Happy New Year!  We were so happy that all of you sent in your links for our call for a free January shop critique.  It was a great way for us to ring in the new year and we hope that this post today helps you tweak your own shop during this slightly slower month.  So we’re pleased to announce that Arabella Bond is the lucky winner for this month!  You can follow along with our critique by looking through her shop HERE.

Things we loved about the site:

• Your homepage video!  We instantly knew you were a fun, chic lady who adores what she makes.  Plus, we saw how your bags would look on us.
• Photo links to your shop!  It’s a great call to action and a customer instantly knows what sorts of products you make.
• You’ve really branded your site well in terms of color.  It certainly matches the colors of the leather you use to create your bags.
• Easy navigation bar and an easy-to-use contact page.
• Gorgeous photos on your about page!  We love seeing the artist at work.
• Really nice close-up photographs of your bags.  We especially liked the ones where you show how items like phones fit in them.  🙂

Things we would tweak:

• It’s important to make your call to action as obvious as possible.  So while we LOVE your little photo links to your shop on the bottom of the page, those move around on every page and thus sometimes they’re not visible at all.  Adding a little ‘shop’ tab on your top navigation bar means your customers will always know where they can go to buy your goods.
• We really enjoyed that you had an events link because your work is perfect for Renaissance Faires, craft fairs, heck, even motorcycle rallies!  However, when we clicked the link, everything was from 2010!!!  🙁
• You have so many great photos of customers wearing their new bags.  Why not add some testimonials to that page as well?  We know they have amazing things to say about your work.
• Speaking of the gallery page where you show your customers with your work, it would be better to label that page as a ‘fan gallery’ or ‘Arabella Bond lovers’ so we don’t expect in-studio, flawless photos of your bags and models.
• That’s actually the one thing that’s missing in your shop: photos of people wearing your bags!  We want to know what it looks like on a real person when we’re in your shop.
• You may not know it, but your ‘comment’ page only contains spam comments.  There’s not much point to keeping that page so why not clean up your navigation bar?
• We were so happy that you had information on how to figure out your size for a belt because it’s SO important for a business like yours.  One of the biggest obstacles to buy is that a customer doesn’t know where something will hit them (in terms of a shoulder bag) or if it will be too big/small for their waist.  If you linked to that sizing information in each of your product descriptions, you’d definitely increase your sales.

We hope this critique helps not only Arabella but you as well.  There’s never an end to the tiny tweaks you can make to your site to increase sales and make your customers happy. Please let us know below if this critique helped you with your site! 

Want more?  Check out our e-course, Convert Your Creativity, to learn how to increase your sales conversions and build a shop that brings in the money you want.