I would like to solicit some feedback on the following website homefurnishingtextiles(dot)co(dot)uk. My reason for raising this is that I am not seeing visits turning into conversions, which are less than 0.5%. Some of the site details are shown below:

 

1000 Visits a month

162 Indexed pages

Page Rank of 2

MOZ Rank of 4

Domain age 2 years

50% Bounce rate

80% New traffic

 

One significant point of note, is that on or around the 9/10 April 2010 I saw a 50% reduction in search engine visitors, despite no changes being made to the website.

 

I am aware that only having Paypal as the payment method might be an issue. But is there anything else that I am missing? Is there anything that might stop you from buying from this website?

 

Thank you for your feedback.

The PayPal buying process is a major turn off... it majorly damages credibility - it's not how I expect to pay and the way it pops-up in a separate window with some random email address across the top. Do you see lots of abandonment at that stage?

Another major factor is there's nothing selling on the site. Nothing draws me in and products just have a picture and their dimensions listed - there's no sales copy, nothing appealing to me, making me want the product or giving me a reason to buy.

The design is way better than a lot of the osCommerce-based sites out there - the only thing that jumps out is the block of text on the home page could do with some styling tweaks to make it easier and more attractive to read (especially looking at the bolding - it looks a bit spammy).

Change the buying system and get some sales copy written is my advice.

I totally agree with what Mr Wizely said about Paypal, especially how you're doing it now.

 

With the amount of products you have I'd strongly recommend using a proper shopping cart system to handle sales. Not only will this appear more "shoplike" with a proper basket and checkout process, but will also offer you lots of different tools to help sell things. You could still use Paypal but I'd suggest using a normal payment gateway and offering Paypal as an alternative.

 

One thing I did spot is that your P & P is very expensive, eg on a £7.50 item it tells me postage is £6.99 on top, it's cheaper for me to nip up to [insert superstore name] for some bedding.

 

There's far too much text on the home page. Who wants to read all that? People come to your site to buy bedding not read your company spiel. Imagine going into WH Smiths only to be force read their corporate waffle before you were allowed to get on with your shopping :-)

 

Combined with the apparent high cost of postage the total cost of ordering is far too expensive. Many people buy multiple bedding items in one go so one thing you could do is offer 3 for the price of 2 as an incentive. I remember my mum always buying three of everything, so one in use, one in the wash, and one ready for use.

I'm gonna have to add another 'dislike' to the PayPal. It doesn't really work on professional company websites; people expect you to have an integrated system, that looks like your own.

 

The design is clean, but lose the paragraphs on the home page. Even on my portfolio site, I'm looking to use as little boring paragraphs as possible; people don't read them half the time!

I would thank you for your feedback, very constructive.

 

The owner has taken immediate action in that (i) all the prices have been changed, (ii) the text on the Home page has gone and been replaced with a graphic. These will not be the final solutions, but are quick fixes for teh moment.

 

The Paypal item will take a little longer to implement.

 

Thanks again.