Help me tweak my website? Come give your input :)

cool… looks really good…

i must admit the maglight heat sink thingy, looked pretty cool…

This is awesome. Thank you guys so much for your feedback. Its of course going to take me some time to get these things accomplished.


1. Shipping and payment

It seems as if everyone agrees this needs work ( as do I). I will try to get set up to offer more options as well as signature confirmation. This is one of the build areas I am struggling to learn how to do, but it will be done.


2. Product Pictures.

I agree there is a huge want in this area. Most of you have better cameras on your pones than I have at all, and that is not even the biggest hurdle as I know very little about this too. I do appreciate the suggestions about lighting.

I am actually very seriously considering having someone else start doing my pictures for me. I was thinking perhaps I could trade someone some product for a few good images?

I am also working on the logo thing. I just put that up so there would be something besides " your logo here" LOL

3. Marketing, Spelling and guarantees.

I see your point jhalb I think I will change that opening statement about the bulbs.

As far as the warranty statments etc I will have to work on that too. I have never had an official statement mostly because I have never needed one. The truth is on the forums if anyone ever had a problem they just PM me and I can honestly say in the roughly 5 years or so I have been doing this, I have never ever had to turn anyone away.

Generally good… but get rid of the placeholder text under ‘terms and conditions’ and ‘about us’. “Our stores” pops a map nicely, but the name of the store didn’t seem to appear. (Which is bad, if you want to find it.)

Looks good :star:

Two things that come to mind:

- You could consider using secure connection (HTTPS).
When the customer is using your website, anybody between him and your server can read the communication (including passwords). On the other hand, there is more overhead with SSL/TLS and the data you’re dealing with is not that sensitive.

- If you’re looking for an additional payment method, take a look at Stripe


Could you guys tell me about how you feel the speed of my site it. Does it feel smooth, or sluggish?


How does the page loading speed of mine compare to say Mountain or Illumn?

Adventure Sport
http://asflashlights.com/en/

MTN
http://www.mtnelectronics.com/

Illumin.
http://www.illumn.com/

Be honest, to you think mine is slower, faster or about the same?

I’ll preface this with while I do run a successful web store and have been doing so for some time I’m in no way an expert and am still pretty crap at technical tweaks. Also I have a habit of doing walls of text so this will probably be long.

To start most of your website issues are probably related to the store system itself, presta shop in your case, which for things like this you really have to be knowledgeable about that system in particular to get things like checkout and such setup. You probably already have been looking on presta’s forum and if it’s anything like Zencart you probably can find someone who has done exactly what you want and maybe even made an addon. Besides a few visual tweaks like the logo background which I think you just need to bring that image into gimp and change the white to an alpha channel I would aim for practical things like shipping estimator, more shipping options, payment options, clear information about shipping and payment options (more details below). The site being easy to use and usable by buyers with a wide range of needs is IMHO more important than looks so best to do those first.

For payment you may want to keep just PayPal, for a long time I just used paypal and really didn’t have many issues but you have to make it super clear that paypal accepts credit cards. Paypal doesn’t exactly help with this since they tend to push paypal a bit on the payment page but trust me if this is not super clear through the whole checkout process people will give up or email you asking about credit cards. In terms of other payment methods like a direct credit card payment processor there are two categories here it seems to me, easy setup ones like stripe and all those ones they advertise on TV and full on ones like authorize.net. The main difference is easy ones are easy to setup but you pay more, big ones can be tricky to setup have super complex fee structures and can be cheaper. Either way I would stick with offsite payment handling. Like Paypal the customer leaves your site, pays, then returns. This means no finanical data is ever on your site which takes a ton of security issues away from you, makes PCI compliance much easier (which you will need for big boy processes and maybe for easy ones). I did a ton of searching and big processors won’t tell you their fees upfront but after you do get through them, they are a little cheaper than paypal if you have the volume. Really paypal is probably the best way to go at least for awhile, they are easy, secure, and pretty cheap.

Shipping it a tricky one and still one I struggle with, you want to be clear on shipping times and offer a wide range. USPS is great but there time estimates are often totally off, things pretty rarely get lost but often delayed a week with no useful tracking. Offering something like FedEx gives a more reliable (although more expensive) option to those that want it and may be the way to go for more expensive items. I don’t even want to get into the mess that is international shipping. As stated above a shipping estimator is a very nice features just as a user.

At this point I’m convinced that product photography is an art and a science to rival any other. I’ve gone through so many iterations of my setup I’ve lost track. Now I run, 6x 1600 lumen 5000K CFLs, 4 from above with diffusers, and 4 from below with a diffuser (glass stage so things are lit from below, no shadows). Coupled with that I now have a Cannon 450D on a tripod with remote shooting. Frankly for a long time I used a ancient Olympus C-4000 zoom and the pictures were pretty comparable to the Canon if you get the settings right. I’m no photography expert either but if you have a point and shoot you need a tripod and you need to use it with the self timer. In addition I set the F stop as high as it will go (again with a point and shoot it won’t go very high) and then take 2-3 shots changing only the shutter time (around 1/10 to 1/25). Then I pick the one I like the lighting best and maybe tweak just a hair in gimp. The color of the object makes a big difference flat black items are pretty easy while super white or clear objects can be a pain. Small objects use the macro mode. The thing that I haven’t seen many people use is the bottom lit stage. For me this is a cardboard box, lined with tin foil, with two lamps in it then on top goes a piece of glass with a sheet of teflon sheet on top. You don’t need to use teflon of course I just happen to have it. Any decent diffuser material will work. You may need to balance the lights above vs below (I use 2 below 4 up) but after you do that the shadows are gone. I can show you an example if you like.

And the TL:DR version is stick with paypal, lots of checkout directions, more shipping options with details about them, cheap camera is fine but tons of light from all directions, good settings and a tripod. Any questions feel free to ask.

It needs some XP-L V6’s, XM-L2 U4’s and XP-G2 S4’s, the rest looks good :wink:

Edit, Can you please specify the tints of all your Leds not just the Kelvin temperature please? Just like you did on your S3 1C’s

For me its alot slower than the other 2 idk if its the pictures slowing it down ?

For me is the same speed as illumn and just a tad faster than RMM

scianiac,

I really like that idea of the under lit stage for the pictures. I will have to experiment with that.

Do I need to be taking the pictures in a lower quality ( to speed up the site) or is it enough to set the jpeg quality in back office?

The under lighting requires a little tweaking but to me seems way more versatile than what is normally used. The key is light balance which is just a matter of bulbs and the diffuser, white garbage bags don’t work as they give a weird tint but that white sheet packing foam might work, I use that over my top lights as a diffuser.

The image quality again kinda depends on the site setup. I generally take a the highest setting the camera has, then edit lighting if needed in gimp, then watermark, then resize to a moderate size then upload. Depending how the site handles pictures, I have an addon that automatically resizes the images so when they are small pictures in a list like thumbnails they are low resolution so the page loads quick, then on the item page they are a little bigger and when you click on them they go full size with a matching resolution. If your site doesn’t do this then just pick something in the middle so page load times won’t be super large. Make the image 100% size on your computer and use that to gauge how big things are, I go for 100% is about 1/4 of the monitor, which is enough to see and take additional images if some detail is needed, could go bigger if you want I just picked that kinda at random. Your images seem to load pretty quick now so you site may have this feature as it is. Again I’m no expert but I don’t think the camera image resolution setting and resizing them later has much effect for our uses.

can you give me a link to your site so I can look at it?




EDIT: Also what is everyones take here about registering for "domain privacy" I sounds like a good idea, but after reading this I'm not so sure.

I would take a look at it but it seems to be down rn, I have a buddy that can hook you up with some cheap pro hosting if intrested pm me.



It should be running now.

I actually just switched from Ipage to inmotionhosting today to see if perhaps that would speed things up a bit.

Thank you for your offer.

It's at asflashlights.com. Not ready at the moment though.

My store is http://www.clandestineairsoft.com/ and if it’s not obvious I sell airsoft parts. Like I said I’m far from an expert and still have a lot of visual improvements to make. Many of the older pictures are crappy so like this is a more recent one.

If I recall the only thing the domain privacy does is hide the register information so it can reduce spam and I wouldn’t use a phone number or email you care about if you don’t use it. Your address will probably be on your shipping labels so it’s not like someone couldn’t find that. Kinda your choice I guess.

Could you guys give it whorl now and see what you think. Is it any faster?

http://asflashlights.com/en/