Badly designed online shops

[Scuby]

I've been looking around about a million online (diving) shops this weekend for a few bits, and its amazing how many of them are really horrible to use. The worst are those where you can't get any information about delivery costs until you've filled in all of your details and just prior to confirming your order. When many places charge upwards of £10 for postage of even small light items it really would be much better for the customers if they let you see this upfront!



David

[Ferg3333]

I also agree with what you have said. But good online shops cost money esp. when a good web designer is required. And I guess there is little user testing.

[Lazlo]

I think "name & shame" would be a good idea :

Go Dive: Because you can never have too many products on the same page.

Divers Warehouse: WTF is going on there? Horrendous colour scheme, hundreds of items on the same page, "detail links" which are nothing of the sort. Mind you, it's certainly distinctive. I've always been too scared to actually order something online from them - I end up ringing up for the same price - at which point the service is excellent IMO.

On the other hand, and an example of how to do it properly - Denney Diving. All done by Chris himself in his spare time apparently, though how he finds the time what with spending so much time with the customers is beyond me. What a star

[narked at 90]

when i started my website to sell diving stuff that we build, i didn't know which way to lay it out,
do i put loads of products on one page but this would not allow much detail on the products.
or basically one page one product but this make the web site very big and cost more money for the web-space as i have a page limits unless i pay more money.
and trust me it isn't cheap, i had to renew my fee's yesterday
with regards to the cost of posting i cant say about the other company's but i try to get it as close as possible and some time i end up out of pocket, my problem comes because a lot of my sales are international and i need to try and match the cost of UK and international postage,,,,this can be a big headache some times.

Welcome Page

if any one has coments about the layout of my site i'll be happy to listern.
mind you the products are quite speicalist so i do need to give anothe info on what they are and what they are for!!
kind regards john routley

[milldog]

brought some stuff from Kent Diving very good
and Smiply Suba also very good

other than that they either dont have enough on the pages or not enough information

Graham

[Lazlo]

Nah - yours is fine John (not that you need my approval).

Also, I do appreciate how long these things take (I'm a software engineer), it's just bad design I don't like. Some of them have obviously taken ages to do, but presumably some really bad decisions were made early on.

I don't really get that worried about bad web pages. Usually a phone call gets the desired extra info

[Scuby]

Just one thing with regard to the cost / complexity, I understand that - the ones i'm talking about often do appear to be professionally built sites, just not designed to make things easy for the user

And yours looks good to me John - i'm guessing not the most sophisticated back-end, but it is clearly laid out, prices shown clearly, and on adding them to the basket the running-total for delivery is shown straight away - no clicking, no filling in details to get the information, etc.

David

[Scuttler]

Gotta say that Niknaks used to pee me off with the menu. You hover over one selection so that a submenu appears to the right, but then when you tried to move to hover over the sub menu and bring up a sub, sub menu the sub menu would disappear. Drove me nuts!

BUT....I think it's sorted now.

[Scuby]

Originally Posted by Scuttler

Gotta say that Niknaks used to pee me off with the menu. You hover over one selection so that a submenu appears to the right, but then when you tried to move to hover over the sub menu and bring up a sub, sub menu the sub menu would disappear. Drove me nuts!

Hehe yeah I noticed that today - but if I put the mouse back on my table instead of being lazy and doing it from the sofa its not a problem.

The Kent Diving one is a bit cluttered for my liking - it sticks random products in which get in the way when you're looking for something specific, but fine to use as far as I remember.

Go Dive is a bit of an odd layout (bit pages), but I can find everything and it tells you the delivery cost so no big complaints.

Divers Warehouse as mentioned is a bit funny too having massive pages with everything on, but in some ways I like that - saves lots of clicking. But as someone else said, "detail" doesn't give much detail.

Places like Denney, Simply Scuba, Deep Blue an the like seem to use fairly standard online shopping software and they're good.

I think the one that I particularly struggled with was Dive Cellar, I had to go as far as actually clicking "order" to find the price (though without my real details in).

Can't remember any others without going back to look at them - i've got at least 4 times the number of dive shops I mentioned above in my favourites list Funny really, often I have to go though a LOT of them if i'm looking for something specific.

David

[divingniknaks]

Originally Posted by Scuttler

Gotta say that Niknaks used to pee me off with the menu. You hover over one selection so that a submenu appears to the right, but then when you tried to move to hover over the sub menu and bring up a sub, sub menu the sub menu would disappear. Drove me nuts!

BUT....I think it's sorted now.

Yep, *issed me off too

Still working on an update to make it even better as it happens, but time is a limiting factor.

Would be interested in other thoughts about the layout also, see if we can't make "the experience" (I hate that with a vengeance ) better ?

Cheers