Need Website Criticism

[integrity]

Hey Marty, here are a few things that jumped out at me:

1) No clear call to action. When I arrive on your site, I'm greeted by a wall of text. No pictures, no examples, just plain text. Immediately my laziness kicks in and I hit the back button to see what the other search results have to offer me. I would attribute part of your 94% bounce rate to that. 94% is pretty bad, so I would suggest coming up with an entirely different landing page concept -- not just modifying this one.

I don't want to out anybody else's sites, so I'd just recommend you do a google search for the same keywords you're bidding on and check out both the paid results as well as the organic sites ranking for those terms. Pay attention to what they're doing and build upon it.

2) Stop running google ads, for now. I noticed that most of your products retail for about $1.50 (I'd assume your profit on each item is less), and your Adwords CPCs are nearing the $3 mark in some cases. Even if you were to hit a 100% conversion ratio, you'd still be losing money. I understand you want to get some data about your product quickly, but in all honesty, you will need thousands of visitors to draw any concrete conclusions, which at those bids will cost thousands of dollars.

I would try to get traffic organically (Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, forum posts, Yahoo answers, ect..) before running more paid advertising campaigns. Although another less competitive PPC network like Bing Ads might be another option as well, since click costs should be lower and the quality is still high.

3) Use higher quality images. For those people that did make it to your pictures page, the examples you have included of how the tattoos look like aren't very good. One of the tattoos even looks more like a stain than an actual tattoo. I don't want to discredit your product, but I would recommend portraying it in a more attractive fashion. Again, I'd suggest checking out your competitor's sites and see what sort of images they use. Put yourself in the shoes of a potential buyer and ask yourself if you'd be interested in your product if you came across your site.

Hope some of this helps you man, all the best.

 

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[Marty]

That's extremely helpful. Thanks Integrity.
I'm definitely staying away from ads right now. I will work on picture quality. I may be able to pay for a few professional pictures. I'm going to have to figure out the balance between photos and educating.

 

[SeanKelly]

As far as website goes... you're definitely on the right track, but it's really not clear what you're selling and visually it's a mess. Make it look awesome with pictures, colors, calls to action, etc. Just follow the advice that's already been said.

On a side note, I really don't care for the name Nogretz. Is it supposed to be like no regrets? For some reason I just hate the name.

Your product made me think of this movie scene

Good luck moving forward with your idea

 

[Bigguns50]

1st off....I love the idea and I would buy them to try them. I actually researched this a bit a while ago but didn't find what you did. Good job.

I'm with @integrity on this. I didn't read ALL the replies because I wanted to give you my impression and my thoughts.

Google something like 'great landing page examples'. The trend and newer sites have lots of white space...are highly interactive...few words...long scrolling, etc.

As a consumers...I want to see great pictures of tattoos. Up close and clear...right on the front page...different designs so maybe one will appeal to me.
Put them in my face bro. Tell me...They look permanent but they're not..They last x amount of days ! AND they're safe, inexpensive, great looking, etc.

Maybe a side by side pic...one of a permanent tattoo, one of your temporary tats.

Keep going !

 

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[Marty]

SeanKelly, That movie was hilarious. "Not even one letter?" I am trying to convey the idea of no regrets (as a permanent tattoo may leave regrets). I'm not married to the name, so if I get a lot of negative feedback, it's early enough to change it.
Bigguns, thanks for the encouragement! I think there's a big market for something like this, I just need to get better at reaching and educating that market. It's still very early in my business, but so far I'm doing a terrible job at it. The good news is that this morning I was doing a worse job at it than I am now.
I like your "in my face" ideas, especially with side by side photos. I used Tafy's advice to hire a $5 web designer from fiverr. I'm going to get some better photos and have a slide banner on the home page. Underneath I'll have some information. Hopefully that does a better job of mixing education with pictures than what I'm doing. I reached out to my wholesaler and they have some photos they're sending me with permission to use in marketing.
One thing Integrity said that I may need to address is that one of the photos looks like a stain. That's probably crap photography on my part, but this stuff is gel. One of my kids used a decal of an eagle on his arm and was screwing around before the gel dried (takes about two hours). He ended up getting the gel on his hands and breaking the seal of the decal. His hands look like he dipped them in an ink bottle and the tattoo looks like a big blob.

 

[biophase]

Shopify has got to have better free templates than the one that you are using! Change it, go with something normal for now. How much is shipping?

 

[Mike39]

I glanced through some replies and don't have time to read through every single one so I apologize in advance if I bring up any points that have already been covered.

Problems:

1. Logo is pixelated (first thing I noticed, looks unprofessional)

2. Upon landing on the site, I had no clue what you were selling. I had to click on a picture of a hand just to find out what the product was. Most visitors would have left before then.

3. Take out the hand from the thumbnail for the bottle, just show the bottle itself

What I would do:

Your not selling lawnmowers, people don't know that the product is and you need to educate them. Design your site so a 5 year old who just drank a 40 oz redbull, (i.e.they aren't very bright and have an amazingly short attention span) would be able to make a purchasing decision.

Put a video showing what the product is on the homepage of the site and put some text saying "Create your own professional temporary tattoos!", just something to tell the consumer why they should be interested and why they should buy. Put some images up of the tattoos and the application process. (Further on, you can create landing pages. One with text explaining the process, another with a video, etc. and split test the conversions.)

Educate them, make them like you, then ask for the sale. This isn't a product where you can just throw up a shopping cart, you need even a simple funnel here.

With that being said, you have an awesome product with a lot of potential!

 

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[Deki_mal]

3) Use higher quality images.

This

2. Upon landing on the site, I had no clue what you were selling. I had to click on a picture of a hand just to find out what the product was. Most visitors would have left before then.

This, sort of

By the way sorry if Im repeating what other people said. From my perspective there is nothing visually catchy from the site. My personal gut reaction was to click away (no offence) because I couldn't be bothered reading. I get that it was temporary tattoos, and I happen to know what they are, but if I didn't I wouldn't know how to find out, because all I read was the slogan.

People get tattoos for visual reasons, to look good, as a fashion statement, to look cool, to give off a certain image, etc etc. You front page has no visual appeal. I think you need to move away from simplistic design and use bolder colours, have some pictures. Maybe have really trendy looking models (male or female) with tattoos, have professional photos of your tattoos, etc. I donno, but my main point is that since you are selling an image your site has to have immediate visual appeal

Hope that doesnt sound too harsh

 

[Coalission]

Your landing page sucks, but you already know that. People are going to tell you to fix it, but that will send you into a neverending spiral of failure.

Change direction completely.

The product is cool, but too cheap to use paid traffic for it. If you live in a big or touristy city, take this to retail stores or gift shops or whatever, maybe do some type of consignment deal. If you want to sell online, focus on free traffic like SEO or whatever. I absolutely hate SEO and most other free traffic sources, but if you don't have money, don't waste it on paid traffic because having someone take out a credit card is a big leap from collecting leads, and at $1.25, garnering an at best 1% conversion rate, you'd have to get clicks at .0125 to just break even. You can go thru PPV and maybe get sub-penny clicks but shitty traffic, or find CPM traffic sources and get insane CTRs, but that probably won't happen in this case. Put all this work into some type of social media thing, trying to make it go viral. This is only if you really want to sell this online, which I'd also get away from that idea.

If you want to make the most money, do these at festivals or some sort of place where tourists and children go to, and sell each tattoo at $5 a pop. You'll make much more per bottle. Design a nice cardboard advertisement briefly but boldly showing the benefits of your tattoos over henna, and rake in the money. You'll get threatened by all the other henna folks already making a killing at those places, but you look like you can kick their asses anyway, so just take over.

 

[Bigguns50]

@Coalission ... I agree with trying different things. See what works. Summer's nearly here and so come the festivals. Hell...if you do well at them, you can 'hire' people on commission to help sell for you.

but you look like you can kick their asses anyway, so just take over

Love this !

 

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[jon.a]

Consider a video like this...

 

[Marty]

Shopify has got to have better free templates than the one that you are using! Change it, go with something normal for now. How much is shipping?

Biophase, the fact that you asked that question tells me a lot about my page. It's $4.99. I wanted to make sure that the customer knew the whole time so there were no surprises so I inserted it (rather clumsily) on the top bar of the website. I had a feeling it couldn't be seen.

 

[Marty]

Mike39, you're absolutely right man. I need to educate my customer WHILE keeping their attention. It's going to have to be very visual. I don't think this is going to be possible without dropping some dollars on professional pictures, professional video and editing, and professional web design. That means I'm going to have to raise some capital. I can drive traffic to my site and work social media pretty well. But I need a superior product (talking about my selling, not my actual product) before I start doing that like a mad man. Honestly, the web site was such a pain in the a$$ for me, that when I was done I felt like it was pretty good. That's the problem with not outsourcing things you don't know shit about. You lose objectivity and your standard becomes about progress and how hard you worked rather than how good the project turned out.
BTW, thanks for the encouragement. Regardless of my bounce rate and lack of conversion, I agree. The product is awesome. The failure to sell it is on my execution, not the product.

 

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[Marty]

Coalission, Great ideas. I live in a military town (Fayetteville, NC), but we do get plenty of festivals and such. Also, I'm a veteran, so getting on base during MWR stuff would be no problem. I think I'm going to go both ways. I can't go the retailers route though. This is made from a plant, so it does have an expiration date.

 

[Marty]

Coalission and Bigguns, thanks for the vote of confidence, but it's just a byproduct of the beard. Beards make everyone look bad a$$. If I shaved it you'd see that I'm actually 5'9 and 125lbs.

 

[Marty]

Jon, Yes! That is what I need. Something like that. I also think I need to keep myself OFF of camera. I don't look like someone that would put people at ease about buying a new product that they've ever heard of. My 16 year old daughter has volunteered to do video talking if I need it and I think she is probably better suited to make people feel comfortable.

 

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[Marty]

Deki_mal, I agree. I need more visual stimulation to get my product across. I need those visuals to convey quality, but also that this is not a sticker tattoo and that you will be drawing your own tattoo. As for models, no way I can afford to pay models to agree to not only be photographed, but wear a tattoo for three weeks once the shoot is over. I can however drop a few bucks on pizza night for my teenagers friends (with their parents permission) to allow me to tattoo them and have a professional photographer there. They won't be wearing the most stylish clothes (they're regular teenagers, not Kardashian's), but it's a good place to start.
Don't worry about sounding harsh. The title of the thread is practically begging for bluntness. I respect bluntness. I appreciate bluntness. Thanks for taking the time to give me an honest response.

 

[Marty]

"The logo is pixelated"
If I'm going to convince people to use a product they've never heard of, that goes on their skin and may harm them, they have to believe that I'm not a meth addict putting together a product in my kitchen with the same lab equipment I used to make my meth. I can only do that if I LOOK like I'm big (look big, act small) and professional. Perception is everything. I have a lot of work to do.

 

[Steve Eason]

My first impression when I hit the site was what is this product? You NEED to have those pictures on the landing page. Show me what it's about with out me having to dig into your site. Honestly, you should be able to capture everything that you need to on a single page with this product. I should be able to quickly see the price, product and sales pitch on this single page without having to go any further into the site. Although the additional information is good to have, you just want the main 'sales' page to have enough information for me to want more info.

Now, one thing that I've seen you say over and over in response to the great ideas and tips people have been giving you is that you can't afford to hire someone to do this or can't afford a professional photographer, etc. If you are short on funds, you can get great results without having to hire anyone. I'm sure you have a friend or yourself who has an iPhone 5s? Get them to take the pictures. I get fantastic pictures with my iPhone's camera. Just be sure to have it well lit. Don't take pictures of the person, but the product. You don't need model's to be in the picture. Just a close up of the tattoo itself. But as mentioned above, make sure the quality of the tattoo is great. As you stated, have some friends come over, order pizza and have a little promo party.

WHEN you start making money and the product is gaining traction, THEN start reinvesting the funds into improving the photos, hiring out the web design and fixing other things. But until you do start seeing results, find ways to make it work, as best as you can, as cheaply as you can.

 

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[Marty]

Steve, thanks man. I think the promo party is something I'm going to get going. The photos I have on there are iPhone 5 and the concensus has been that they aren't good enough. I may be able to get better lighting and see if that fixes it somehow.

 

[parkerscott]

Im going to add one more vote for the name.

 

[integrity]

Jon, Yes! That is what I need. Something like that. I also think I need to keep myself OFF of camera. I don't look like someone that would put people at ease about buying a new product that they've ever heard of. My 16 year old daughter has volunteered to do video talking if I need it and I think she is probably better suited to make people feel comfortable.

Hey Marty, I wouldn't count yourself out just yet.

While I think your daughter could do a great job demonstrating your product, from a marketing standpoint YOU could be perfect for the role as well.

Something like the Dollar Shave Club promo comes to mind.

 

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[Marty]

Ha! Kind of the Anti-PR guy! Great thought Integrity. Thanks.

 

[Deki_mal]

As for models, no way I can afford to pay models to agree to not only be photographed, but wear a tattoo for three weeks once the shoot is over

I wouldn't count it out. Think outside the box. I dont know what its like in the US, but here in Australia there are a lot of semi-professional photographers and models that are willing to work for practically free (just to have something in their portfolio). I know I have a friend that is starting out fashion photography and he's yet to be paid, and he also seems to be able to find a ton of models that will work for free. One of my friends owns a fashion label and she used this method when constructing her website. Ill PM it.

Also, consider buying a website template if you don't want to pay a professional to make it, they range from $20 to about $150. Sure you have a couple hundred bucks to invest. Maybe funnel some from what your paying google, since you already have decent traffic

Also, I like the idea of you talking in your own video link. get someone else to do if for free. Maybe find a film major at university that needs a portfolio; their skill level is usually enough to make it look really nice, but they often work for free or minimal pay

 

[Marty]

You know, when I created this thread, I was ready for a "This sucks, that sucks, you suck."
I was also ready for a couple, "Try this, maybe it will work" or "Just keep at it"
I don't know why I, but I wasn't expecting the specificity and time investment that these responses have in them. Or the PM's offering additional advice and help. I'm truly appreciative to all of you. I'm not a guy given to sentimentality, but this is a community full of unselfish givers. Anybody who comes here with the right mindset is going to be better for it. Thank you all.

 

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