Chefscatalog.com Gets Critiqued

CHEFSCATALOG.COM

Chefs Catalog has been “outfitting the best kitchens for 30 years.” But does its Website make the cut? Critiquers Amy Africa, president of Web consultancy Eight by Eight, and Brian R. Brown, lead consultant/natural search marketing strategist with SEO agency Netconcepts, gave Chefscatalog.com a thorough review. Africa looked at content and functionality, and Brown tested search capability. Here's what they had to say.

AMY AFRICA

For starters, Chefscatalog.com should move the e-mail sign-up somewhere at the top of the page so it can be seen in the first view. You can have e-mail sign-ups at the top and the bottom, but you'll get about eight (yes, eight) times the sign-ups if it's at the top in the first view.

And the site should make the perpetual cart (a cart that stays with you at all times so you know what and how much you have in your basket) its own area. The PC is now in the action bar; it'd be much better served if it were above or below the action bar in its own section.

The best perpetual carts show a shopping cart icon; the number of items in your cart; the dollar amount in the cart; small links to view cart, print cart, save cart and e-mail cart, and a red “checkout now” button — but only when there is something in the cart.

Chefscatalog.com needs to make the sale items look salesy. Changing the pricing from black to red is a start, but it would be more effective if it showed the savings either as a percentage or a dollar amount as well. Using sales icons or bursts is another great tip — especially if shoppers can click on them to get a list of all the sale items on the site.

I would also include more add-to-cart buttons on the product pages. It's important that a user sees an action directive — such as buy-now, add-to-cart buttons — on every view. That means every time customers scroll they see another big, red button directing them to buy.

Does it look pretty? Not particularly. Does it work? Like gangbusters. Web artists tend to design pages, but users look at views — in other words, every screen they see is a page. ?If you want their orders, you need to ask for them.

Chefscatalog.com should put add-to-cart/buy-now buttons on all the pages — not just the product pages.

There are a lot of good things about this site, but it's just not aggressive enough. For instance, you shouldn't need to click on something two or three times to be able to buy it: As a user, you should be able to buy what you want whenever you see it.

Have a complicated product? That's fine — let shoppers click on “buy now” and bring them to the place where they can order it. ?

This site could also stand to jazz up the category pages like “New,” “Sale” and “Gifts.” These have a lot of potential, but they lack excitement. And the “Sale” page should have some call-to-actions for the discounts and/or limited quantities available. Deadlines are good on the Web because they create urgency and cause people to focus. ?

The “Catalog Orders” page looks like something you need to be a rocket scientist to use. These pages should show a picture of a catalog in the right-hand column, and lots of alternative ways to contact you — big phone numbers and live chat buttons, to name a few.

Asking for the promotion code first (as it's done here) is often the kiss of death. ?If you're going to do it, consider asking for it at the end of the checkout, not the beginning, and make sure it's clear and easy to use.

Use big, red “Check out now” buttons; avoid “Remove” buttons if it's something that customers can just simply erase; and collect their e-mail addresses as early in the process as possible. That way, if they abandon their carts, you can write them.

Try to keep the fields they have to fill in (in this case it's the item number and quantity boxes) in the middle of the page. From an eyepath perspective, it's very important that you not change the number of columns on any form/ordering page you have on the site.

Chefscatalog.com needs to revamp (read: completely overhaul) the first “Your Shopping Cart” page (typically known as the “View Cart” page). The key to maximizing your shopping cart conversion is to get people into and out of the checkout as fast and efficiently as possible.

That means using lots of big buttons that tell the user what to do next. Granted, the first page of the current checkout is aesthetically pleasing, but the action directives are hidden under the “Enter Catalog Code” section.

What happens if you came in from a PPC ad and not from a catalog? How about if you don't have your catalog with you or if you've ordered from Chefs Catalog before but you don't have an offline mailer available?

Sure, the merchant makes it easy for you to “Continue Without Code,” but it's only then that the next option (“Calculate Your Order Total”) comes up. Until then you don't really see it, which is confusing at best for the average user.

All sites should have the phone number on their checkout page and throughout the site. Don't want people to call you? Tough bananas. Use your phone number anyway.

Just by listing it in the top, right-hand and bottom columns, you will typically see an increase in conversion. About 25% of people use Websites to gather their orders and a phone number to place them. You'll save 5% or so of them if you don't have a number, but the other fifth of your customers may just abandon the process entirely.

If you don't want to use your phone number throughout the site, at least use it in the cart. Most of the things that go wrong at checkout are your fault — not the customer's — and the only way to save the order is to allow them to place the order over the phone, by fax, e-mail or secured chat.

BRIAN R. BROWN

Chefscatalog.com is cooking up some good SEO on its Website. But even good recipes can be made great with a little extra effort, and by keeping some of the basic fundamentals in mind. Seeing how competitive online cookware is, good SEO goes only so far, anyway.

Chefs need to look at our friend Googlebot as a food critic — if the site wants rave reviews in the form of page-one rankings, it needs to make sure Googlebot leaves full and happy, and knowing what he just ate.

Fortunately, the site is already fairly strong on URL architecture. This is critical for a few reasons. First, it's one of the hardest things to change later. Messing up the 301 redirects, using 302 redirects instead, or a myriad of other technical slip-ups can undo a lot of work in a short time.

Second, if the URL architecture is bad, no amount of effort anywhere else will matter, because the search engine spiders won't even be able to traverse the site.