Please Review Our SIte & A Checkout Question / Help

[HaleyCalire]

Hi Everyone
Our new site went live on Wednesday and I want to thank everyone who has helped us with set up. We are Haley and Claire and in a previous life we worked for BT managing Broadband Contracts for large organisations. The hours were long and as we both had young children, about a year ago we took redundancy and started to look at online opportunities.


Our children were both mad on scooters, so we decided to build an affiliate site about kids scooters and stunt scooters. This became quite successful so we decided to take it one step further and sell the products ourselves. We have created our site and we are just finalising the agreements with the manufacturers, so not all products are ‘live’ and in stock but should be over the next couple of weeks.


We were making daily affiliate commissions with our affiliate site, but since going live on Wednesday we haven’t made a sale, although we have had 42 people in the checkout according to bluepark stats – So any advice or obvious errors we are making would be greatly appreciated, along with any other tips or advice on the site in general.


Our site is Stunt Scooters and here is the link..http://www.stuntscooters.co.uk/


Thanks in Advance.


H.
Ps. We only have paypal set up to take payments at the moment. In your experience does this have an affect on checkout conversions?

[Red Devil]

You don't appear to have a lot of stock. The ones without the "add to basket" symbol are out of stock.

[HaleyCalire]

Hi RD

That's true - Although we got a verbal agreement from the manufacturers to supply us, they wanted to see the site as an ecommerce site before giving the final green light. We will have more stock throughout the next week or two.

People are still adding the stock we have 'live' to their basket, but not buying.

Any advice on this and the site in general will be greatly appreciated.

H.

[Red Devil]

For those out of stock items, I would change the availability wording from "No stock, delayed despatch" to "No stock, coming soon".

If you don't want to hold too much stock but can guarantee supply from your supplier within say 3-4 days then allow orders where no stock (or add dummy stock) but make it clear that delievery will take "x" number of days. If your supplier is drop shipping, then just add "dummy stock" quantities and accept orders.

OK to be a little more positive.

On the "add to basket pop up window" I would change the "fade" to "fade = 0" (probably set to 10 or 15 seconds at the moment) so people can either "continue shopping" or "review and check out".

At some point (when sales start to pick up) I would invest in an SSL certificate which will give your customers more confidence that the site is secure and that their details are protected and indeed will make your Admin pages more secure. I know you may be taking payments off site but people still have to register and add their personal details on the checkout pages.

I did a dummy order and bought a scooter for £99 and the up sell message said "Order another £1.00 of any product for free delivery". I would be a little peeved after spending £99 to discover that the free delivery cut off point was £100. I only want to buy one scooter. I know the cut off point has to be somewhere.

Your postage for anywhere other than the UK mainland is prohibitive to buyers. I appreciate your prices are dictated by the price you can get from your courier. If I was buying a £70-£100 scooter and lived on a Scottish Island I would be loathed to spend £49.50 postage. Granted, the population of those islands won't make up the bulk of your potential customers. Some of the scooters are quite heavy at 4 kg.

A lot of your "Slamm" categories have no products. I know it is a good idea to get your website "live" to get established with the search engines but categories with no products and categories with products with little or no stock, won't get you many orders.

So perhaps you have to be a little more patient and realistic about orders when starting out.

I would add the "related items" block to your product pages so items within the same category will show underneath the product the customer is on.

Have you submitted your products to Googlebase? Have you opened a Google account and linked your sitemap.xml to your account to encourage Google to index your pages? Sign up for Google Analytics so you can see your site stats (in addition to those through Bluepark).

I dont think there is anything fundamentally wrong with the site's design. You will find that people will test the site out and leave without buying to start with. The site is very young and needs to get established. More products will help to get more coverage with the search engines - the more pages you have to be indexed the better. These pages can be information pages as well as products. Until the site has been live for 4-6 weeks you won't get a feel of how it is performing. Having stock will help but don't over stock/over spend. As I said before, if you can guarantee a delivery lead time with your supplier, then operate on that basis rather than buying stock in for orders that you haven't got but make it clear to the customer. That's perfectly acceptable provided you are up front about it.

Don't forget to work on your SEO.

Market your website on and off line but try not to spend too much money in the process.

Good luck with your new venture and if I think of anything else, I'll let you know.

Add a link or two (with keywords) to your Bluepark signature - that helps the search engines to find you.

[Terry]

Hi there
I hope your new venture os a success for you.
Just one or two little things that I have noticed whilst briefly looking (Will look in more detail when I get the opportunity).

Not all of the text that looks like you should be able to click on it, actually is hyperlinked...eg http://www.stuntscooters.co.uk/slamm-rage.html You cannot click on the words in orange "Slam Range Generation 4". Whereas, other words in this colour on different pages , you can. Think you just need to check your links thats all.

When I added to basket, The dialogue box asking me if I wanted to continue shopping etc disappeared quite quickly, before I had a chance to read it all, and look at the options.

Personally, I would take out the portion of checking out as a guest at the checkout phase. I would also put in just a check box for the customer to tick to say that have read and agree to your terms and conditions.

Great that you have the upset message on checkout for free delivery if you spend £xx. Your P&P does seem very cheap for certain areas

You said you only have paypal at the moment, but you display all of the credit / debit card logo's. I personally hate and didn't want paypal as a payment options, but lots of customers do use it over other methods - so, personally, I would keep that as a payment option.

On your customer service page http://www.stuntscooters.co.uk/customer-service.html some of the text is out of alignment, just needs a simple edit

You may attract customers by having a loyalty point scheme - this always works for me. Also, maybe a special offer section.

A lot of the images don't look / stand out enough for me... I think the black background doesn't help? Just a personal thing, and maybe just because Im an old geezer in comparison to the people that will be looking for these type of things :-)

Anyway - don't be disheartened, it takes time and a few tweaks here and there should help.

Have you sent out a promotional email to all of your previous affiliate clients? Offering a discount coupon? You can also have affiliate accounts on the site
Anyway, hope you don't think Im being too picky...like I say - just personal things, and with just a quick look
Terry

[Red Devil]

Personally, I would take out the portion of checking out as a guest at the checkout phase.

I would keep it in. A lot of people won't want to register. Guest checkout is very popular. Give people the choice.

You said you only have paypal at the moment, but you display all of the credit / debit card logo's. I personally hate and didn't want paypal as a payment options, but lots of customers do use it over other methods - so, personally, I would keep that as a payment option.

You don't need a PayPal account to pay through PayPal. You can use your credit card. Perhaps make this clear.

[Terry]

Yes, thats what I meant about paypal - as it stands now, it looks as though you can use credit/debit card as an option..ASWELL as paypal....does need to be made clear.

Personally, have never found guest checkout popular in my experience - as they have to put in their details anyway, so, the automatic registration works (for me) and hence why I mentioned the loyalty points, as a guest checkout won't attract points ..but all down to personal preference

Play around with things, and as RD says, it is very early days - and you can add, take away certain aspects/features over time, once you have given enough time to see what works for you
Terry

[HaleyCalire]

RD and Terry - Wow and a BIG, BIG thanks.

There is a lot to digest and understand, especially via the site set up settings so I will go away and play about with it to set the site up as you both suggest.

Re the images standing out - I would like to put a border around them but not sure how. I started another thread and had some great responses but none quite worked so I will look into this as well.

Thanks again. Your input is much appreciated.

H.

[Neil]

Just going back to the original question - there's not actually a lot wrong but can you see where the people who visited the checkout are from?

One of my affiliate sites had a lot of foreign visitors, it could be that is the case and the delivery charge is putting them off.

[kerrysg]

Site design looks fab to me, although I have no technical expertise so am just commenting from a layman's point of view...

The only minor thing I would say is that there is only one item on your news ticker - if you don't have time to write an article as long as the one you already have, you could do a quick welcome to your site article, or something about free delivery over your specified amount (or loyalty scheme if you decide to use it).

Also with regards to guest checkout, a quarter of the orders that have been placed on our site since going live last week have been done as guests -not sure if that helps you at all. Maybe it's just a case of using it for a while to see how popular it is with you.

Good luck with everything - as the very helpful Terry said it does take time...

[Ashley]

The single thing I would do now is change the add to basket behaviour to "display basket". Also I think the black background is a big no, I find it really heavy on the eye, also makes it look a bit cheap (sorry!). If you are confident in your venture, I would highly recommend you invest in a professional design, I think the key is you are selling a lifestyle not just a product. You need action pictures of kids on scooters looking 'cool', close ups of the designs. You talk about the features of the shooters but you really need to see these pictorially, so for example, exploded views of the designs. Also you do need to offer a proper credit card payment option.

In summary, you need to invest some of that redundancy package! (I used to work for BT too!)

[Chrisg]

The single thing I would do now is change the add to basket behaviour to "display basket". Also I think the black background is a big no, I find it really heavy on the eye, also makes it look a bit cheap (sorry!). If you are confident in your venture, I would highly recommend you invest in a professional design, I think the key is you are selling a lifestyle not just a product. You need action pictures of kids on scooters looking 'cool', close ups of the designs. You talk about the features of the shooters but you really need to see these pictorially, so for example, exploded views of the designs. Also you do need to offer a proper credit card payment option.

In summary, you need to invest some of that redundancy package! (I used to work for BT too!)

I agree with Ashley on the black, our site used to be black and grey and we changed this year an got a 30% increase in sales immediately.

As for the credit card bit I would offer google checkout as well just to give some redundancy without having to get a credit card processing account from your bank.

As for the delivery cut off I have a mix of low value accessories which people can add to get to the threshold without having to buy a second big item. I suggest gloves, small kids knee pads, helmets, stickers etc.

[Red Devil]

Also I think the black background is a big no, I find it really heavy on the eye ...

I agree. You can have a black outer site background but a white inner background where the products are displayed and then have black text on a white background. Much easier to read.

[HaleyCalire]

Hi Kerry - Thanks for the great comments and suggestion - re the ticker. I will look at this.

Hi Neil - Good point. We do nget a few Spanih visitors anting to buy.

Hi Ashley and Chris - I will think about the inner black background - Hubby said the same thing.

Ashley - Could you expad please on the basket behaviour? I am not 100% sure what you mean.

Chris - Re the parts. We will be looking at this next week.

Thanks again everyone - it's really helping.

H

[Neil]

I think the colour really depends on who you think will be choosing the scooter - my 9 year old thinks its one cool site and i would never buy anything like that without him seeing it first, infact i made the mistake of having one in the basket as he was looking at the site so guess what he thinks he's getting for a birthday in 2 weeks!!

Personally i think you need to get a SSL sorted first before you start changing anything else. People are constantly told to look for that and i wouldn't use a shop without one. You are getting people to the checkout, so nothing wrong with the site - you just need them to checkout.

I do agree with ashley about the action pictures as well though.

[kerrysg]

Agree with Neil - my 10 year old would love it, but I suppose it's not the children who are buying... Maybe black background with white centre (as previously suggested) to keep everyone happy!

[HaleyCalire]

Please excuse the spelling mistakes in my last post - I was typing quickly whilst watching the Voice on BBC 1!!!!!

H.

[Ashley]

Site / Configuration / Product

Towards the bottom there is an option, add to basket behaviour, I would change this to view basket only. This will take the user straight to the basket when they add a product.

[Red Devil]

If you are going to make "wholesale" changes to your template colours, it is best to make a backup copy of your current template (there is a copy icon to the right of the template - 3rd one) which will give you a template called "templatename [1]". Do not edit this but continue to make changes to your current template. If you decide to go back to your original template you have "templatename [1]" as a backup that you can set as your default template.

With regards to basket behaviour, I think all you need to change is the "fade" to "fade = 0" if you want to keep the new look add to basket pop up.