Hi from pttools

[pttools]

Hello

We sell Hand Tools, Power Tools, Safety Gear and Fixings for the DIY market and our site is [url]www.pttools.co.uk[/url].

A key Unique Selling Point of ours is that all the goods on our site are in stock in order to maximise the delivery times. We therefore don't use 'drop shippers' or use a traditional recurring inventory system.

It would be interesting knowing what other people have as USP's and what infrastructure was needed to enable then.

Behind our site is some custom integrated infrastructure (code) that enables to manage the 'virtual self'. If you are selling tangible goods and those goods have to be on the self for you to sell them, you have to run things quite tightly. E.g. If a user for whatever reason aborts a transaction you want to put those goods back on the self as soon as possible, like you would at a checkout of a 'real' store. This is usually done before the next user views the catalogue. However if the user aborts half way through the transaction we might have enough information to ring them up and ask them politely whether they intended to cancel the transaction and whether they are having any difficulty; providing other means of payment if necessary.

The next stage when we get enough funding is to write a server to merchant account script that communicate via SOAP to find the exact status of all current transactions at any given time. This really will be instant unlike IPN, etc. This will mean that the transactions that are more than half way through can be assessed on-the-fly often without the need to ring up the customer.

Paul

[TWD-Tony]

Hi pttools!

I've just had a look at your website and overall it looks quite good... I do have the following points to make but don't think I am being picky or anything...

Your code doesn't seem to include any META TAGS except for the <TITLE> tag, now although the SEO community in general agrees that keywords are not as important than they used to be - it is still a very good idea to have them

Secondly - Google Adwords, now this is MY opinion... Online (eCommerce) websites should not be displaying these, it tends to cheapen the look and says "I'm not selling much so I'll try and earn a few pounds with these ads..." I know that this is not the image you want, but adwords have a place and on info sites they are fine as it is just the webmaster trying to claw back some of the hosting costs... But eCommerce site's just look wrong (IMHO).

And just another little thing.. when browsing ecom sites, I like to BROWSE - there doesn't seem to be a way to just follow lnks to products (catalogue style) but only a search function?

Please take what I have said as minor niggles - rather than me ripping the site to peices! Overall it has a very clean and pleasant design and functionality...

[pttools]

[QUOTE=TWD-Tony]
And just another little thing.. when browsing ecom sites, I like to BROWSE - there doesn't seem to be a way to just follow lnks to products (catalogue style) but only a search function?
[/QUOTE]
Really did you not see the links along the top? I suppose I could make them bigger or put them in the intro.

I asked a question about ads [url]http://www.teneric.co.uk/forums/thread2346.html[/url]
I suppose I didn't want my ads to look like a Christmas tree. But your right AdSense are a little bit 'Christian'.