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New store, first with cubecart, please look


Guest ladyabbie

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Guest ladyabbie

I am new to cubecart and first I will say I love it, I just started my store about a month ago and within a week I had a viable store...then my brother, a web designer, was helping me customize it some which turned into customizing it a lot so after about a month we are done. So here it is...www.ladyabbies.com ...I think we are basically finished and I am honestly thrilled with the way it looks, but wanted to post it up here to see what other people think of it before I start advertising it and all. So please let me know if you see any changes/improvements, etc that you think it may need.

Thanks in advance for your time, Erin

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  • 1 month later...
Guest ladyabbie

I'm bumping this up because I would love to hear more truthful takes on my site. I'm getting a decent amount of traffic but little of this is turning into sales and even more frustrating is that people seem to start the checkout process (they register and their names show up under customers) but they don't complete the order. I just installed the express checkout mod and someone went through that and still didn't complete the order. My webmaster and I both run tests to check if everything is working correctly and that doesn't seem to be the problem. So I am trying to figure out what the problem is and would love honest opinions.

Are my blinders on and the store isn't as good as I think it is? Please let me know. What more can I do with it?

Brutal comments, please email me at [email protected], others please post here so that others may use the advice.

The site again is www.ladyabbies.com.

Thanks much,

Erin

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Hi Erin,

I've created a test purchase, and have the following comments;

View cart button - not really visible

I added an item, and could see the basket, but not the "View Cart" button (I had to look fairly hard).

On the std cubecart install, the ViewCart button is pretty obvious (Orange background methinks). Do somethign to make it clickable.

Express Checkout.

There is a small mod to the Express Checkout mod (mod to a mod!). This drastically cuts down the number of clicks/basket views required to get to the final payment page. This is only a small code tweak that the author offered. Visit www.cubecart.org / commercial mods section for more info.

Place a test order on my store (http://gear4mobiles.co.uk) to see the flow. Please use "test" values, so I don't send a chase email!

Cart Step2,4,5 - Basket contents mis-aligned (FireFox)

This is a biggy. I'm on a widescreen laptop (1280x800) and the basket contents were shifted over to the right of the screen. This means a bit patch of white, with the basket over the blue background and a nasty horizontal scrollbar. This looked a mess - and needs sorted asap.

On a plus note, its really good to see someone using their logo on the PayPal payment page.

I'd advise to put the "PayPal payments" logo at the bottom of the front page- or perhaps put it in a sidebox (use a different logo)

Change the "Fabulous Toys"... etc Text, and possibly put a motange of products, or perhaps something a bit flashier (I do like the cycling products - very nice!)

After looking at your store, the main problem is the shifting on the cart pages. Fix that, and the rest are fairly minor.

I wouldn't worry too much, your site looks really good (alignment issue aside), and it all takes time to build up traffic and custom.

Jason

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Guest ladyabbie

Jason,

Thanks for running the test order and for the comments. I have sent them along to my webmaster and we'll be changing some things. I appreciate your time!

~Erin

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...
Guest ladyabbie

First of all, cute new member descriptions!

I am bumping this again, maybe there are some new people out there who would like to take a look at my site. It's been up for about 2.5 months now and is ever changing so I'd love opinions.

The layout of my product pages was just changed so that I have the picture, price & product options at the top and then the product description below, I like it alot but would love to know what others think.

Other changes are smaller but I think for the most part it is coming together nicely.

Thanks in advance for your time, if you look!

Erin

www.ladyabbies.com

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Guest devstudent

Seeing as how you seem to be begging for criticism I'll toss you some.

Over all, I think the site looks really nice. If I was a customer shopping there I didn't see anything that would stand out to me as looking odd in a way your average person would likely pay any attention to and for any reason feel discouraged from shopping there.

As a web developer though looking at it, and what you seem to be wanting input from, there are a couple major things that bother me when seeing it, again, this is only from a developers perspective, customer perspective I think your probably good.

Right off the top, the page layout doesn't center properly in my browser, either in IE or FF, it's scooted (technical term) over to the left side too far. This isn't as bad in FF, but it gets very bad in IE. In fact, in IE it forces an un needed scroll bar at the bottom of my browser for no reason. When the page opens in IE its off to the left the same amount as when I see it in FF, however if you scroll with that scroll bar it gets drasticly off center.

I've attached an IE and a FF screen shot so you can better see what I'm talking about and how your page looks to me incase it's not looking that way to you.

A minor detail, no biggy, but the list items in your "Popular Products" box over there also look a bit strange the way they are wrapping under the numbers. A minor thing, but from a developpers perspective a touch that should be improved so the letters that drop to the next line aren't starting all the way over at the far left edge of the margin and instead appear indented as a true list item should look.

Lastly, and the biggest issue from a developers perspective, you have lots of boo boos here that a professional web developer would have resolved, a few errors you know, not so bad if your DTD was set to Strict, but your setting the DTD to cheater pass Transitional and still dropping 20 errors in the code, thats a little excessive and not the type of thing I'd expect to see from a professional web developer...

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&am...com%2Findex.php

CSS doesn't pass validation either, may after the code errors are fixed in the XHTML though?

IE Screen Shot:

Sorry, couldn't get the FF Screen Shot to upload for you...

The total filespace required to upload all the attached files is greater than your per post or global limit. Please reduce the number of attachments or the size of the attachments.

You get the idea in the IE screenshot though where the problem is dramaticly worse.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Well, since no one mentioned it, I might as well give you feedback from a business perspective. Your potential customer does not know you as you are not a household name. Given this, you need to add something to the site to assure customers that your store is an authentic entity and that any and all information they supply you with is going to be confidential. Include at lest one of the following: a logo from the security certificate provider, ie VeriSign, Comodo, etc. and/or a GeoTrust True Site seal. Also, if you can afford it, a BBB Online logo wouldn't hurt. Now on a developer level, your site has a serious bug. I accidentally typed an "a" when the country field had focus and it changed my country to Afghanistan. Your site then refused to let me fix that error and continually displayed the "No shipping method setup for your country. Please contact us to see if we can make an alternative arrangement." error. You need to fix that one. Also, when I first visited the page, I clicked buy on the main page, then clicked on add to cart (two clicks) and then there was no checkout menu option anywhere. You need that. I had to go to cart contents (more clicks) and then try to checkout. Hope this helps.

TomG.

Day Job

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Guest ladyabbie

Tom,

Thanks for looking at my store and taking the time to give me some feedback. I had no idea about the country issue. I tried it myself to see what you meant and you are 100% correct about the problem. It's not something I ever even thought of and at this point I do not have a way to go back in and change the address, the customer is stuck. I would assume at this point their only option is to clear out their history and try to check out again, but realistically, who would ever do that? They will just move on to another site. It's my site and I was frustrated with it! So thank you for pointing that out, I can just see customers getting that message not even knowing that they accidentally hit the wrong country and being totally confused. I have notified my webmaster of the problem so hopefully there is a solution. I assume there is but I have limited knowledge (generously speaking) of html coding, etc...so I will have to wait to hear from my webmaster.

I am not quite sure I understand your comments about the checkout itself. I feel my site is set up like many others I have looked at and I don't see an issue with the checkout process. But thank you for letting me know what you thought about it. In my opinion I would think people would want to review the contents of their cart before they check out anyway, so going through the cart to checkout makes sense to me. It also used to be set up so that a person could click on "buy" from the menu and the item would be added to their cart, but since I added a gift option and there is no gift mod available, I had to put the option on each item description and therefore, if you click "buy" on the menu it still takes you to the item and you do have to click "buy" again to actually add it to your cart. Again, this is due to not having another option if I want to allow customers to make their item a gift. So I don't love that system either, but don't really have a choice until there's a gift mod option on cubecart that allows me to add it to the checkout area, rather then each product description page.

Again, thanks for your comments. I appreciate the honest feedback.

Erin

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Guest ladyabbie

Actually, the more I think about it, I do understand what you mean about the checkout menu so I will be talking to my webmaster about adding that as well.

Thanks again!

Erin

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  • 2 weeks later...

I see you added the Comodo corner certification, good job. Has it had any impact on sales? Do you have enough sales to see a trend (the seal usually adds 10-30% to sales depending on demographic.

TomG.

www.tmg4apc.com - Day Job

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  • 2 weeks later...
Guest lordbarron

im also interested in that comodo thing it looks really neat and is a constant reminder the site is safe.

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I am in the minority, I hate the commodo thing, for two very good reasons IMO, 1) javascript, and 2) invalid code:

Result: 11 errors / 1 warning

line 1 - Error: no document type declaration; implying "<!DOCTYPE HTML SYSTEM>"

line 46 column 6 - Error: end tag for "HEAD" which is not finished

line 48 column 17 - Error: there is no attribute "LEFTMARGIN"

line 48 column 31 - Error: there is no attribute "TOPMARGIN"

line 48 column 47 - Error: there is no attribute "MARGINWIDTH"

line 48 column 64 - Error: there is no attribute "MARGINHEIGHT"

line 49 column 26 - Error: there is no attribute "HEIGHT"

line 49 column 86 - Error: there is no attribute "BACKGROUND"

line 65 column 8 - Error: required attribute "TYPE" not specified

line 71 column 110 - Warning: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "v_search"

line 71 column 110 - Error: general entity "v_search" not defined and no default entity

line 71 column 118 - Error: reference to entity "v_search" for which no system identifier could be generated

line 71 column 109 - Info: entity was defined here

As to the first, I can live with it, as CubeCart needs js to work and most people browse the web with IE and just accept all js by default, this is not such a terrible biggie. However, I cannot stand the invalid code that is produced by the commodo frame.

On the bright side, most of your customers probably don't care that your site is full of invalid code and there is also an element that will be impressed by the ever-present corner graphic, so though I personally despise this commodo thing, it might actually help increase your sales.

In addition to the 11 errors caused by this commodo thing, your site homepage itself has 22 errors in the code:

Result: 22 errors / 1 warning

line 47 column 81 - Error: there is no attribute "onClick"

line 227 column 408 - Error: end tag for "img" omitted, but OMITTAG NO was specified

line 227 column 292 - Info: start tag was here

line 243 column 14 - Error: document type does not allow element "p" here; missing one of "object", "applet", "map", "iframe", "button", "ins", "del" start-tag

line 453 column 101 - Error: required attribute "alt" not specified

line 538 column 84 - Error: there is no attribute "onMousedown"

line 539 column 21 - Error: there is no attribute "width"

line 539 column 42 - Error: there is no attribute "onSelectStart"

line 539 column 56 - Error: element "ilayer" undefined

line 540 column 21 - Error: there is no attribute "width"

line 540 column 40 - Error: there is no attribute "onMouseover"

line 540 column 98 - Error: there is no attribute "onMouseout"

line 540 column 112 - Error: element "layer" undefined

line 546 column 27 - Error: there is no attribute "onClick"

line 559 column 20 - Error: the name and VI delimiter can be omitted from an attribute specification only if SHORTTAG YES is specified

line 563 column 20 - Error: the name and VI delimiter can be omitted from an attribute specification only if SHORTTAG YES is specified

line 567 column 20 - Error: the name and VI delimiter can be omitted from an attribute specification only if SHORTTAG YES is specified

line 571 column 20 - Error: the name and VI delimiter can be omitted from an attribute specification only if SHORTTAG YES is specified

line 575 column 20 - Error: the name and VI delimiter can be omitted from an attribute specification only if SHORTTAG YES is specified

line 579 column 20 - Error: the name and VI delimiter can be omitted from an attribute specification only if SHORTTAG YES is specified

line 583 column 21 - Error: the name and VI delimiter can be omitted from an attribute specification only if SHORTTAG YES is specified

line 589 column 68 - Warning: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "docId"

line 589 column 68 - Error: general entity "docId" not defined and no default entity

line 589 column 73 - Error: reference to entity "docId" for which no system identifier could be generated

line 589 column 67 - Info: entity was defined here

Most of this is not very serious, and your designer should be able to straighten it out in a matter of minutes.

Overall your site is very nice and shows a flare for creativity. Good work, hope sales continue to improve.

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Guest ladyabbie

Thanks for the comments.

I don't know that I love the Commodo thing either, but I do think it might make a difference for some customers. Plus since it was free with my ssl purchase, it's a much better value for me right now then paying for the BBB online or something of that nature.

I am not too worried about the invalid code it causes, and as you point out, most customers will never know or care that it exists. As for the other errors, thanks for pointing them out. I will send them to my webmaster. I think we knew about them already and, since my webmaster is my brother doing all of this for me for free:) it's just been put to the end of the list of things to do. But I am about done making major changes to the site so hopefully he can now spend some time ironing out the small issues, such as the horizontal scroll bar and the like.

Thanks again!

Erin

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