| I must agree with Tim. Because of what I do (and I'm sure this goes for a lot of the others here) I'm often asked by people my opinion of a website, 99% of the time they're asking if they think it's OK to buy from. And if I were asked my opinion about this site, I would say no it's not.
I'll give you a plus or two first. I've never bought from an adult site but 1500 products seems to me to be a substantial product range, especially given that Tim's well-established example has 5000. It also loads extremely swiftly.
I'm afraid on the negative side the design feels very unfinished, if not worse. It doesn't require oodles of graphics, white and trim is always very welcome. But it does currently give off a bit of a "spreadsheet" feel. The header for instance has two plain square animated GIFs with the brand image (the mouth and text really could gel better) and "novelty" is spelled wrong. Would I place my trust in a novelty goods store that spelled novelty wrong? I think most would say "No" and unfortunately the quality of English is sub-par throughout the rest of the site. The website name is even spelled wrong on the home page.
I took Tim up on his point about security and had a look at the cart. For some reason you are able to submit an order when your cart is empty (confusingly giving you the option to delete nothing, which doesn't work anyway), but more to the point when I tried to submit it just produced a database error. It didn't seem to be related to the empty cart, but there was no explanation. If it was the cart, let people know with a proper error message. If it wasn't, nobody can order anything. Is it secure? I'll never know! On the issue of trust, I had a look at WhoIs for the domain and it says it was registered in Oct 2006, whereas the website says established early 2006. Don't get me wrong, I'm not accusing anyone of anything for all I know a domain change was made early on. But if anyone is sufficiently unsure to look it up, it does appear unsettling so if there was a domain change it might be worth noting so on the site? Perhaps not, I don't suppose many would check.
You can view an enlarged product picture when browsing, but nowhere does it say so and nor can you tell from your browser as the "hyperlink" icon doesn't show when you hover your mouse over the thumbnail. The forum is a great idea, but not a Flash forum! You can't go back, you can't bookmark, search engines can't index the content, people without Flash can't use it at all. Flash forums are a novelty at best, I'd suggest SMF forums which are free and very well made.
Sorry to be so negative, but with a lot of potential in the physical good site, the e-commerce side is not at all doing it justice. Good luck keeping up with the Joneses. |