Recently I was contacted and asked to provide my input as to how I would make improvements to the cardroomsupply.com website. Cardroom Supply is a e-commerce website that sells game tables, chips, and supplies for the game of poker. I must note that I am being compensated for this review but have not been given any prompting to what type of review to write but was asked to give my honest opinion.
First Impressions
When visiting the site for the first time the impression that I got was that this site primarily sells furniture. After further looking I then noticed that they also sold poker supplies. The other thing that I noticed was that this is a Yahoo! hosted online store and therefore is not the most professional setup.
Clicking around the site was responsive which was good but when I added something to my cart the entire look of the site changes and then I was on an order.store.yahoo.net URL instead of the cardroomsupply.com URL. While Yahoo! is a professional name it does not give the consumer the feeling that this is a well established company. It seems that they are using the bare minimum to make some money.
Clicking further around the site had me in the articles section reading a article about Texas Holdem Strategies which was cool.
The overall impressions that I got was that this company offered a lot of different poker items but the true poker enthusiast would probably not purchase from them unless they had really good prices.
My Suggestions
If I were to redesign this site I would offer the following suggestions in order to drive more customers to the site and to increase customer conversion:
- Loose the Yahoo! shopping cart. I would replace this with something different such as Miva shopping cart or even the open source osCommerce.
- I would change the focus of the main page to items that people are more likely to purchase straight from the internet such as the poker chips or supplies. I would also add a “Featured Product” that would be on sales for the week or month. The idea behind these 2 items is that it is going to get people looking around the site. You have to build trust with the customer first before you can expect to make a big purchase like a table. Also the featured product would have people coming back on a regular basis to see what the new featured item is. This will in return bring more traffic which then can then be translated into more conversions.
- I would add more articles to the site and have an excerpt from the latest article on the front page. This will also bring more traffic as people come back on a regular basis to see the latest news or pearls of wisdom that you are giving them for free. This will produce more traffic which is a prime target for sales. I would also add article titles on individual related product pages so that people can feel that they are getting some free info with their purchase. In return I would also and related products to the articles page to try and push sales from people reading the article.
- I would give the graphics some touch up as far as adding some more vibrant “fun” colors and more pictures of people who look like they are having a good time while playing cards. This will put people more in the buying mood.
That’s it. It would be a lot of work to implement the changes that I have suggested but I think there would be a pretty quick ROI on whatever they paid to make the changes.