# Alright folks, time to switch roles - review my store



## Twinge (Apr 26, 2005)

We're finally getting ready to launch our site, www.justbetees.com. We aren't really sticking to any specific category; instead, we're offering a variety of shirts to fit most people. We have several additional ideas that we haven't had time to make up yet, so we'll have several more shirts available as time progresses.

Check around the website and tell me both what you like and dislike. Try to find anything broken I may have missed. There are some test items up so you can test purchases if you'd like to (real purchases work too, if you'd actually like to buy one). Some shirts are still missing descriptions -- if you give me one I decide to use, I'll send you a discount coupon or something =) Some of the descriptions we do have up are fairly mediocre as well (category descriptions too), so if you've got something better send away.

Here are a few things we know about and are planning to address, but won't worry about quite yet:
* Make category view look the same as All/New product view
* Optimize graphics and html (to be a little friendlier to dialup)
* Fix the meta description tag to be a real description
* A few other misc. minor bug fixes that don't affect anything important.

So anyway, let loose your dogs of war, and let me know why our website is awesome or why it sucks before we start promoting it - I'd appreciate it!

Thanks in advance,
Twinge


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## puzzleguy (Apr 5, 2005)

You've got some good stuff on your shirts. I like the colors you used and the simple layout. Well... now the things I think could use some work: The descriptions really need to be fleshed out. What kind of shirts are they? Why should I buy your shirts? What does the graphic on the shirt say? (Some of the stuff is small enough it's somewhat hard to read.) If you don't have what the shirt says in the description a search engine can't find it.

You've got a good start. My first efforts needed lots of improvement. (It seems there's always something that could be improved.)

Good Luck with your endeavor.


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## triplebtees (Jun 3, 2005)

When i click to enlage image, a new window appears, when i maximize the window, the image does not get bigger, but the window does. One other thing, maybe it is just me, but i would like to see an image of the shirt, not just the design. Great start though!


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## [email protected] (Jun 2, 2005)

Hi, great start but i agree, you need to have the t shirts on there too, even you getting some printed and taking shots yourself, that's what i did for my site as i find some sites, especially the e-commerce bits of it very dull, so did a front end where you can actually see people wearing them, helps the buyer picture themselves in the product.


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## jdr8271 (Jun 16, 2005)

for the pictures of the shirt, you just need to take one picture of a person wearing a blank shirt. Then using photoshop or illustrator, put the different designs on it.


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## Twinge (Apr 26, 2005)

puzzleguy said:


> You've got some good stuff on your shirts. I like the colors you used and the simple layout. Well... now the things I think could use some work: The descriptions really need to be fleshed out. What kind of shirts are they? Why should I buy your shirts? What does the graphic on the shirt say? (Some of the stuff is small enough it's somewhat hard to read.) If you don't have what the shirt says in the description a search engine can't find it.


I agree on the descriptions, but it's surprisingly hard to just write up some little description about each design. All the information on the shirts themselves can be found in the FAQ, and it seems like it'd be a bit excessive to put it on every product page (though some sites do).

I would hope the inset in the larger image would be plenty large enough to see what the text says... I was kind of trying to avoid putting the actual shirt text in the description to avoid some redundancy (the short name is on there everywhere for search engines to pick up on, from the title to the alt text) but I'll consider it.



puzzleguy said:


> You've got a good start. My first efforts needed lots of improvement. (It seems there's always something that could be improved.)


Yeah, websites never stop being in deveopment really =)



triplebtees said:


> When i click to enlage image, a new window appears, when i maximize the window, the image does not get bigger, but the window does. One other thing, maybe it is just me, but i would like to see an image of the shirt, not just the design.


The pop-up for the largest-size image is a bit hackish right now; eventually we want to make it open in the same window instead of a new one. We do have actual on-shirt images on several of the shirts (Night Dragon, for example), but a few designs were made after we took our first run of pictures. We'll retake them (and include the new ones) sometime soon. The pop-up should be resizing correctly for the larger on-shirt images.



jdr8271 said:


> for the pictures of the shirt, you just need to take one picture of a person wearing a blank shirt. Then using photoshop or illustrator, put the different designs on it.


We were trying to avoid doing a cut and paste job, but I might try it in the future if I need to. Actual shots of each shirt should look better I think.


Also: If anyone here actually does want to buy a shirt, you can use coupon code 'tshirtforums' to get a 10% discount (epxires in 1 week). Thanks for the comments so far.


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## jdr8271 (Jun 16, 2005)

> We were trying to avoid doing a cut and paste job, but I might try it in the future if I need to. Actual shots of each shirt should look better I think.


I disagree. Even t-shirt hell, and cafepress, the two most popular t-shirt website on the internet use cut and paste pictures. If you dont have actual pictures of the items, your buyers wont buy. From my experience, when I added my 'cut and paste' actual pictures, sales tripled.

Best Wishes,
Jon


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## Twinge (Apr 26, 2005)

jdr8271 said:


> I disagree. Even t-shirt hell, and cafepress, the two most popular t-shirt website on the internet use cut and paste pictures. If you dont have actual pictures of the items, your buyers wont buy. From my experience, when I added my 'cut and paste' actual pictures, sales tripled.


That is comapred to none at all though. We have on-shirt pics, they're just real photographs instead.

Though, they are only for the largest size image; a lot of sites have the smaller images on a shirt (such as t-shirt hell), but this makes them completely unreadable and really pointless in my eyes, but perhaps that's not how others view it.


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## Adam (Mar 21, 2005)

Get both up. Leave the images you have now as a zoom and put the t-shirt image above. I've proven the same thing as Jon, sales rocket when the customer can see the what the t-shirt will actually look like. Your larger images (the ones of a t-shirt) are great put those on the product pages. 

It's not entirely obvious what your site is about from a quick glance you definately need pics of t-shirts on there. That is the first thing I noticed, this will be an issue when trying to convert sales. Even your product names could do with the word t-shirt adding to them, e.g. Lightworker T-Shirt. Forget just having it on ALT, it needs to be in the TITLE as well.



> Though, they are only for the largest size image; a lot of sites have the smaller images on a shirt (such as t-shirt hell), but this makes them completely unreadable and really pointless in my eyes, but perhaps that's not how others view it.


Your larger size images are great, you also need a mid sized image of that one. Then you will be set. Listen to the advice mate. The visitor needs to see exactly what your products look like straight away or they will leave. You need to get their attention and spark that impulse buy. The majority of t-shirts sales are created on impulse, when someone thinks damn I have to have that shirt they'll buy it. Helping the customer envisage what the product is going to look like just helps that impulse buy move quicker to the checkout. I'm certainly basing this on years of selling t-shirts on the net. T-Shirt Hell's conversion rate is fantastic btw, and I'm sure the way they present the product shots helps not hinders.


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## Twinge (Apr 26, 2005)

Adam said:


> Get both up. Leave the images you have now as a zoom and put the t-shirt image above. I've proven the same thing as Jon, sales rocket when the customer can see the what the t-shirt will actually look like. Your larger images (the ones of a t-shirt) are great put those on the product pages.


'See what it will actually look like on a shirt' is relative, though. T-shirt hell relies on thier text to describe a shirt because thier tiny-arse small pictures are completely unreadable (and worthless, IMO)... I can't really use text to describe the shirt in detail without a major site redesign so it seems like making the small pics relatively readable makes more sense to me. 

It just doesn't seem like people would be more likely to click on an unreadable, mysterious shirt picture (with only a vague text name) than a design they can actually read to me -- but perhaps I'm wrong.



Adam said:


> It's not entirely obvious what your site is about from a quick glance you definately need pics of t-shirts on there. That is the first thing I noticed, this will be an issue when trying to convert sales. Even your product names could do with the word t-shirt adding to them, e.g. Lightworker T-Shirt. Forget just having it on ALT, it needs to be in the TITLE as well.


Maybe I'll try to put a picture of a t-shirt, someone wearing one, etc. on the front page description or something... dunno.

Yeah, I also need to work on my meta descriptions and some other stuff too. I did have to add the word 't-shirt' to the alt, so I'll find where in the php I can do the same for title when I get a chance.



Adam said:


> Your larger size images are great, you also need a mid sized image of that one. Then you will be set. Listen to the advice mate. The visitor needs to see exactly what your products look like straight away or they will leave. You need to get their attention and spark that impulse buy. The majority of t-shirts sales are created on impulse, when someone thinks damn I have to have that shirt they'll buy it. Helping the customer envisage what the product is going to look like just helps that impulse buy move quicker to the checkout. I'm certainly basing this on years of selling t-shirts on the net. T-Shirt Hell's conversion rate is fantastic btw, and I'm sure the way they present the product shots helps not hinders.


I personally rather dislike the way cafepress does it. Sure, I can see the design on a t-shirt, but I can't actually see the design until I get like 5 clicks in... I find that really annoying. I would think a readable design would be better for an implse buy than an unreadable picture of a shirt, but perhaps I'm mistaken as I said above. Maybe I'll at least rephrase the larger pic to be something like 'click for larger, on-shirt picture' or something, I dunno.

As I may have said earlier, I did try putting the shirt images on the product pages for the medium pics at first, but they were still entirely unreadable and worthless there it seemed to me. It also seems like another alternative of having both an unreadable on-shirt picture and a medium design picture would be rather cluttered on the product page as well.

Obviously, I haven't had personaly experience, but other alternatives mentioned don't really make any logical sense to me...


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## Adam (Mar 21, 2005)

I think the logic is in the statistics. I personally have been selling t-shirts on the net for over 5 years and know that sales increase when the customer can see the design on the t-shirt. I can't really help much more than that. The customer doesn't need to be able to read the design word for word on the t-shirt image they can get that level of detail in the images you have up there now. Put them side by side / above and below. Seems like a perfect solution to me. You want your site to look like you are selling t-shirts not images.

For example:

http://justbetees.com/images/large/DragonTimesTwo_LRG.gif
If I saw this I would think wooah cool, that is a smart looking t-shirt. I would be more tempted to buy it if I could see it straight off, otherwise I'd probably do what I did before and click away.


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