O/T - Kudos to the Pelican!

[patalive]

There was a very interesting article in Monday's WSJ about tracking online web data by net vendors. Many vendors do not use the data to their advantage, e.g., tracking number of hits to the site. The more informed and sucessful online vendors track what customers actually do when roaming a site or filling a shopping cart. The article points out the most critical point is when a customer moves to the checkout area. A high percentage of incomplete checkouts indicates that the vendor's check out procedures/screens are too complicated, convoluted or just plain unfriendly.

Pelican's check out is superb and it's one reason I am increasing my purchasing from them. Once they have you on file, you only need your name, email address and I think zip. Period. The entire order is entered and tracked.

Wayne and company also follow other best practices described in the article for online vendors. Nice job, Wayne!

Chuck

[s_wilwerding]

Originally posted by patalive

Pelican's check out is superb and it's one reason I am increasing my purchasing from them. Once they have you on file, you only need your name, email address and I think zip. Period. The entire order is entered and tracked.

And if you have cookies set on your browser, even those are filled in!

[billwagnon]

I have to say (and I may be a moron) I find it extremely difficult to locate parts etc on Pelican. Love the BBS etc, but I need a "catalog searching for dummies" book for the commerce side of this place.

[nostatic]

one of my gripes would be that it is too many clicks to get to a search page (3). Searching functionality should be available from page one imho.

[old_skul]

I agree. The searching portion of the catalog is lame. It needs to be *way* more user friendly, and offer the ability to search certain categories/models/years - and rank them.

You know, Google sells a nice little $20,000 web appliance that does a nice job - Wayne should stop the Brinks truck he talks about so much and make a withdrawal.

[billwagnon]

Originally posted by old_skul
Wayne should stop the Brinks truck he talks about so much and make a withdrawal.

actually, that's his next book!

[Wayne 962]

We're working on the search engine...

-Wayne