Protx/Checkout Woes

[fatoftheland]

Hi all

could someone take a look at our site and tell me if they can make head nor tail of the errors our checkout pages are throwing up.

www.wholesaleheating.co.uk/acatalog/home.html

Just add anything to the checkout (low value item) and go to the checkout fill out and continue to the protx page which tries to redirect but never loads. Internet explorer loads the page "but with errors"

Errors are viewable by clicking the exclamation in the bottom left of IE. Click the show details button and then previous to view the first error. These errors seem to be on all our checkout pages. No idea whats caused them as I haven't done anything to the actinic checkout it's all settings just slightly adjusted in actinic.

Anyones help would be great.

Cheers

[fatoftheland]

anyone?.....

[wjcampbe]

You have a real problem with navigation on that site. I tried clicking the huge buttons in the centre of the page. Neither the buttons with words, nor the chevron arrow buttons are clickable unless you catch the narrow strip of tiny writing in the top left corner.

Once I had solved that, I click Radiators and valves, then clicked, then clicked, then clicked.... about 15 clicks later I was no nearer to finding a valve to buy.

OK I'll try taps - clicked on Add to Cart on the first tap I saw - it went off looking for cgi-bin/act-cgi-bin/ca000001.pl and eventually brought me to a 404 error.

Tried again and managed to add a Sentinel cartridge.

Shipping is messed up - no choices and the method I was offered was (0.00).

Filled in some junk on the invoice details page and clicked next - screen cam up to say 'you are off to protx' - ands stayed there. After ten minutes, I closed the page, did a view basket and emptied the cart.

A peek at the page source showed two form tags, both aimed at the protx vps process asp page - neither with any method of activating them.

A search for previous posts about enabling the "Next" button on this page might help, but I would recommend revisiting the navigation to see if you can shallow it out a bit and reduce the number of click required to actually find something to buy.

[Darren B]

Same as Bill never bounced to PROTX

Not sure why you want to use another cgi-bin, also found the site slow when running scripts.

Also agree with Bill, far to many depths when looking for a products, if your going to use large buttons, put large text in them

Just my opinions
Darren

[pinbrook]

I thought I'd search for a radiator key, having just broken the last one we have here.

search returns and fil error, after sitting for a couple of minutes.

I then didn't bother to choose a purchase I clicked one section until 10 clicks later I found a radiator. I added to basket, again long delay, eventually reached checkout without error just delay, got to the bounced page to Protx and stopped. and I'm still waiting.

To me the site is pretty unusable, and its too slow. Hosting needs to be upgraded to somewhere that doesn't slow the site down to a dawdle and allocates sufficient processor time to the scripts.

To get rid of the fil error you will need to purge and refresh the site

[fatoftheland]

wjcampbe: Valid comments but if you can tell me a way to catorgorise 8000 products with less clicks then be my guest! We are also aware that the arrow buttons need to be clickable. This site is still in development so some creases still to iron out.

I agree that many clicks are required to select a product, but we are not selling products which have simple options, we sell complex plumbing and heating products to the public who rarely have any idea what they want. Since our competitors (whom also use actinic) have built their sites in exactly the same way (some who have been around since 1997) we do not see a more straightforward way to display section breakdowns leading to products.

Shipping if Free on orders over £100 - Thanks for pointing out that we haven't changed the shipping message.

I agree that scripts are incredibly slow to run and really don't know a way around this. Scripts are currently being run by a sub directory within the cgi-bin as another ecommerce store is currently running on our server, so this was designed to separate the scripts. Next step is to try running these from the root of the cgi-bin.

If anyone has any ideas what the errors are in the checkout and why protx doesn't redirect then please enlighten me.

Thanks

[chris ashdown]

: Valid comments but if you can tell me a way to catorgorise 8000 products with less clicks then be my guest!

I would suggest using one of Normans expanding menues which I think would enable you to move down the directories using the mouse without clicking

Another way is to put more options on each section or sub section so that you still have all the choices but with maybe one or two clicks rather than the large number at present

Traditionally most people reccomend 3-4 clicks to buy a product any more then the vast majority will move on

Look how Prezzies and the others with large selections handle it

[Jan]

Why do you have 2 cgi-bins? ie: cgi-bin/act-cgi-bin My guess is that this is causing the problems you are seeing.

Regards,

[wjcampbe]

Multi shops on one cgi-bin are best separated by using the built in ability to select the extension AND/OR change the number used.

One site on .pl and another on .cgi can never collide. One site using 000001 and another using 000010 - also can never collide.

[fatoftheland]

thanks for the posts everyone. some food for thought...