Complete Disappointment @ eBay Austin Reed Outlet

This could be simply compared to paying absolute top-whack money to locate your store in a shopping mall or popular high street location, with its perfect location and an insanely high volume of passers with a 100% chance of walk-in custom. Just like it is being featured as an eBay Outlet in fact, but without the top-whack money outlay.

Giving the physcial store  a fantastic front-of-house display, spending decent money of staff and designer time to create a brilliant display set-up, with this season’s designs, for both her and him, plus the accessories, stands and covering it from all angles of entry (shop displays are very rarely hit straight on, always need to be angled sideways to capture walking custom).

But then forgetting to replicate the style in the inside of the physical store. Tatty shelves, everything boxed up and not on display. Just left in a heap on the floor. Like a Kwik-Save from the 1990’s.

Yep, you’d never do it on the high street so why are you doing it on the net?

Yes, the front of house does have issues, but thats minor when you compare it to when you leave the front page and enter a category, try it and you’ll see this:

Its completely lost its style, that fab looking store front, that front of house display, you know the one, the one that can make or break a retail shop… its.. gone.

There is a gaming term, that is most apt for this, its called the *face palm*, you know the action, place your head in the palm of your hand and move you head gently side to side.

As you can see from the two purple links, I was looking for shirts (my shirt spend is almost as bad as my book spending habit on Amazon currently), the inner templates are OK, but are lacking a close up shot of the fabric, that’s a big thing for me when buying a shirt, the fabric.

It would take someone less than 30 minutes to put a nice header together, probably even less then that as you could almost copy the one from the home page.

Look, this took me < 1 minute in Paint, see how much better it looks?

Going from the shop home page, to a category page is such a shock to the browsing buyer. Remember they’re[customers] crazy creatures and do not like being scared, the same if coming from an eBay listing to a shop category page, it would be far less distressing with a header in place.

Do not let your buyers think, buyers thinking is a bad idea, make it easy for them, make it a common experience, make it simple.