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Shopping for industrial tools online can be a major production — especially if a site is not up to snuff. Production Tool Supply sells such complex items as precision measuring instruments, carbide inserts, hand and power tools, workholding devices, safety supplies, fasteners, machinery, and accessories. We decided to see if the Warren, MI-based mailer markets with precision online. Critiquers Amy Africa, president of Helena, VT-based Web consultancy Eight by Eight, and Stephan Spencer, founder/president of Madison, WI-based SEO agency Netconcepts, gave a thorough review of the PTS site, with Africa examining the site's content and functionality, and Spencer testing its search capability. Does Production Tool Supply's site hit the nail on the head, or does it get a hammering from our experts? Read on to see.
AMY AFRICA
As I state in almost every article, navigation accounts for 40% to 60% of a site's success at a minimum — emphasis on at a minimum.
Navigation is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You get what I give you. If I give you a lot of choices, you get a lot of choices to choose from. If I give you nothing, you get nothing.
Production Tool Supply has limited navigation. It just doesn't offer much in terms of choices. Period. If you know what catalog item number you're looking for, there's a chance you'll find it. But if you want to shop or browse at PTS, or as its tagline says, at “America's Tool Crib,” well, pray for miracles because it's not exactly possible without divine intervention.
The action bar — the list at the top of the site of the things that a visitor must do or see — showcases Home, Products, Customer Service, About PTS, Specials, and Browse Catalog. Under Products, the company offers Line Card, MSDS, Hardinge Machinery, and Hazard Codes. The entry page for product boasts that it has more than 235,000 PTS products, plus many hard-to-find items.
I guess the operative words are “hard to find,” because if you click on any one of the choices underneath (including abrasives, hand tools, plant and safety, and so on), all you get — and I mean all you get — is an alphabetical list of manufacturers, with one or two clickable links.
And that's not even the best part. The best part is that when you click those links, you go to that particular manufacturer's Website. Hello? What year is this — 1998?
There's no other way to say it: That just plain stinks.
(Yeah, I wanted to say, That just plain sucks. But in my last critique I postulated that a well-known and well-respected Website sucked. To say I got a lot of feedback would be an understatement. Whether they agreed or disagreed that the site sucked, it seems that direct marketers take offense at the word suck.)
It's bad enough that the site's Browse Catalog section is one of the world's most unusable formats — framed PDFs — but driving people to other sites? Granted, PTS does have nifty page and part number finders (helpful if you have a catalog at your side), but neither of those things are enough to make the site shoppable.
The “Specials,” which the site promotes all over, and should be commended for, are colorful ads, offline sales fliers, if you will. But they are not clickable. So if you find something you are interested in or want to learn more about, you'll need a connection to Dionne Warwick or one of her psychic friends for help determining the part number.
With the Specials sections, PTS is so close, yet so far. If the users could interact with the site, it would be the perfect reason to visit the site on a frequent basis. It's clear that PTS has everything if you need the sort of stuff it sells, but what good is it if you can't interact with it? Can't find it? Can't buy it?
Granted, navigation is often a difficult thing for companies to improve overnight. It takes time, effort, and a lot of studying of your data (however sparse it may be) to do it right. So what can PTS do to improve its site in the meantime?
First, the merchant should work on its home page. Production Tool Supply's home page is dismal at best, and not just because of the lack of C-navigation, either. (C-navigation is top, bottom, and left-hand navigation.) The benefit of the page — its simplicity — is also its biggest weakness. If your goal is to sell, you need to show things to buy. PTS does an excellent job of promoting credit card logos, but unless it sells MC, Visa, Discover and AmEx, it's a waste of space.
What it needs to do is to showcase several (preferably 12 or so) of its most popular items on the entry page. For each product, this would include a picture of the item, a headline and possibly one to two lines about the product and more information, and buy now/add to cart buttons.
PTS should also include a perpetual cart (a shopping cart that stays with you at all times) in the upper right-hand corner. The site could even include a cart in the right column and at the bottom column as well.
