Gift catalogue changes

If you've been to the pressies4princesses gift website lately, you may have noticed more change is a foot. We are experimenting with new page layouts. Basically, we want to help customers find the right gift faster - because that saves you time and, obviously, helps our sales!

Of course, we understand that many people arriving at the store actually don't know what they want "until they see it". And, that's where I think the new pages come into their own.

Up 'til now, like most gift retailers, we have created sections for different occasions (eg birthday, anniversary, new baby, etc), gift types (eg jewellery, personalised romantic, etc)and the different gift recipients (like girlfriend/ wife, mother, friend, etc). But, once in a section, you'll find there's just a big long list of gifts, spread across page-after-page in a fairly random order (most popular first in our case). So, in girlfriend/wife you might find a gorgeous handmade necklace, then a bouquet of flowers, then a personalised poem, then another piece of jewellery and so on. I don't think this is particularly helpful and often wonder if our customers don't struggle to see the "wood for the trees".

The ongoing process of re-shooting all our product images has helped a little. Shot on a pure-white background they tend to stand-out more and be more instantly recognisable. But, this doesn't solve the inter-mingled ordering.




So on our best-selling gifts pages and our best-sellers for girlfriend and wife section, we're experimenting with showing groups of gifts on the first two pages, then outputting the simple list (by popularity, as before) afterwards. The idea is that visitors can cover a lot more 'ideas' faster and only have to make the interested/ not interested decision once for each. Under the old system it was like (reading down):

"Oh a handmade necklace. Nah, definitely don't want to buy her jewellery..."

"A teddy bear...hmm..."

"A bathing gift set - possibly..."

"Another necklace. Nope not jewellery."

"Another handmade necklace. Look, I am really not interested in this jewellery!"

We hope the new layout will help solve this problem. It gives more focus to each gift idea. But, once you've dismissed it, you're not going to have to wade through loads more similar suggestions!

The new catalogue pages are a work in progress and I think we have some tweaks to do with the actual design. So, if you have any suggestions as to how to improve them, I'd love to hear from you. Likewise, if you've got any feedback about whether this is a better or worse way to show the gifts, please do add your comment.