We’ve taken a few days off since our last blog post, but we do have a good excuse. The time has been used to prep and launch the new Pacific Ink.com web site. When you have a few minutes you should head on over to Pacific Ink and check it out. We think you will like it.

We starting building the new site about a year go with some designs and what we thought were some solid e-commerce upgrades to our existing site. In a few months the entire site was built but we decided not to launch it. We can’t really say why, but something just didn’t seem right about it. At that point we shelved the project. Now that we look back, it was a good thing to do. The designs sat for 6 months.

One day we decided it was time to take a look at the site again. So we pulled it “off the shelves” and looked at the entire site with some fresh sets of eyes. Long story short, we had some great elements, but there were also some areas that were really lacking, so back to work we went.

The site you now see is one we are excited by and proud of. We viewed and tested many web sites, both within and outside of the printer cartridge industry. Many inspired features you now see at Pacific Ink. Many showed us things that should not be included in an e-commerce web site. You would be surprised at some of the things being done.

It probably doesn’t happen to often that a company explains some of the logic behind their web site, but we’d like to take a minute to share some of the thoughts that went in to designing the new Pacific Ink.com.

First, we realized that many web sites, ours included, have begun the trend of complicating the ordering and checkout process. Everyone talks about making the process easier, but take a look at the web sites you are shopping. It seems every day that more and more is being added to pages where you are simply supposed to purchase a product (upsell items, advertising links, reviews, commentaries, etc). While some of this is very useful and helps the customer with the purchasing decision it can also be distracting and sometimes frustrating. Perhaps some of the worst offenders are in the printer cartridge industry. They are filling their web site pages with extraneous text for reasons other than helping the customer buy the product they want.

Our goal was to strip the whole process down. Show you exactly what you want and then get out of your way. When you find the cartridge you need, or your printer model you will be able to view all other relevant products. We even removed the upsell screen (Do You Need Anything Else?) screen from the checkout process. It was simply too much. In time we will be adding aids to help customers make purchasing decisions, but be assured they will be added in a way that keeps the distraction to a minimum.

Second, provide subtle aids throughout the site to help the customer find what they need and then let them know they are in the right place. It sounds quite simple, but bigger images are better (and don’t have to slow down page loading speed). Customer research taught us that simply seeing the manufacturer brand box instantly let the customer know they were in the right place to buy the cartridges they needed. Same went for an image of their printer. By supplying queues such as these we can put customers in an assured state of mind and ease their purchasing process.

Third, we looked to improve our search feature. Some customers have already conducted a web search (Google, Yahoo!, etc.) to find us, so to make them go through another search process where they have to review a list of results just didn’t seem right. We spend the last 6 months working on our site’s search function with the goal of you providing 1 or 2 pieces of important data and then our system doing the rest. Our “little red box” may be similar in appearance to other search boxes out there, but believe that the technology behind it is very different. We’ll continue to work to refine the search formula to make it as easy as possible for the customer to find exactly what they need within a few seconds of arriving at our site.

Fourth, we simplified the checkout process. You’ve found what you need and now all you want to do it buy it. Our goal was to use this logic and clean up the checkout process. As we said earlier, we eliminated the product upsell screen during the checkout. It was just an extra click that was not necessary (customers already had all they wanted). We think you will find our checkout is right up there with some of the fastest and easiest on the web.

We could go on and on with more about how we designed this web site, but the bottom line is that we think it is good, and our test groups felt the same. We were so happy to see the high ease of use scores. So, enjoy the shopping experience and always make sure to let us know what you are thinking. We want to hear your ideas and suggestions.

Thank you so much for shopping with us!