Somebody please help us! We have been live since late November. We sell automotive tools. We have 225 or so products, very competitively priced. We have what I consider to be a fairly attractive, easy to use site. Checkout is completely secure through apache and very fast and easy as well. We tried sales, free shipping, etc… We opened a free advice column, a free automotive forum, and available one-on-one Automotive diagnostic advice. Nothing is working. Please, somebody take a look at the site and make some suggestions. It’s:http://www.cartoolconnection.com
Thank you for your help, Brian Short, site co-owner.
Hi cartool0, welcome to the forums,
First, for me is the white text on a black background. I’ve seen this on “Game” and “Goth” sites, but these type of sites are a younger demographic than auto tools. So I’d have to really be interested before struggling to read it, in fact, I turned off CSS styles to do so. Not something most visitors are likely to do if a back button’s handy.
I looked for the link to the forum to see how many registered members it had, but could not find the link. Try making it more visible. EDIT: Found it. In addiition to being inline in the text, another link to it might help. 0 members? Not good but then again it’s only a month old, give it time.
As for lack of sales, I don’t need to tell you that in the current economy money is tight. And from what I remember of the area, the northern border of Vermont isn’t exactly heavily populated. Maybe highlight your shipping terms?
And I think maybe a “weekly/daily tip/tool/common problem” type of blog would help attract visitors too. You could get WordPress for free if you wanted to.
If you’re prepared for a potentially brutal but honest evalution of the site, try posting a thread in the “site review” forum. http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=12 Just need to comment on 3 other sites first before starting your own thread.
I am on a 1200 x 960 resolution which made the font really uncomfortable for the eyes. Also in order to read anything, because of font size and resolution I had to move my head real close to the monitor.
As the others mentioned - it’s too hard to read.
And, no offense, the layout is way too “old-school”.
My advice would be to get a really good designer to make a new layout with eye-friendly colours and a “current” style (not too web2.0 as it wouldn’t fit the sites topic).
It does seem that a lot of graphic folks love
white text on a dark background …so hard
to read and should never be used when you
want someone to read the text.
I looked through several pages and the site
is really rough.
And as a “tool nut”, I cannot figure out why
I would buy one of these tools???
You either need to target brand names and
then be a “Great Price” …
…or you need to sell really COOL tools and then
have some sales content that explains to me
why these tools are the coolest around and
why I need them.
Right now I look at them and wonder if Home
Depot sells the same or similar items …and that
makes it a tough sell for you.
Thank you everybody for the input. As you can see, we underwent some drastic reconstruction. Please take a look and tell me what you think. We are currently in negotiations with tool manufacturers but it looks bleak…very expensive. Anyway,thanks again for the advice.
Please request a site review in the site reviews forum as Mittineague suggested if you’d like more feedback.