Website review

Popz

Hi there
Ive recently had a website created for our store in abid to increase revenue - in the past three weeks we have had 547 hits to the site, which Im happy with but this has not translated into an appropriate level of sales - Im hoping maybe ye might take a look at the site and any feedback as to why people are not making the final purchase would be greatly appreciated (or any other thoughts/ opinions.)
This site is a retail site and consists largely of maternitywear.
www.yummiemummie.ie

Thanks in advance
Popz

drunkmonkey

It's spelled Yummy not Yummie

Popz

Thanks for the feedback.... very helpful

drunkmonkey

The name is all wrong, that was my first impression, it's Yummy Mummy.

The site looks like a mix of different sites, see this URL http://vividgraphicdesign.net/yummiemummie.ie/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&page=shop.browse&category_id=1&Itemid=64

It's not SEO friendly. There's no security when you go to checkout, where's the HTTPS://

If your just learning yourself it's not a bad attempt but needs some work, if your paying someone for the site it's far from finished.

I would change the name though.

Popz

this is the name of the shop which is a bricks and mortar busines for the past year and we have a gotten a great reaction from it - it's just a play on the spelling and I will be keeping that bit, but thank you for the feedback in relation to the security aspect, I will take that back and review it.

Much more helpful -thank you sincerely

drunkmonkey

Google doesn't do plays on spelling. I understand you want to keep the name the same as you have on the shop but your entering a different market if your going after online customers. You want a nice search friendly URL.
If it's maternity wear your selling, even something like yummymaternity.ie would be a lot better, people will be searching google for maternity wear and if you have that in your URL google will straight away give you kudos.
You'll struggle to get your current URL ranked well.

SEM

There is nothing wrong with this brand name or domain name. Spelt as it is is a brand name and not just "yummy mummy", which will be very easily ranked no.1 for also.
Just a handfull of quality links along with a half our strategy every day and you'll be up there.

SEM

cormee

SEM wrote: »

There is nothing wrong with this brand name or domain name. Spelt as it is is a brand name and not just "yummy mummy", which will be very easily ranked no.1 for also.
Just a handfull of quality links along with a half our strategy every day and you'll be up there.

SEM

Nobody is saying there is anything wrong with it (apart from the spelling), what they are saying is that a keyword-rich domain name would be better - especially for a small web start-up that would have limited resources.

tricky D

Navigation:
The Online Shop drop down only has Terms and Conditions in it. All your product categories should be listed and T+C put in the footer.
Put Online Store before About Us.
Why have Web Links at all? You're giving people the opportunity to leave the site which is not in your interests.

Footer:
Use recognisable icons for facebook and any goood content like special offers should be prominent on your site.
Newsletter link is broken, doesn't have input boxes for email and first name and link to privacy policy.
Contact email is not a mailto or linked to contact page.
No RBN info.

Sidebar (lhs):
Login doesn't have password prompt in inout box.

Home page:
You are not making good use of your homepage real estate.
Search box and text sizing functions would be better in the header (top right). The date is unnecessary.
No actual products are displayed at all.
Most of the main text is fluff. Welcome content is almost useless - the users wants to see product, so let them. The free delivery is worth keeping but needs to be treated better - stick it in a bright star badge. Instead of talking about 'we...' you need to talk in terms of what you can provide for your prospective customers = your products. You should list your top sellers or categories there paying attention to your keywords.
Look at www.mothercare.ie for comparison (except in general keep text as text and not in graphics).

Store:
Online Store mainpage has no actual products listed.
Category pages have products pushed too far down.
Individual product pages have images which are too small and when clicked go to the individual image. Would better like: http://www.website4retail.com/enlarge-item-image-popup-lightbox.html
Add to cart button should be orange, the current one does not stand out at all.
Most size info doesn't give the equivalent cms measurement. Some Larges are different to other Larges so actual centimetre measurements remove any doubt.
When I added Aphrodite Woven top to Cart, the result was 'Info: The selected quantity exceeds quantity available in stock.' If that's the case it shouldn't be listed at all. Annoys users.
Continue Shopping Checkout are too close together and cause confusion. They should be buttons anyway.


SEO
Your Search Engine Optimisation is very poor.
The page URLs are as good as meaningless. http://www.yummiemummie.ie/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&page=shop.browse&category_id=3&Itemid=2 should be http://www.yummiemummie.ie/baby_wear/
babywear should be spelt as baby wear. babywear gets 2,370,000 results on Google, baby wear gets 168,000,000 results. So baby wear is used a lot more in general.
Headings, alts tags and strong tags are not used at all that I can see. Page title could be better used.
Meta descriptions aren't great either see http://www.google.ie/search?q=Darma+Dress

drunkmonkey wrote: »

Google doesn't do plays on spelling.

Actually it does to a certain extent. A bit surprisingly in this case, it is displaying yummy mummy results for yummie mummie input when I would have reckoned that was a bit too far removed. http://www.google.ie/search?q=yummie+mummie. Anyway yummy mummy how ever spelt is well down the key phrase pecking order.

hth and gl

professore

I have to smile at the comments - which are all valid but missing the point.
You are generating reasonable traffic already so the question is why are so few people ordering ?

Well it could be price and the fact that they have 10000 other choices at their fingertips. However ...

The first item I tried to add - the "Aphrodite Woven top" to my cart by clicking the "Add To Cart" button and it tells me
"Info: The selected quantity exceeds quantity available in stock."

Therefore if I want this item I can't order it. You should get your developer to remove the stock control. Amazing how everyone now either looks at the design of the site or how Google will see it - they never check if it's actually possible to order something on the site !!!!! This is a basic thing.

tricky D

Sure you didn't copy that point from my review, prof;)

Also did list some other conversion and display problems.

worc

If you had no prior knowledge of websites and learned joomla yourself to get that site up and running then well done - if you paid someone for that site then I'd be pretty annoyed if you handed over more than €100. Some of the suggestions above to improve the sites' SEO such as creating search engine friendly urls could be done in a few minutes....so if you have paid for this site I'd be super p*ssed.

One of the hardest things I had to do was completely scrap an entire website design to go with someone that was simply better - it was a long time ago but I learned a great lesson that the time you put into something, even if that something has to be put aside, is worth it because you probably learned buckets of knowledge that will help down the line. My honest advice is that you might need to consider putting that site to the side and going another direction.

If I knew you personally I would be really pushing you to go with something like Shopify because you will get to choose and customise a site that has been specifically designed for e-commerce and would be a big step up from what you've got at the minute. Although it might cost you more (~$30-60 a month) to have a site with Shopify, given you have a business you can write that off against tax as a business expense so it technically won't affect your net income.

What you've got at the minute is a Joomla template that has been integrated with VirtueMart and, as I have found with 95% of sites that do that, it just doesn't work. It doesn't "look" integrated or attractive the way an e-commerce site should to create trust and easy navigation - and I would guestimate that this is why you are not making sales.

I genuinely hope my advice isn't coming across very negatively because I think you have great potential with your site but not going with Joomla/Virtuemart the way it has been done here.

en.r4cart

There are lots of free web apps you can use, e.g prestashop, megentu.
Here are the ones I used. Link1: www.ndsgameone.com
Link2: www.r4cart.com

You are welcome to contact with me if you need some help.