Loaded Commerce Community

Ok everyone. My store selling Skin Care products is now live and I'm looking for any feedback you guys can give me.

Fabulous Skin Company

The site has only been live for about 2 weeks. We're pretty happy with the traffic and sales so far. (getting close to 1 sale per day).

We have product feeds going out to Shopzilla, Yahoo, Google Base, and soon adding Price Runner.

Most the traffic is coming off Adwords though. Although it's more expensive. it is paying for itself in sales so far.

I am also wondering if I should add Google Checkout to the site.. is it worth it when I am already using Paypal Express and the paypal Payments Pro modules already?

Anyways, let me know what you all think..

Thanks in advance for the feedback.

-Mike

Overall nice looking site Mike,

I might be inclined to have all sub-categories as main categories since you only have two (in the menu on the left). Less clicks = more sales / more user-friendly. And also because you don't have images to illustrate the sub-categories.

That way you could also lose the 'all products by category link.' K.I.S.S (Keep it simple, stupid).

I would also make the free shipping and christmas special promotions more impactful - they are a bit lost - and it's efforts like this that can make all the difference in getting waverers across the line.

Good luck,

eff9

Thanks, great feedback. I am going to try to get the menu to display all sub-categories but keep them in main groups for now because we plan on adding other products. I added the drop down menus as a temp-fix until then, but you're right.. so far I'm not happy with any of the menu groups for now.. I also toyed with having it as dhtml, but haven't been able to make that work right either..

I agree with you on the shipping and special also. I did that pretty quick as the last few weeks has been spent on adding products and fixing the photos. I might revisit that in a few days as free time allows..

Thanks again for the feedback.

-Mike

Ok, I worked on the menu problem first.. finished up using the Catagories3 box and making some changes to it.

I'm pretty happy with the results.. check it out.

-Mike

Figured I'd go ahead and fix the header image also with the shipping and sale info as that's a pretty easy fix.. I'm glad I did that too because I like the way it turned out.. let me know what you think.

-Mike

Over all looks good but it was to slow of a site. If I where a customer I would not have stayed waiting for page loads.

I ran a speed test on your site and it looks like images are the slow down.

Your Site Test:
Connection Rate Download Time
14.4K 221.04 seconds
28.8K 114.02 seconds
33.6K 98.73 seconds
56K 62.04 seconds
ISDN 128K 23.86 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 8.46 seconds


Another cre site speed test for comparison:
Connection Rate Download Time
14.4K 105.58 seconds
28.8K 56.89 seconds
33.6K 49.94 seconds
56K 33.24 seconds
ISDN 128K 15.87 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 8.87 seconds

Wierd.. When I run a test on the main page it shows.

Connection Rate Connect Time
56K 29.48 seconds
DSL 2.44 seconds
Cable/T1 1.01 seconds
T3 0.03 seconds
Total Page Size (including HTML and images) is 195.30 Kilobytes

Not that I would wait for 30 seconds on dial up. I could probably cut 20-30% off by lowering the resolutions.. maybe the problem is my server?

Was that the index page you tested?

I think the problem is my host server is slow. I did some tests against some other sites that were similar in size and my site loaded 5x and 10x slower..

Anyone know of a good host for cre?

I just tested the base url
Here is a link to the utility I used
Speed Analyzer

Very nice site. Did you create the design yourself or is it based on a template? If a template where did you find it. I like the way the product photos look like they are in a 35mm slide.

Thanks. I bought the original template from

http://www.websitetemplatedesign.com/cr ... p-390.html

I found it pretty easy to work with and have done alot of little changes.

The photos I take myself and crop, scale, adjust and resize. I found that the photos are probably the most time-intensive part of getting all the products posted, but highly critical to purchases.. It might just be the beauty industry. but I think our % of purchases almost doubled when the photos looked nicer.

I am working on moving the site to a faster server. Things should be 3-4 times faster after the move. Hopefully it will be complete next week.

-Mike