Website wishes

[Damselfish]

You have been doing fun things with videos, 360 views, feeds, etc. and I think the funny animations are cute - but do you have any plans to enhance the basic shopping experience?

It's rather tedious to look for things. There's only the basic categories, and stuff isn't always where you would expect. For example, if I click on BCDs, of course I get BCDs - in no particular order I can tell, with random sort-of-BC-related accessories mixed in. There's no way to look quickly for a particular type or brand. The mens and womans subcategories aren't usually a useful distinction, just makes you look in 2 places. There's a lot of scrolling because I have to go past the whole description of all the stuff I don't care about, rather than an abbreviated listing/thumbnail. Other categories are even tougher, there's generally lots of unrelated things in random order. The search doesn't help since it looks blindly for text which is ok for a forum, but not useful to find products. For example I just searched for "weight belt" and got 21 items, only a couple of which were weight belts, but it turned up a tank and a drysuit!

I was looking for the comfort cushion mouthpiece that I had added to my cart the other day. I tried Accessories, it's not clear which of the many subcategories it would be but I looked under "Scubatool-Save a Dive-Seasick" since there is a picture of a mouthpiece in the save a dive kit shown. There's a couple there but not the one I was looking for. I looked under regs (not where I would normally look for a mouthpiece) and only the Seacure one is there. I know I found it someplace. I finally seached for "mouthpiece" and found it, in with a list of all the random stuff that has "mouthpiece" in the description of course.

To re-add the boots that were on my list, I had to scroll though all the hoods and gloves. I can see why they might have been classified together - but if I'm looking for boots, I'm looking for boots!

It would be nice if the cart was saved - I had a bunch of stuff in my cart the other day, when I came back it's all gone. (It would be nice to have buttons for "view cart" and "view wishlist" too - clicking on "check out" to see these isn't intuitive when someone doesn't really want to check out yet.

When I add something to my cart, it shows me my cart - when I add something to my wishlist it doesn't take me to my wishlist, or leave me in the product listing - but back to the main page which is the least likely place I'd want to go then. Without getting into details, the wishlist does all sorts of weird things and doesn't seem to work very well. It keeps asking me to login and doesn't save things for long. (And yes, I am accepting cookies)


I'd probably buy more if I could find it, and it didn't disappear!

[ScubaToys Larry]

Actually working on that as we speak. Unfortunately, most of the hard core programming of that is beyond my abilities, but I've got a guy who is very good at adding those types of things to the cart system working on it. I've seen several of the proto types, and we're tweaking, and hopefully in the next few weeks, the cart will have a lot of new features.

Thanks for taking the time to write out such a nice synopsis of features you would like to see... some will be quick... others down the road.

[fireflock]

I too have noticed that as more and more products are added, it is sometimes hard to find what I'm looking for. If I have a particular product in mind, and I know the name and model, search works well for me.

If I kind of know what I want, but I'm not sure which brand or model, I end up scrolling through tons of stuff I'm not interested in all the different categories.

If you're looking for examples to consider, Amazon does a decent job with all the tabs on top of the page (electronics, books, toys, etc...) and then subcategories within that (DVD, CD, etc... as an example in the electronics tab). I also find the LeisurePro system, with brands and features check boxes on the right side, makes it easy to narrow in on what you want.

I love having so many new products added to the site. We just need a better way to look through them.

[ReefHound]

I would like to add my agreement with the things that have been mentioned. The product display is clumsy and the search is unreliable.

I would most prefer the LP features that allow you to drill down within a category by product feature, brand, style, etc. but that could require extensive programming and database changes.

I would definitely like to see a more concise display in the browse or search results, with a link to a more detailed product page. The site requires way too much scrolling.

I would like to see display options such as ability to show all results on a single page instead of this next page, next page thing. And to be able to sort the display by brand name, price, etc.

I would like to see the sidebar menu stay fixed and not scroll with the page.

[Damselfish]

Yes, wasn't going to mention LP but their drill down features are very useful. (To be fair, there are tons of major websites that don't even do a good job of things like that and should. Home Depot and Lowe's come to mind, since I suffered the pain of trying to find something there recently.)

Good to know you're working on it! Let me know if you need testing.

[mwhities]

Originally Posted by Damselfish

Yes, wasn't going to mention LP but their drill down features are very useful. (To be fair, there are tons of major websites that don't even do a good job of things like that and should. Home Depot and Lowe's come to mind, since I suffered the pain of trying to find something there recently.)

Good to know you're working on it! Let me know if you need testing.

haha Took me literally 30 minutes to find Home Depots mosquito systems on their website. :|

[frogman159]

I completely agree

[mentalmarine]

Doctor..
..Doctor
Doctor...
..Doctor..
I concur

[Babster]

Ditto on all the above.

Forget about LP - Newegg is a better example of an outstanding retail site that lets you drill down/search (the #1 computer hardware site out there for those not in the know).

Can't wait to see the improvements! Thanks, ST!

[harb99]

Originally Posted by Babster

Ditto on all the above.

Forget about LP - Newegg is a better example of an outstanding retail site that lets you drill down/search (the #1 computer hardware site out there for those not in the know).

Can't wait to see the improvements! Thanks, ST!

i agree that newegg is a site that is very easy to navigate and drill down to find exactly what you are looking for