Practical eCommerce

woodenpenworks

I have what I consider a pretty good product. One item in particular is a hand made pen with an engraved coat of arms.
It seems that people like it, select it for purchase, and then abandon it at the shopping cart level.
I need some advice on what to do to convert these people.
here is the product's link
http://www.woodenpenworks.com/coat-of-arms-engraved-pen.html

Any help would be appreciated.

dean0088 · **Date:** Wed Feb 27, 2008 8:15 pm **Subject:** Check out abondonment

I think it has to do with not showing the price of shipping. I went in and went through your checkout process and you don't tell me the price of shipping unless I put all my info in. That may be a function of your cart but I think you need to tell people what the shipping is before they provide their personal info.

If your shipping is being added by destination then maybe just ask for the city and state before the personal info is placed. Or price your shipping on a scale so you can place it in your listing.

When I went in and looked at it, I felt like I was going to have to place my order and then find out what the shipping would be, I think that scares people away.

Hope that helps

woodenpenworks · **Date:** Thu Feb 28, 2008 6:53 am **Subject:**

Dean, Thanks for taking the time to do that. That is a valid observation. I am reviewing my options within the checkout section of the Yahoo store editor.

woodenpenworks

woodenpenworks

Dean and All
I was able to place the shipping calculator on the shopping cart page.
If any one cares to take a look and comment further, I would be grateful.

Thanks

saicool171 · **Date:** Sun Mar 02, 2008 9:41 am **Subject:**

Adding a 'Shipping Options' or 'Shipping Info' page would be useful. Perhaps in the bottom menu.

If you offer free shipping for sales over a certain dollar amount make this prominent. If you don't, you may consider it and make it prominent.

Your telephone contact in a more visible spot would be helpful as well. If a customer has a question, they can reach you right away and they don't have to dig thru the site for the information. Having a separate Contact Us page from the About us page would be helpful.

You have a great product and I think navigation enhancements and confidence builders could help in your conversions. Time being of constraint to step in and do a detailed review - I would recommend two books/authors that helped me tremendously when I started out:

Don't make me think by Steve Krug
Web Usability books by Jacob Nielsen

These should give you a fair amount of information. After implementing design and navigation elements from there I would also recommend using an DELETED software (Google DELETED is free) to identify areas your customers might be facing issues with and further optimize your site.

Best,

Saicool

TackleToyStore · **Date:** Tue May 13, 2008 8:03 pm **Subject:** Product Reviews

Woodenpenworks,

You have a very nice website. I agree with the shipping end of it, having that available will help. I would take out the surnames, that list is way too long, and very hard to read. I would incorporate that into a search, or an alphabetical listing, where if the customer clicks on the letter B it takes them to a page where all the surnames that start with the letter b are. This will clean up your page, and perhaps get rid of the scrolling.

On my website I have tried to get rid of as much scrolling as possible. I also added a shopping cart on the right column, this allows the customer to view their cart throughout their shopping experience, there is also a convenient Google Checkout option right under the cart, so the button doesn't have to be displayed by the ADD TO CART button that is on each product. Basically I have tried to eliminate as much "clutter" as possible. I also have one page check out where the customer does not have to register to purchase a product. There are a lot of people out there that prefer not to register their information, hence the need for the non-registering purchase option.

Even with everything you see above, I still have some abandoned carts. I don't think that you can do away with that 100%. I see abandoned carts with products on my site that have free shipping, so it's not always shipping.

I hope this helps.

Get Elastic · **Date:** Sat May 17, 2008 12:08 pm **Subject:**

There's a lot of wasted white space on the right where a product description (with nice, scannable bullet points and short, concise copy) should be. I would also design this page so there is one form where a user can start typing their name and the dropdown menu tries to match the name (think when you type in your country into a form field and if you're in Canada, you start typing Ca and it jumps down the menu accordingly).

This would save a LOT of space, and then you can display your add to cart button more prominently! I missed it on first look of your page. You might also want to test different colors of add to cart button using Google's free Website Optimizer tool.

CGard · **Date:** Fri May 30, 2008 9:22 am **Subject:**

I really liked your product, but from the standpoint of appearance and usability of the page, I thought listing all the names was rather redundant considering there are easy-to-use drop down lists.

Also, I think that people may abandon when there is no company history or service number on the page. Both of those things, to me, seem to make the process more legitimate. I know you have contact information on another page, but I like to know there is someone I can contact live if I really needed it.

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