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functionality seen in more modern ecommerce sites to aid customer choice, or increase conversion. I am of course making comments on a
business for which we have no idea of its turnover, development budget or marketing budget. What I can tell is that the site is an off- the-shelf template-type solution.
Functionality
and user journey Functionality is pretty basic throughout the site, but probably conducive with the platform. The gift finder is a useful tool, but has no styling around it and is a fairly crude way of getting customers to a group of products, but it does the job. When you click into the Baby Gifts
category as an example, it has many subcategories that are displayed nicely above the fold, very clear, usable and friendly. Going one click deeper, however, doesn’t provide any more functionality to refine the selection. This is especially pertinent if
you land on the site from a search engine. The phrase first birthday gift lands you directly onto the subcategory page, which is great, but it disappoints by not having any dynamic filtering or further selection refinements that would significantly help the customer. I found that if I knew the brand of the product I was looking for, but not necessarily the product name, finding the name of the brand to begin with was quite difficult, as the brands are depicted as logos and not in alphabetical order on the left-hand column. Once you are at product level, there is
professional product imagery blending into the white page background, alongside copy. To aid search-engine visibility, there should ideally be more than 200 words of unique copy to accompany each product. Again, to reassure visitors, links to customer service related pages, such as delivery or returns policy, would help.
Merchandising I would like to see the product ranges broken
down a bit more by sections, for example, a section for photo frames, otherwise it’s a little meaningless. Also, there’s no way to view all when a user searches for a product. If the site structure would allow, it would be much better for the end user to see groups of products. This would enable much better merchandising and even basic landing pages for pay-per-click on cheaper generic or product-specific terms. You can leave product reviews once you
have an account, however it’s not possible to leave an anonymous or a review about your experience about shopping with Born Gifted on the whole. These company-level reviews can be aggregated within Google Products and boost the performance within not only that channel, but also Adwords, as the number of positive reviews is shown in display ads.
Checkout Once I have decided on my purchase and add
the item to my basket, the cart is continuously displayed top right. To order, I need an account, otherwise I cannot purchase from Born Gifted. There are benefits in stipulating having an account in terms of harvesting email addresses and storing buying behaviour for account holders, but if your visitor is in a hurry, this may put him off. It would also be
impact could be made if this wonderful traffic entered a specific landing page for that phrase, with some intuitive filtering to get you to products of interest, quickly. My guess is that the bounce rate could be quite high—more than 40 percent—for these types of phrases. On the plus side, it’s pleasing to see the
Tactics Views
output of the blog piped through to the homepage. The content is current and provides fresh dynamic content to the homepage for SEO, even in the excerpt. Overall, the naming of categories and
subcategories lends itself to good SEO as we can see above, coupled with solid meta title and description naming of each page. At product level, it would help even more if the product name could be included in the URL; the rest of the site’s URLs include the brand or category name. On each category page there’s clever
use of screen real estate using tabs to include a decent amount of copy for the search engines, though it’s not entirely clear to the human visitor how these should be used. More copy needs to be allocated to the brand pages just beneath the H1 tag.
The site would benefit from a
distinction between the H1 tags and page title tags as they are equivalent. The H1 tag is rendered in pink text at the top of category pages as a list of key phrases and
There are better ways of presenting seven pages of 199 unsorted gifts
helpful to include the delivery cost and stock availability in the basket so that the customer has all the information up front before mentally committing to the purchase. Plus, the site should remove the need to verify the address and delivery options each time a customer reaches the checkout. This could be a little frustrating to some visitors if they decide they want to continue shopping. When you start the checkout as a new
customer, the first three steps—delivery address, delivery instructions and checkout—do not have URLs starting with https. Only when you click submit to be taken to payment gateway Worldpay, are you under secure conditions. While it could be argued that your details need not be protected under https during this process, and perhaps this was de rigueur a few years back, my expectations would be that all customer data should be secure.
Search-engine
optimisation Born Gifted is doing very well on Google, for some fairly big generic phrases such as Christening gifts, first page, second position; teacher gifts, first page, second position; first Birthday gifts, first page, first position and baby shower gifts, first page, first position. All these phrases land directly on the
homepage. Taking into account the customer journey and navigation, again I wonder what
isn’t very readable to the human visitor. Born Gifted would certainly benefit from
having direct links from the homepage to its Facebook page or Twitter account, plus providing sharing buttons for the main three social media networks that can influence SEO in 2011, namely Facebook, Twitter and Google+. It was interesting to note that both the Facebook and Twitter accounts had not been updated since mid-2011, maybe this is symptomatic of the lack of visibility on the homepage.
Summary There is no About Us page, which in my world
is one of the most visited pages on clients’ sites; people use this page to help them decide whether they trust you, like you, and would buy from you. It’s a page that you can use massively to your advantage, however it’s missing in this example. The only About Us type information is on the homepage, so I feel the site is really missing a key element. The big question is, would I buy from it?
Well, in short, yes I would. The site has got a lot going for it. However, given the above points, I do wonder if some small steps to improve the site alongside undertaking some testing and analysis could improve conversion rates and overall bottom line. My educated guess is yes, they could.
Kevin Galway is commercial manager at ecommerce services provider MAD Productions.
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