Anyone else hate the organization of the GlowForge shop?

Everything Else
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So, let’s say one wants to buy ProofGrade materials…and so one navigates to https://shop.glowforge.com/ to go shopping.

Once you get there, the shopping experience is horrible:

You have to go into a subcategory of material. Fine, you probably knew if you wanted plastic or hardwood anyway.

But now, you have to go, one by one, into each and every type of hardwood, or whatever, just to figure out what’s offered. Price/Size, etc. One page at a time…and forget comparisons.

How about a one page table, in each category:
Down the left are the various types of Hardwoods
Across the top is the sizes available
And in the cell, the price for that size which is a link to the purchasing page.

Wow! Shopping just got a LOT easier.

Heck, in each cell, right next to the price, there could be a field for how many you want to buy. Then one click takes all of the numbers from the whole table, and adds them to the cart!

The store right now looks like someone just grabbed the default wordpress shop, and gave no thought to making it easy for the customer.

Tom

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2

It seems like the easiest way to shop right now is just to add one of everything to the shopping cart. You can now see all the options in one place, adjust the quantities, and remove things you don’t want. All on one screen.

I guess that will have to do until the shop is improved.

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Do you have an example of a site you think has done it right? I have no problem with it but I’m open to seeing it better.

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4

yeah, i’m sure there could be something better, but this seems an awful lot like pretty much every other online shopping experience.

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For starters the category page should list the dimensions of the items instead of requiring you to click through.

https://shop.glowforge.com/t/materials-categories/hardwood

Ok, what’s “medium” hardwood? It takes another click to see it is 6"x12"x1/8".

My calipers don’t say “medium” anywhere.

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GroveStranger: That will work as long as they continue to have only one size of each material. I assumed that is planned to change someday.

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I dont like it either. To be fair, my first experience using it was when a bunch of stuff was sold out, and the only way to see what was sold out was to click through, scroll, click back. Lather, rinse, repeat for every item. I suggested they maybe add a sold out indication to the preview picture so you dont have to click through. As well as an option to be notified (or automatically purchase) when an item is back in stock.

Long term, it would be nice if they maybe had a quick shopping feature like a lot of sites have - that lets you preview the item, see the price, select size, and add to cart without clicking to the item page, unless you actually want to.

Being able to see all items and sort them (by size, price, maybe even availabity or rating) would also be cool, but they would probably need more products to make that worthwhile. Like, right now, you can just click the search button, but you don’t get a result of every variation. So sort would be useless right now if it were a feature. Because if I sort by lowest price, I would get the lowest starting price. Which is a different animal entirely and not very helpful for quick comparison shopping.

I have too many feelings about online shopping experiences. I think I may shop online far too much…

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