Hello, I'm a new customer who has just placed his first order with you. I'd not heard of your business before I started reading the Teatunes blog (http://teatunes.wordpress.com); they mentioned your popcorn tea, which is what I signed up to try. I picked up some other interesting teas too. I thought you'd like some thoughts on the process, in particular the aspects that disappointed me. I'm a professional web developer with an interest in usability. I'm not saying this to brag – just to provide some context for my remarks. Overall, I'm not disappointed or upset – I just think there are some areas that could be easily tweaked to result in a truly remarkable business. It's obvious you all have a lot of passion for what you do, so I hope this feedback is useful to you. So. Here's what I noticed: • Having to register to order. A registration form is known as a barrier in usability parlance; it's something that stands between a user and their goal (to order some tea). The benefit isn't obvious to a user, and it speaks of a deeper commitment which people aren't necessarily willing to make. This one turned me off – I added some items to my basket, clicked 'checkout', got presented with a registration/login page, and closed the browser window with annoyance. It was only a couple of days later that I decided I really wanted to try the popcorn tea that I came back and purchased it. • Not keeping my shopping cart overnight. I actually came back the next day intending to complete my order, but my shopping basket was empty. If I wanted to order, I'd have to find all the products again and re-enter them. Again, this means a user has to have more commitment and spend more time repeating their actions. Chances are they'll just go elsewhere. • The amount of detail needed to register. This morning I finally decided to purchase some tea, and registered with the site. That's a big form to be presented with! Do you really need my mobile number? Really? • Not accepting a valid email address. I signed up to your 'real tea' thing for the free tea, which accepted an email address with a plus in it fine (alex+teapigs@alexpounds.com). But when I tried to register with this address, it told me it was invalid. It's a perfectly valid email address, and should be supported. • Promo code not working as promised. On the teatunes blog I was told that using the promo code 'teatunes' would result in a 20% discount. My order came to about £18 including postage, or about £15 without. I entered the promo code and got a discount of £1.70 – this is not 20%. I can only guess there's some weird pre-VAT discount going on. It's possible that this is an error with teatunes' reporting of your offer, but it was still disappointing. It would also have been nice if I could 'stack' promo codes, so I could get my 20% off and some free tea. It would be OK to limit this to one code per 'class' of offer to prevent abuse (ie. one discount code, one freebie code, one reduced postage code if you offer such things). • Javascript navigation. The links in your left-bar menu aren't proper links. They use Javascript, a web scripting language, to navigate between pages and open/collapse menus. This is a bad move – Javascript isn't supported in all browsers, meaning some users can't navigate your site. More importantly it means that Google can't 'crawl' your site, resulting in lower search engine rankings and fewer customers. It can also affect how your site works in browsers that do support Javascript - I wanted to open a link to a product in a new browser tab, but couldn't because it's not a proper link. These are all things that are easy to fix, but please don't just take my word for it – you can test whether these are problems for your business, and use the results to determine how far you should go with a fix. Here's how I'd test and fix the above: • Don't ask users to register to order. Just take my billing & delivery details, along with an email address to send confirmation messages to. Once an order has been placed, you can offer the user the chance to register (but it should be optional). Make it clear that this saves their details for their next order, meaning they don't have to fill out the forms again, and can give them access to special offers and so on. You can monitor the number of people turned off by the registration form by comparing the number of people who click 'checkout' compared to those who complete their orders. • Extend the timeout on your cookie sessions. I checked the cookies set by your site. Some of them are set to 'end of session', which is probably not what you want (this means they get cleared when the user quits their web browser). It's also likely your web server cleans up old sessions nightly – make sure that it considers old sessions being those which are a month or more in the past. Amazon, for instance, never lets go of your shopping basket, and I know I've spent more money with them because of this. If a user is logged in, you can also store their basket in the database instead of in session data. You shouldn't have to test this one, but you could compare the number of people who don't complete checkout with those who come back soon and don't buy then either. • Make your navigation use real links ( links) and use CSS and Unobtrusive Javascript for enhanced behaviour. Unobtrusive Javascript is a technique that uses something called "progressive enhancement" for behaviour you can't do in pure HTML. This lets people with older browsers and search engines navigate your site, while keeping the enhanced functionality for users that have browsers with javascript. You can find a good article on this here: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/behavioralseparation I hope these pointers help you improve your site. If you're interested in usability, then "Don't make me think" is a great book on the topic. It's short, well-illustrated, and friendly. There's a free chapter online here: http://www.sensible.com/chapter.html . On the small business/being remarkable side, then I can't recommend Seth Godin's writings highly enough. He's written a book called 'Purple Cow' on this topic. There's an excerpt here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT9hGAlt89o , but the main idea is that word-of-mouth advertising is the best way to grow, and the best way to get word-of-mouth is by delighting customers. Seth writes a blog full of small articles around this idea, and the best of it's collected in another book, "Small is the new big". http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/01/how_to_be_remar.html is a good example of his posts. Best wishes, Alex.