Frustrated

[Hobbins Models]

This is another of those requests for comments on a web site, The only thing is I am really frustrated on the lack of orders eminating from my site.
The only thing I can think of is pricing preventing final ordering... Unless someone can tell me differently.
ALL comments will be received gracefully no matter how harsh

[Mike Hughes]

There are a few things you need to consider:

1. Are you getting enough qualified traffic? Most online retailers are reasonable happy if they can get a 1-2% conversion rate. i.e. they get 1 or 2 sales for each 100 people visiting the website. How many visitors are you getting to your website and what kind of conversion rate are you getting?

2. Design considersations:

- Your website is too wide. people hate scrolling and dislike not seeing the whole website. A quick look at my most recent stats tells me that 69% of my vistors are using a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 or less and your website won't fully show at that resolution.

- Your frontpage is too large: A total of 619345 bytes. On a 56K modem that will take over 2 minutes to download.

- The top level graphic is too wide and doesn't look too good.

- The navigation buttons inside the catalog don't look that good to me.

3. Search engine friendliness.

- Your navigation goes via the cgi-bin and I couldn't see a sitemap link on your front page for the search engines to follow. Doing this would help the search engines index your website and bring more customers.

Mike

[Hobbins Models]

Thanks for the reply Olderscot.

1. Are you getting enough qualified traffic? Most online retailers are reasonable happy if they can get a 1-2% conversion rate. i.e. they get 1 or 2 sales for each 100 people visiting the website. How many visitors are you getting to your website and what kind of conversion rate are you getting?

We have over 15,000 in the past 3 months out of these we only received 10 orders, Bad conversion rate?!
We asked the question as to why people purchased from us, they gave replies such as "easy to navigate", "well designed" and " Lots of choice".

2. Design considersations:

- Your website is too wide. people hate scrolling and dislike not seeing the whole website. A quick look at my most recent stats tells me that 69% of my vistors are using a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 or less and your website won't fully show at that resolution.

Is there a way of retricting the width of my site, or it just a matter of reducing content and or removing Left hand colums?

- The top level graphic is too wide and doesn't look too good.

Anyone know a good graphics designer?
We did pay someone to design the header graphic (obviously didn't pay enough)

- The navigation buttons inside the catalog don't look that good to me.

Better to have a standard text than a graphic button?

3. Search engine friendliness.

- Your navigation goes via the cgi-bin and I couldn't see a sitemap link on your front page for the search engines to follow. Doing this would help the search engines index your website and bring more customers.

sorry dont understand this one. could you elaborate?

Thanks for the quick reply Mike

Ian

[NormanRouxel]

That top banner has been stretched too wide and has an obviously wrong aspect ratio. It would be best to re-scale this so it looks right and then add white space at each end if you want to keep it the same size.

You could also make sure that your pictures are optimised for web display. E.g. front page image tn_futaba_ff7.jpg is 19Kb but only 9K when re-saved with some compression. Doing this to all these images will make a big difference to page load times. You also have one huge 70K image of a product box that's bigger on it's own than many complete pages.

[RuralWeb]

15,000 in the past 3 months

Are these actual visitors or SE spiders I suspect the latter looking at your Alexa rankings.

Your site has 103 pages listed by Google so i dont think you have an indexing problem.

I think the other posts have identified the problem ie the images are too large and the page needs scrolling even at high res - both these are visitor killers.

[Hobbins Models]

Thanks Norman and Ruralweb,

I will endevour to sort out these faults, hopefully these comments will help my coversion rates.

Ian

[freakmode]

Hi

I just added a few products from this section

http://www.hobbins-models.co.uk/acatalog/Series_A.html

And all of the prices are FREE

I am then unable to checkout as the min order value is £5.

David

[chris ashdown]

The links from the home page are missing on items "Reflex xtr, Hanger 9 p-47 & P-40 & parkzone mustang" the others work ok

[chris ashdown]

We have over 15,000 in the past 3 months out of these we only received 10 orders, Bad conversion rate?!
We asked the question as to why people purchased from us, they gave replies such as "easy to navigate", "well designed" and " Lots of choice".

Ian

Are these Hit's or sessions, it's sessions you need to use as these are the number of individualls who have visit your site (some may be repeats by the same person) What is your daily average?

Even so 15000 / 90 is only 166 a day so maybe you could consider PPC on a limited scale to get the numbers up. many items on the forum about PPC

[Hobbins Models]

Thanks for all the replies, and so quick too, I will address all the issues brought up by you wonderful people.

Are these Hit's or sessions, it's sessions you need to use as these are the number of individualls who have visit your site (some may be repeats by the same person) What is your daily average?

Even so 15000 / 90 is only 166 a day so maybe you could consider PPC on a limited scale to get the numbers up. many items on the forum about PPC

From January 1, 2006 to February 22, 2006 1-12 of 12


Date Month Unique Visits
1/1/2006 January 9,951
2/1/2006 February 6,740
16691 Unique Visits

[jont]

Ian - just browsed to your homepage and Firefox came up with a warning to advise "additional plug ins are required to view this page" - not sure what is needed as hit cancel - as may other viewers - I thought I had the usual suspects installed so not sure what it was asking for (it is the item above Welcome to our shop)

[Hobbins Models]

Ian - just browsed to your homepage and Firefox came up with a warning to advise "additional plug ins are required to view this page" - not sure what is needed as hit cancel - as may other viewers - I thought I had the usual suspects installed so not sure what it was asking for (it is the item above Welcome to our shop)

I have checked the code and found nothing that would require a plugin. I will install Firefox and see what happens.
Maybe someone could shed some light on this?
Thanks for the info

Ian

[jont]

It is this

src="http://www.hobbins-models.co.uk/acatalog/flowers.txt

which does not show in IE

is that from a CUSTOMVAR or something?

[Hobbins Models]

It is this

src="http://www.hobbins-models.co.uk/acatalog/flowers.txt

which does not show in IE

is that from a CUSTOMVAR or something?

Ah, yes that is a leftover from a flash header i used at christmas. I will remove the code and try again.
thanks again jont

[janeread]

Are these actual visitors or SE spiders I suspect the latter looking at your Alexa rankings.

Your site has 103 pages listed by Google so i dont think you have an indexing problem.

I think the other posts have identified the problem ie the images are too large and the page needs scrolling even at high res - both these are visitor killers.

can you tell me how you can find out how many of your pages Google has indexed? This would be interesting info for me and my 4 sites!