orders, but I'd like more.

I think the fact that I have a limited number of products may cause some people to think that it's not a "real" store. The next line of products I'm going to add will be Insight Tech weapons lights. The distributor told me those are good sellers.

 

[Wopasaurus]

I think the lonnnnnnng site thing is a turn off. Where it scrolls forever, and there's nothing there.

I think you could do a lot with Tabs also. Make it moreso web-2.0, and less old style.

My girlfriend works for a web development company, I can get some tips for her on making it more up to date. Here is a site they have done, so you can see what I'm talking about.

WildFlavors