Id like to just quickly introduce myself, my names Lee and ive recently started an online store selling childrens books and toys.

 

Over the last 5 months ive had my head in books and been trawling websites to learn about web design so that I could come up with an ecommerce website. Previous to this i had no experience of web design and even now have a limited knowledge of html, php and css. With this knowledge ive managed to build a website based on the zen cart template.

 

The website has just launched and although ive read articles and forums explaining that it takes a while to get these things up and running i dont think i ever really knew what a struggle it would be. This is part of the reason for joining the forum, up until know ive only really had feedback from friends and family on the site (who all tend to be super nice about it) so id love to get some real quality feedback from a community of experts.

 

Please dont pull any punches i want people to be really honest about the site, i know that our prices are the cheapest and our products are good, yet despite a modest amount of traffic we have not had many sales. To that end i can only assume that theres something wrong with the website.

 

I look forward to the feedback

 

P.S. Dont even get me started on SEO, I find it a complete minefield.

Welcome to the forums

 

Oli

Welcome to the forums, and if you need any SEO help, or help generating more sales... add me on MSN tyrc@hotmail.co.uk or pm me, or post on the forum everyone here is freindlier than a monkey in a banana factory.

Welcome m8!

Welcome, Lee!

 

I'm a newbie too, only a couple of weeks old, and I love it here. Not only have I learnt a lot trawling through previous threads, but my pleas for help have been answered instantly and everyone is very friendly.

 

I'm very impressed with your site! I can't believe you started learning web design only five months ago! E-commerce is on my long list of must-learns, and I find it very encouraging that you've produced such a professional site in such a short time.

 

I'm no SEO expert, but I know there are plenty here. As far as I can see you've done a good job in optimising your site, with key words liberally sprinkled and good use of the title and description meta tags. One thing I would suggest though, is that you change that H2 which merely says HOME to a H1 with a more descriptive key phrase, reason being that (a) Google attaches great importance to your H1, and ( no-one is going to Google for "Home"...

 

 

Marie

Your site is brilliant and looks wonderful. I can't believe you're a "novice designer". Bravo!

 

One thing I've learned about e-commerce is that it takes a lot more time then you expect. I'm not even talking about the design aspects but bringing in the customers and making the sale.

 

Boring personal story: Prior to doing freelance writing/web design I made a full-time income selling items on eBay. A few years in I decided to put my eBay items on an e-commerce site. My prices were great, the site functionality was all right (for its time), but the sales just didn't happen! I chalked this up to serial browsing - for every site I go to where I actually make a purchase, I reckon I "just look" at dozens of them. Other people probably do the same thing, so 1,000 unique customers may only result in a handful of sales. I was successful on eBay because it gets such high traffic, so for all the looky-loos I was still making sales from the serious buyers (who are the minority). But on my own site, with my own promotion? It was an uphill battle.

 

Have you added your products to Froogle yet? That is the single most important step, IMHO, to getting targeted traffic to your site.

 

Looking forward to seeing you around the boards and speaking with you further!

nice site - took ages for things to load...but that might be my crap broadband - I live in a tiny village and 5.30 seems to be the time people get home from work and log on to the internet and it all starts chugging - very annoying.

 

I have a friend who uses Cactushop for some of his clients as it used 'friendly URLs' which is better for SEO that the 'query strings' other ecommerce products spew out...but I don't know anything about ecomerce, so thats a stolen bit of wisdom from someone else.

 

Your lack of sales might be because people are just not finding your products via the search engines.

I've just seen a load of stuff that my nephew would love - so I may well be a new customer soon!

All,

 

Thanks for the support and feedback certaintly some things for me to look at this weekend. I didnt know about the H1 tag so ill certaintly have a look into that.

 

Ive already had a look at a lot of the posts and theres some great advice and info on here and im sure it will help me up the steep learning curve ive got ahead to make the site succesful.

 

Just to answer some of the questions:

 

Ive submitted to frrogle (or google base as its now called) btw this is really simple with zencart just 3 clicks and all your products are listed. I looked into ebay but a lot of my suppliers wont supply me if i list on there, ive looked at alternatives (amazon etc) but the commision rates are high (maybe something ill have to swallow to get some traffic and quick sales. Ive tried installing a mod on zencart to convert URLs to a more SEO friendly format but this caused a lot of linking issues so i reverted back to the dynamic URLs for now.

 

Eskymo id love you to be a customer, if you order soon you may even get your own single digit order number! (not sure i should be advertising that fact.

 

Once again thanks for the advice and im sure ill cross posts with you all over the next couple of months.

 

P.S. My web design knowledge is very limited but if anyone does need advice on anything zencart related then it may just be about the only thing i know anything about.

 

Lee

 

www.fantasticals.co.uk

Welcome to the forums.

Hey there!

 

Welcome to the forums...

Hey Lee! Welcome to WDF! Hope you enjoy it here!