I check out the online sites to see what products are available, their specs, reviews and prices. When I see something I am wanting to buy I prefer going to the store to check it out the product before I purchase.
A few not-so-humble suggestions for your online sites:
- Allow us to pick online only. Many people do order online, but, for those of us who want to be able to go into the store and check out the product so we can make the final decision before buying give us the option of seeing only what is in the store.
- Same goes for your affiliates. Again, if I am interested I will click on the box to show them.
- If the product is not available allow us select a check box so as NOT TO SEE them. If they are not available, or sold out, then I don't want to see it. This is the equivalent of empty shelves in the store. If it isn't there then I am not interested in seeing a pretty picture. If not available, give an option quickly inform us how long it would take for it to be stocked locally.
- This is a biggie and too many sites do this. Check boxes are only that, you click on them and there is a check mark or it is empty. Clicking on it WILL NEVER initiate an update, that is completely against what click boxes are for. Allow the user to select what they want to see and then have a 'REFRESH SELECTION' button to present the user what they want to see (example below).
- When I tell you NO on my location respect it! There is a site that every page I go to it asks me for my location and I keep telling it no. The same goes for asking for my postal code and not allowing me to see anything until I do. When I want to tell you my location (to see if stock is available locally) I will tell you and not until then.
- Keep the scripting and fancy images to a minimum. Not everyone runs the latest hardware that can handle all of the scripting quickly. I have a high end machine for development work and pages there renders quickly, however, I have a netbook that I also use for development work and the same page sometimes takes up to a minute to render and that is not acceptable.
- Test your pages for IE, Edge, Chrome and Firefox. Too often I have to open up another browser so that your pages will properly render. Again, follow the W3C standards for your pages and thoroughly test your pages.
For those thinking these are small business the answer to that is no. These are large multi-national corporations who I would expect to be able to afford great web developers with the skills and knowledge to build sites that make it easy for customers to quickly find what they are looking for, confirm that the product is available locally.
Check out the W3C site for web standards and how to develop a website that should work cross platform and with different browsers.
It has been a while since I coded web pages, but, if I remember correctly you can use the following as an example of how to do check boxes. Change the { and } to < and >. I changed the values so that you can see the code and not the form.
{form}
{div}
{input type="checkbox" id="In Store" name="instore" value="itisinstore"}
{label for="In Store"}Show product that is in store?{/label}
{input type="checkbox" id="Online Store" name="onlinestore" value="itisinonlinestore"}
{label for="Online Store"}Show product that are in the online only store?{/label}
{input type="checkbox" id="Out of Stock" name="outofstock" value="outofstock"}
{label for="Out of Stock"}Show product that are temporarily out of stock?{/label}
{/div}
{div}
{button type="submit"}Refresh your selection{/button}
{/div}
{/form}
