Please see my site

[dvbrar]

Hello everyone,

Can you guys please take a look at my site. I did most the work myself. Now as the site is growing we are feeling the need to hire a professional. However, we have decent traffic and conversion rate is over 8%. So I'm kind of scared to make changes. I will appreciate any suggestion.
www.epetdrugs.com

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Devin

[candypam]

Devin –
You are off to a real good start. You have a great name and logo but there are several things I feel should be changed ASAP.

1.The introduction about your product line should not be in your header. I was so busy reading that I missed your phone number and everything else up there.
Your link text in your header is too small
2. Help link – I saw a fax number and company address, but still didn’t see your 800# in your header, because I didn’t want to read your paragraph up there so my eyes wouldn’t look up there. I thought I’d have to fax my questions
3. Your “buy now” links on your products is very misleading. I clicked on them thinking I was placing them into the cart, but was taken to another page, on that page I see more item choices but no order button. I had to click once again
4. I see your “free shipping over $99, but after”finally” getting a $39 item into my cart, I do not see a shipping total. People will think it’s free shipping
5. Left nav area - BBBonline badge is wasting valuable real estate. People would rather see how secure your website is or you search bar there.

There are several really cool programs that someone like Solid cactus could implement into your website.
1. Snap Shop - would let the customer see the item quickly with out leaving the landing page, plus purchase it in a second.
2. Shipping Manager - will show the customers shipping costs no matter how much they spent ASAP.
3. Mini Cart – Lets the customer see everything – all the items they have bought, shipping costs etc with out having to go to the check out page.
4. Left Nav Slide Out Menu – will stop customers from scrolling down below the fold. Right now you have to scroll forever.
5. Several store examples of the above programs –
blaircandy.com, countrytradedays.com, kaleidoscopestoyou.com
Hope this helps!
Thanks,
Pam

[Charmlady]

I agree with Pam -- too much text in your header - you want to draw the user in, too busy makes your eyes confused and not know where to look -- also make your toll free # bigger, so it jumps out at ya --

Carry your FREE SHIPPING ORDERS OVER $99 throughout the site - its great that its on the home page, but carry it through the site, because after I left your home page and was shopping, I might have forgotten that, and it might make me buy more to get the free shipping. Also SC can put a shipping countdown on your checkout page. Would highly recommend the snap shop too --I have it on my site, and our sales/page views are double what they were this month last year (before we had it)

Also doing a link exchange program, although time consuming, Google places alot of importance on this, and give you higher page rank. If you are interested, I have a fabulous program that is a robot link builder... Email me if you want more info

[cactus_donnat]

Hello Devin!

Thanks for stopping by our forums! Pam and Liz gave some really good suggestions.

First off, I really like your logo- and also that you have a toll-free number and free shipping- those are good for building value and trust.

A few things- your header has a lot of white space- the header is very valuable real estate, as it is universal- it stays with the shopper all the time. Like Liz and Pam I think mentioned, your free shipping message should be there, as well as a more prominent display of your 800#. Solid Cactus could do a header design for you- incorporate those trust and value elements with a little more design, and you can have a great header.

I also agree with Pam-- the BBB logo is good to have, but it should be with your other icons at the bottom of your left-hand nav. Where it is now, I would suggest moving your search box. People naturally gravitate to the left-hand nav for the search-- Best practices would be to have your search box, then your navigation directly below. Almost half your online shoppers will use your search, so having it where the heat map studies say people look for it would be very valuable. Then, in the body you can put more emphasis on your featured items.

When I clicked on an item page, I was little distracted by the font size- it's huge! Is there a reason you have the text set to be so big? The item name took up three lines. I'd consider making the font smaller.

Another thing, that I mentioned to someone else recently in the forum, is the default Yahoo click-to-enlarge-- this is bad. It takes people in the same window to a page with a white background. People are so acustom now to pop-in windows that they go to "x" out of the enlarged picture-- with the default, it would accidently close your whole site. CHeck out Moleskines.com - Moleskine Notebooks, Planners, Journals and Sketchbooks to see what a more advance version can do to keep the branding, and keep users on your site, as well as show multiple images if you needed to... in your case, maybe the actual size of the pill, the pill box and maybe the back of the box or something...

All in all, your site is clean and easy to navigate-- and I congratulate you on your high conversion rate. That is great since you are still using a Yahoo template. With some positive changes to your site, either with extra features, or a custom design, it can only go up from here!

If you wanted to contact me offline, I could help you look into implementing these features/ideas if you feel you wanted to investigate them a little more!

Thanks again for coming by!
DOnna

[dvbrar]

Thank you Pam, Liz and Donna. I really appreciate your time for looking at my site. I'm going through all the problems that you guys mentioned. I have already removed the header text that Pam and Liz suggested and I will do whatever I'm able to, for the rest I have emailed Donna my contact information. I will talk to her about making other critical changes. Again, thank you for your help.