First of all, I want to give all of you a huge thank you for your responses to the vendor and customer surveys. All in all, I got over 1000 surveys back and most of them contained very thoughtful and intelligent comments in addition to the numerical ranking. I went ahead and chose the two winners of the $10 in Paypal. The vendor survey winner was naturebabyknits, and the customer survey winner was azure 🙂
I have read each and every survey and wanted to share some of the highlights with everyone:
Customer survey highlights:
- First off, the customers were quite clear that overall, each Hyena Cart store is seen as it’s own entity. One store does not reflect on another. As one customer put it “HC reminds me of a mall, they have Dillards and Dollar Tree’s right next to each other, but completely separate.”
- Next, customers were overall having fun with the large number of vendors on the site. Most comments asked for an improved search and a better way to organize the stores so that people could find the items they’re looking for more easily.
- Few people wanted to see a subjective rating system of any kind but many people would like to see feedback integrated with the cart and tied to specific transactions.
- Customers gave high marks for the quality, variety and uniqueness of the products offered at HC.
- Whether or not to limit HC to handmade items was a polarizing question, with many strong feelings towards handmade goods, but the overall number coming out to about 40% against limiting to handmade items and 60% for the limitation.
Vendor survey highlights:
- 40% of vendors were not at all concerned about pricing or quality in other stores, while 60% were somewhat or very concerned
- Most vendors find the cart pretty easy to use, with a slight learning curve.
- I was happy to see that technical support was rated very well, despite my automated reply technique. A few people commented negatively on this, but the overwhelming majority were very positive about the support they receive 🙂
- The overwhelming response for future priorities is advertising.
Based on all this feedback, my top priorities for the next few months will be:
1) Improve HC Multi so that it eventually becomes the only primary (edited: only is a strong word — I won’t force anyone to switch 😉 ) HC cart. Customers really want to be able to check out with multiple items and the cart system is more similar to what they are used to. I will be adding shipping options to HC Multi, as well as choices that have costs and quantities associated with them. Finally, I’ll be adding auction, lottery and BIN capablity to HC Multi’s so they will do everything HC Standard does and more.
2) Re-vamp the HC site, giving it a fresh look and making it more easily navigable by people who aren’t familiar with HC.
3) Improve the search feature so that searches can be limited to titles or tags, certain price ranges, etc.
4) Implement a feedback system per transaction
5) Increase the initial HC sign-up fee to $35 and limit future stores to handmade goods only (neither of these changes will affect current HC stores). I will implement this starting Jan. 1, 2007
6) Make small changes to improve the customer experience including: staying logged in via cookies, being able to change email addresses, maintaining a favorite stores list, being able to purchase without logging in (only for Paypal verified purchases i.e, not auctions, lotteries, or BINs), being able to pay without having a Paypal account.
7) Add a User Agreement and Privacy Statement to the site.
8) Kick off the HC ad campaign
I’m hoping (hoping!) to have much of this complete by the end of January. Some of it may slide into February. I want to finish a good chunk of it before starting the ad campaign, but I guess that’s not 100% necessary.
After that, there’s still a very long to-do list, but these are the things I will be focusing on for the next little while.
Again, thank you so much for your input. It has helped me refocus on HC’s reason for being and it’s future path.