Silly Goose Gifts online store -- please critique

[sillygoosegifts]

Please critique this, our first attempt at displaying products for an online boutique.

www.sillygoosegifts.com

[YvetteKuhns]

Hmm... I have a few more nieces who are getting married. This will be next on the agenda! The mother goose and baby in the header is cute. The color scheme is cute and reminds me of Easter. I probably would have chosen pastel pink, pastel blue and pale yellow, but that is common.

Personalized gifts are not always practical, especially if you have an unusual name, because no one will buy it at a yard sale! But if you are a twin, your relatives will buy you shirts with your names on them to tell you apart. (Yes, I am a twin and I had a shirt with my name on it.) I guess that personalization is optional.

The about us page is personal, but it doesn't say how long you are in business, where you are located or anything that would build credibility. But you do mention that your business is built on referrals. The contact info and payment info are on the same page. It might be better to split them into separate pages.

The only method of payment is PayPal which is okay for small businesses. I suppose people could send check or money order and you can send orders after the money clears. Am I blind or did I not see the prices with the products? Okay, some have prices. There are no prices on the home page.

Cute website. It could be centered instead of appearing on the left with white space on the right for higher screen resolutions. But it looks okay. Since my son is seven years old, we are beyond buying cute things and now buy Transformers. ;)

[damber]

Have you thought of installing osCommerce instead? It would give it a much more professional "internet shopping" feel. Filling out the form with no security seems strange, but then you do not ask any credit card information, but plenty of personal info. Plus, with osCommerce you could accept the payment at the end of the customers visit instead of going through the hassles of emailing them back.

Also, I noticed that all your pages are in html. I'm presuming for each product you must create a new html page. That is a lot of work to maintain. You should investigate writing your site in PHP for more efficieny (though osCommerce would handle this easily). You could use the saved time to tell the world about your site.

I've got my first son on the way, so I'm sure he'll just love using some of your products. Though I do like your website layout. Nice and uniform to give the customer a consitent feel, and all the links work that I have clicked on.

Keep it up.

Damien
www.emuvideo.com

[YvetteKuhns]

I agree that PayPal should not be the only form of payment accepted, but it is okay for a start. And the order form should be secure, with info sent to a database to be retrieved online. But getting the products visible is priority one. Now that is done, you can explore other options.

[damber]

keyplyr - I just visited your jazz site. I noticed a lot of times if you click on a product you get sent to another webste such as amazon.com or sheetmusicplus. Maybe its just me, but it seems strange, I thought if I clicked on a product, I would get the option to add it to a shopping cart. What if I wanted to buy multiple items from your website? Would I have to make multiple transactions with different companies? I get a feeling of being lost in it all. Just curious as I plan/hope to setup an Online Shopping cart so I like to see others for ideas.

Cheers,

Damien
www.emuvideo.com

[hmc]

wow, your shopping cart looks great. i added it to shopping cart directory.

[duke]

Paypal, offer shopping cart buttons free for your website. You might look into doing that. They take care of the confirmation letters and everything. All you have to do is follow their easy instructions and voila---instant shopping cart feel! Best of wishes.

[sillygoosegifts]

thanks for all of the info here, the advice has been very insightful, and I hope to see more! I will work on a PayPal shopping cart for checkout, I think it will be a great addition to the site.

[linnetwoods]

Actually, I feel that damber's remark to keyplyr about having to come and go in order to buy different products off the same site is very revealing of how most site visitors are going to feel.

Far from webmasters making cutting remarks about newbies needing to learn more about how things are done inefficiently online and get used to it, perhaps we should be aiming at finding out how we can best provide people who want to shop with the experience they want and expect...

I don't know much about the technology side of what damber, along with most shoppers, wants to see on our sites, but it must be possible to work out a way to sell people products from various different sources via one shopping cart - probably via an intermediary, entrusted by all the companies with whom one is affiliated to process all and simply give the end customer the final bill...

I don't know, I just think, as Richard Bach once wrote: "Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they're yours..."