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If it has the resources, the company could also use its entry page to feature the current specials it offers each week. From a graphical and selling perspective, PTS does a good job with the fliers, and it wouldn't take a lot to make them into entry pages. It would be good if the site made the products look more discounty (showing the amount of savings). And if PTS employs this type of strategy, it should also make sure to include a deadline.
One of the many benefits of using special offers on the Web is that they create urgency and they cause people to focus. Highlighting that the user has just a few days to take advantage of the offer would be an excellent strategy for PTS.
As stated earlier, PTS boasts it accepts MasterCard, Visa, Discover, and American Express, and that it is VeriSign secured. It offers you options to order with and without registering. Click on “order without registering” and you get four choices — current flier specials, machinery solutions, featured vendors, and introducing NortonSG Blaze. What does clicking on any one of those things get you? More framed PDFs!
PTS desperately needs to find another way to present its products. A PDF is a great format for white papers and such, but it's definitely not the best for encouraging users to engage in purchasing a product. PTS needs to work on changing this, along with accommodating catalog quick orders and orders from other non-direct/no-referrer channels.
What are the site's redeeming qualities? Well, for starters it doesn't have a text search, which is probably a good thing for the merchant. Text search, especially on this number of products, would most likely be the kiss of death, unless PTS invested in a package like Endeca or Mercardo.
The site includes lots of good customer service information — a comprehensive list of frequently asked questions, a complete list of store locations, and links to sales and product support to name a few. But most of its customer service pages are what a user would consider a “dead end.” What is a dead end? It's a page without pictures.
The thing is, users see things in pictures. Search engines see things in text, but it's been empirically proven over and over that users will stay longer and/or drill deeper/click more when there's something (read: a graphic) for them to look at. PTS has a lot of the typical forms on their site — free catalog sign-ups, support requests — and none of them have any associated graphics.
Additionally, PTS should make its “submit” buttons bigger, red in color, and more in-your-face. The site should also make sure that it includes its phone and fax numbers on each form. It's important to have contact information on every form on your site as those are printed out the most often.
And when someone fills out a request, they should get a thank you confirmation page that sets their expectations. How long will it take to get the catalog? What can I do if I want to order in the meantime? And so on and so forth. This friendly “good dog” page should also give the user five products that they may want to look at in the meantime.
If you are carefully watching your analytics, you should see that you get about a quarter of the people to drill back into the site. If you are not getting that many, you may want to look at and tweak which products you are featuring because it does make all the difference.
A follow-up e-mail thanking customers for whatever it is that they did (e.g., requested a catalog, asked a question) should also be sent. If you can get the e-mail into the user's inbox within a couple minutes, it will perform best, as the user may still be online even if he or she is not still at your site.
STEPHAN SPENCER
When it comes to search engine optimization, the Production Tool Supply Website is in a terrible state. Despite the company's extensive catalog, which is 235,000 items strong, PTS makes none of that content available to the search engines.
Only 20 pages exist in Google of the site PTS-Tools.com (according to a search for “site: pts-tools.com”), and of those 20, only one has a title or snippet with it. A lack of title and snippet in a Google listing indicates that the page content has not been indexed; Googlebot knows of that page's URL through links, but for whatever reason has decided not to spider and index that page.
PTS fares even worse in Yahoo, with only one page indexed. What of the hundreds of thousands of product pages, you may ask? Unfortunately, the online catalog is comprised of print catalog pages converted into PDF documents. Thus, there are no product pages available in HTML.
Making matters worse, the PDFs are displayed within frames, which are notoriously spider unfriendly, and then cookies are required to access the PDFs through PTS's navigation. Since spiders don't support cookies, the sessions will always be expired or never started.
PTS visitors with expired sessions are greeted with: “You have been disconnected! If your computer was left unattended for over 20 minutes, you have been automatically disconnected. To sign-on again, close this window and LOGIN.” Trying to access the PDF catalog with cookies turned off yields an “Error 500” message and then a blank screen.
