Auto Parts E-commerce Site Feedback

No I didnt draw the image. Its an old image from a Clemson 4 Wheel t-shirt before my time with them. They have been in business for a long time. I simply isolated the old image and traced it in Illustrator and have been using it trying to 'build a look' on digital and print media.

I pretty much do all the front end work on the site as well as most of their social, print and ad graphic work. The html/css/graphics/products and navigation and all that good stuff. Its a simple Magento theme that I pretty much rewrote.

The hardest part has been getting the site to play in IE8 and below.

I`m worried about the navigation. I browse our competition and other ecommerce stores alot and I tried to implement everything that I thought was good about them on our site. However, Their catalogs are alot larger than ours and their budget is way above ours.

Just a few questions.

Can you find what you are looking for easily?

Are you happy with the actual product pages (we have a few I havent gotten 2 yet) layout and design?

Do you understand our shipping policy?

Did you notice that we also install the products we sell?

What would stop you from ordering with us?

If you checked out the shopping cart - Was it easy to proceed?


We migrated from a old CMS and were completely new to Magento. From the first talks to the site going live last week its been about 5 months of development/spreadsheets/support/coding and graphics 30 hours a week.

I have a hard time finding a ecommerce community thats active with technical feed back from a developer/designer/SEO`ers perspective. Anything I can do to increase our CTR, ranking and sales Im open ears and would love to hear it. My job depends on it!

Any Jeep and aftermarket 4x4 site. 4WD, Quadratec, Northridge4x4. gowarn.com etc.

The CMS is capable of product reviews however I cant use structured data (rich snips) on them. I have a embedded "support forum" ready to go live. Just need to make some FAQS and common questions etc.

Has anyone here ran a successful "reviews" campaign? Im thinking of approaching the owners with something like give a 5% discount on the next purchase over $100 if you leave a product review on your past purchase? Things like this might drive repeat buyers. I need a plan to compete with the big competitors. Hell, A lot of our prices are cheaper and our Phone support is instant instead of waiting half an hour.

The live chat is ready to go as well. Just not implemented. Im online to answer questions 6 hours a day just at the moment I`m still extremely busy with expanding the catalog and making minor additions and adjustments.

Thats a great idea. Not sure if we could implement it in the back end tho.

Heres what I think we need to do.

- Encourage product reviews before and after a purchase. Send out a email X # of days after a purchase asking for a review.

- Have a support forum with a few FAQS, Common Jeep technical questions and just a place for customers to ask questions.

- Set up some kind of reward system for buyers. Whether it be send out a $10 credit/giftcard after a certain amount spent or just as simple as sending a free tshirt with the purchase of a certain item.

Any opinions on these ideas? Have you successfully set up a active community on a ecommerce site? I know some sites have support forums but they are usually the big box competitors if you know what I mean.

We have to do something. As it is now our traffic is steady but not increasing. Not sure if its just us or if its the economy. How long should I expect it to take before Google really indexes our new content and ranks it?

Ive been submitting crawl request on webmasters but I dont see any significant increase in crawling.

Thanks for the input. The site header is linked to the home page. I`ll make plans to add a "back" or "home" button on our pages as well. Im in a battle with the MGO contact us form. They currently offer no legit way to edit it or add content ABOVE the form. Im going to have to pull the form code and set up another cms page that I can actually edit and link it in the footer. Never heard of A/B Testing Tool |Split Testing and Multivariate Testing Software - Visual Website Optimizer before. Looks interesting - I`ll check it out.

You say that our slide images should be linked to individual products instead of categories?

We do send out Newletters relevant to any rebates we have. We usually only have one or two manufacturer rebates going on tho. I made and sent out a Newsletter this morning as a matter of fact.
View it here below -

http://www.radiantretailapps.com/Cus...bcc0e496139e5e

I would like to implement a after-the-sale email system asking the buyer for product reviews etc. Not sure if its possible with our current system to have this automated tho. Looking into that for sure.

Some good SEO news. Looks like the past 3 days our "Impressions" have shot straight up on our Analytics Graph. Hopefully it keeps heading that way!

Heres one for ya. Do you guys market the products in a certain category or do you cross Market? Like should I market Winches in the Jeep Top Categorys or keep the Ads relevant to the products in the category?

Example.

http://www.clemson4wheel.com/shop-by-brand/bestop.html

Scroll down to the page bottom and I created a JS that fades (smaller screens wont see it) in a Winch Ad - Its not relevant to the products in this category but Im thinking cross/up selling? Not enough data yet to get any click rates or anything. Just wondering what you guys thought.