Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

It seems as though you have spent some time looking over my site, thank you. I checked out the McMaster-Carr site. It is nicely designed but I do not believe it looks more professional than mine and it is not apples to apples as it is not an e-commerce site. Many of your comments about how professional the site looks are contrary to the feedback I receive from my actual customers. I do accept part of what you say about the transition to the checkout page. It does look different but with the amount of business I do I am not sure that many people see it as a scam. It would be nice if I could match the colors of the rest of my pages but I am limited by the shopping cart I am using. I do however have the company logo on the checkout page in an effort to reassure customers that it is the same site. The live chat button does not really follow you all over the page. It simply goes up and down on the far left side when you scroll up or down. It does not cover any text and if it is annoying you can X it out and it will not bother you anymore. It is also provided by the best chat agent company and the same button can be found on a great deal of sites for major corporations, retail and otherwise. 

You mentioned the lack of subcategories and that will be my next project. I get very few people that come in to my home page or that browse by category. Most visitors come in directly to the product page of the item they are interested in or they use the search box to quickly find what they want but it does need to be improved.

Again thank you for your critique. I will go over it several times to find the gems of advice and put them to use. 

"Not to be rude... but are you not here to increase your sales by recovering the large amount of people who are exiting your site? If so, the feedback of those few who are buying don`t mean much. You cater to the majority of your market in the ecommerce world. Obviously what makes the minority happy are scaring away the majority of your customers..."

You could have a point there. I probably reacted with a bit of pride and took a bit of offense feeling my efforts were being deemed as worthless. I was wrong.