The skinny on slim wallet seller's site

Most people hope for a fat wallet — provided it's stuffed with cash — but BigSkinny.net is all about streamlining the wallet situation. The company, which specializes in slim, lightweight sport wallets, wanted to make sure its e-commerce strategy was on the money, so it stepped up for a site critique.

Experts Amy Africa, president of Web consultancy Eight by Eight, and Stephan Spencer, vice president, SEO strategies of search consultancy Covario, took on the task, with Africa looking at content and functionality and Spencer testing search capability. Here's what they had to say.

AMY AFRICA

For a small site on a somewhat difficult platform, BigSkinny.net does a lot of things right. It does a great job with its user-generated content using reviews from Amazon, Yahoo and its own customers.

It integrates video with solid call-to-actions — most companies forget that they need to make a pitch at the end of the video. BigSkinny has a Facebook fan page, it's starting to use Twitter and has an official blog, and it appears to be diligent at working the SEO copy.

What could the site do to improve? Here are some bang-for-the-buck changes BigSkinny should work on.

For starters, the site should eliminate the borders on the site as well as the color bands (they can be integrated elsewhere if need be). From an eyepath perspective, lines that serve no purpose should be eliminated.

BigSkinny should consider adding the video to the home page instead of just the “watch the movie, see the difference” bullet. The video should not auto-start on entrance, but it should be prominent to encourage user engagement — it can be placed below or to the right of the carousel.

While the implementation of the carousel is good, the purpose of a carousel is to get the user to drill deeper into the site. So the frames need to be provocative and full of action directives, such as “click here now” or “add to cart.”

Carousels rely heavily on creative. BigSkinny's current carousel has a lot of potential, but it needs to eliminate as much copy as possible; add headlines and teasers; and use large “click here now” or “buy now” buttons.

You have to remember that users see things in pictures, not in text, so slides (aka frames) where there is only text are typically not seen by the user. The site needs to make sure it has exciting or interesting graphics in every view — things that make you want to click immediately.

The category pages have a lot of what looks to be SEO text at the beginning. This is a mistake that a lot of companies make — they care so much about the search engines, they forget about the user.

Getting a bunch of traffic is all well and good, but if you can't convert it, it doesn't really mean a thing. Needless to say, there is definitely a balance, and BigSkinny needs to find it.

The merchant should reduce or move most (not all) of this text so that users can see products on the first view. Many of the category pages now have little to see or do on the first view of the page — you need to scroll to get anything of value.

This also applies to the bottom of the entry page. Folks tend to scroll more — even if it's at different times — on the entry pages of e-commerce Websites, so it's important, from a user perspective, to make the bottom views strong, — not just a bunch of random text. Yes, you can optimize. No, you don't want to dump every word in Webster's there.

The thumbnail photos should be cleaned up. It's hard to read any of the delineation of the small size text that is on the photos. It's not all that easy to read that text in the large size, either.

If that can't happen, BigSkinny may want to consider switching to a three-across format to make the photos and the accompanying text more clear. This sounds trivial, but it's critical.

Our brains do not do well with text that we can't see — if said text is buried at the bottom in a disclaimer/legalese section, that's one thing. If it's near a photo that users will study before they make their purchase, it's another thing — and not acceptable.

The left-hand nav of this site is short, sweet and easy to use. The top navigation is weak. BigSkinny should look at its top navigation to see what folks are clicking on and what they are not.

If there are things listed there that are not being used or are resulting in a lot of premature exits, the site should consider eliminating or repurposing them. Also, things like “customer love” are cute, but what do they really mean to an unknowing user?

Same with “guarantee policies.” Does that sound like a 100% satisfaction guarantee? Not really.

As a merchant, you need to work hard to make things aggressive and telegraphic so that the users don't need to think about what you mean. Users have neither the time nor the inclination to learn anything about your site.

BigSkinny does a great job with its offer development, however. If you put something in your cart, the site calculates how far away you are from its free first-class shipping offer.

What is lackluster about its offers is the presentation. The site puts the offer in text — in orange — without a graphic — in the top navigation.

Offers are good because they create urgency and they cause people to focus. BigSkinny should make a much bigger deal out of the offer — its value and its deadline — and then tie it into graphics.

The checkout is, by far, the weakest area of this site. A lot of this has to do with the fact that the site is using a Yahoo Store cart.

It's important to determine how many users are adopting to cart (meaning how many people are putting something in their baskets), and of that number, how many are actually checking out.

If there are a lot of people adopting to cart, but not a lot of folks checking out, BigSkinny should consider gutting the cart completely. If there are not a lot of people adopting to cart, the merchant can work on remedying that issue first.

From a checkout perspective, the three-step process is okay — not the best, but workable. The issue is the use of PayPal as the only payment method (even though it's PayPal via credit card, it's still PayPal only), and all of the questions asked on the checkout page.

In a perfect world, you should ask only the questions that are relevant to getting an order. Relevancy is determined in the user's mind.

Things like “would you like us to send you an e-mail asking you to rate the products you are purchasing?” and “would you like us to send you an e-mail asking you to rate this merchant?” are not necessary to an order completion and, are therefore, irrelevant.

The site needs to make a better effort to collect e-mail addresses. An aggressive trigger e-mail program could make a significant impact on BigSkinny's business. This would include the “thank you” for signing up e-mail, e-mails based on past purchases, abandoned cart e-mails, and so on.

Finally, the merchant needs to clean up the dead-ends. These are views without pictures or graphics, and BigSkinny has a lot of them.

This would be okay (though not optimal) if the company was a service site. But BigSkinny is an e-commerce site, and it's important to cater to the visual cortex when you are trying to sell. It's also critical that pages such as “How Do I Decide?” are cleaned up. When you click on “How Do I Decide?” you are presented with a thumbnail of an article called “The skinny on our wallet.” That's an unnecessary click for the user.

Next Page: Stephan Spencer