Online shop

chalkie99

OK, I've had a quick look and any comments offered are just my initial thoughts and not intended to offend .......

My main thought is that in a couple of places on your site you mention your large range -

From the home page:

We stock and supply a wide range of contemporary gifts for the home for every budget and taste

From the about us page:

have established a reputation for providing a superb choice

We offer only the very best products available

look at our fine selection of luxury items


To be blunt (sorry) what I see is a very small range of mostly budget price items and I think you would be better angling your wording towards what you actually have, rather than building the viewers hopes only for them to be disappointed on browsing.

You probably need to get advice on altering your urls to make them more search engine friendly and finally, for a quick look, you mention that you want to drive more traffic to your site and that you have a lot of Facebook and Twitter followers. Have you checked your visitors log to check whether people are not visiting the web site or whether, perhaps, they are looking but not buying?

Hope you take this as constructively as it is meant.

erniethemilk

Really appreciate your comments, I am going to go through them and come back, please feel free to add more.

Annisele

Super pedantic hat on, sorry...

I won't order from a website I haven't used before unless I can work out who I'd be dealing with. (I'm a pessimistic soul, and I like to know who I'll have to sue if things go wrong - and if they're outside the UK, I usually don't bother).

The "about us" section doesn't say whether you're a sole trader, a partnership, or a limited company - or indeed anything much about who you actually are. Your "terms and conditions" says that "us" means the owner of the website, but I don't think it says who that is.

The nominet registration for the website gives the same Redditch address that's on your terms and conditions page, and a sole trader's name which I assume is yours - but I wouldn't want to rely on Nominet to work out who I'm dealing with.

I'm also not completely sure you're complying with the Distance Selling Regulations (primarily because I can't work out who you are). But I'm not a lawyer, so if you're happy that you are complying don't worry about that.

Having said that, I think I'm unusually picky with that sort of thing - so I doubt it's a big issue in terms of how many customers you have.

heart_free

Some more basics.....
1) You need to put alt.tags on all your images. If you can encorporate keywords into your alt.tags this is an extra way to get them seen. Search Engines 'read' your site, and they can't read images, so you need an alt.tag to tell the SE what its looking at.
2) Get user-friendly urls which include the title of your page (another great use for keywords. So after the forward slash the campervan page for example would read /coolcampervans
3) Make sure your 301 redirect is set up
4) Your landing pages don't have conversion forms, make it really easy for people to Buy Now!
5) You need to build up more inbound links from authoritative sites. as already suggested ask bloggers to review your products etc.
6) Sharing: its not easy to share content from your site or your blog. add social media sharing buttons.

Good luck, looks like some fun items on your site.

erniethemilk

thanks for comments, we have taken them on board and have changed a few things, open cart is new to us and we are finding a few issues.

The stock we are trying to add more each week, its an expensive task!

SEO we are always working on behind the scenes, we are looking at the FB and Tw sharing tags. Something happens everyday on the site but it just takes time.

The 301 is working just checked it. We changed the set up of the items as I didn't like all the items on all together and I wanted different sections to look tidier, I appreciate it is more clicks.

I really appreciate all the comments.

paulwf

erniethemilk wrote: »

The stock we are trying to add more each week, its an expensive task!

Which is something you really, REALLY need to consider in your business plan before you progress further. I bet you'll find that you need to "seed" the shop with £10K or whatever of stock, some of which you'll find you never sell. Also, to grow the business you'll have to sink even more money into stock to expand the range...so a lot of the profit you make will go back into the business as stock and you won't get to see a return for a long time.

What's the answer? One solution might be to focus on one specific area e.g. kitchenware or wedding gifts rather than covering a broad spectrum. Alternatively can you get a very good supply chain in place? If your wholesaler can ship to you next day and you then courier to the customer the next day just offer a 48 hour ordering process and you'd be fine...though there are risks.

vintagebrighton

Most of what I was going to say has already been said so I won't repeat any of that.

One other thought.... is there any reason why you've gone straight for a website? Would it be feasible for you to build your business up via ebay and/or amazon and then launch your own site when you have enough stock to fill it properly? As paulwf said, you really don't have enough stock for your own site and it's likely to put buyers off.

You could turn it into a positive in a way. Your blog could be about a business start up, how you're growing it, what you're putting in place - taking your readers every step with you so by the time you launch your own site you have a ready made audience ready to see what you have. Possibly also with a ready made 'emotional' attachment to your little venture.

Anyway, good luck with it, whatever you decide. It's a tough climate

vintagebrighton

One more quick thing... don't customers have to physically opt in to accepting cookies now? Your site doesn't seem to comply with the new regulation but happy to be proved wrong

nox118

vintagebrighton wrote: »

One more quick thing... don't customers have to physically opt in to accepting cookies now? Your site doesn't seem to comply with the new regulation but happy to be proved wrong

They do if you use cookies for tracking purposes or persistant cookies. If you only have session cookies or user interface customisation cookies, eg language preference cookies to remember the language selected by the user, you don't need to have the opt-in.

nicesurf

I think you can get a lot of visitors from your twitter. And at the same time you ask people to get followers to your twitter.