Studio60
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Sep 3, 2014
- Messages
- 3,411
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I have worked on the development of huge web stores for a couple of years and there are a few things that I think could be handled in better ways on the Buddy Store.
I am not going into the whole "product visibility issue" here as that is already being addressed, but want to talk about store categories.
There are 2 primary goals for every web store:
1. Lead the customer to the product of his choice as fast as possible
2. Let the customer buy the product with as few clicks as possible
I am not going into things like upselling here, as the store doesn't even provide that. But my big issue is that we should not force a "wrong" category on a product just to prevent it from being sold to german customers.
The user does not (want to) care about the specific bot a product uses. Products need to be sorted into categories by what they do and not how they have been created.
We have a lot of profiles created for the quest bot that are aimed at grinding, that do dungeon farming and it wouldn't even be hard to do professions with it. The store itself is designed in a way that locks purchases for german users in regards to store categories. This results in an unintuitive category layout with a few categories missing altogether and some products not displayed together even though they do the same, just because they utilize a different bot.
Proposed solution:
This should cover the legal issues as well as improve the store for customers which in turn leads to more sales for all of us. I do have more issues with the store, but I am trying to set things in motion one step at a time and I want to form a new opinion when the current changes are live. Since this specific topic has been shut down many a times I created a dedicated thread now to elaborate my reasoning and to let other developers chime in.
I am not going into the whole "product visibility issue" here as that is already being addressed, but want to talk about store categories.
There are 2 primary goals for every web store:
1. Lead the customer to the product of his choice as fast as possible
2. Let the customer buy the product with as few clicks as possible
I am not going into things like upselling here, as the store doesn't even provide that. But my big issue is that we should not force a "wrong" category on a product just to prevent it from being sold to german customers.
The user does not (want to) care about the specific bot a product uses. Products need to be sorted into categories by what they do and not how they have been created.
We have a lot of profiles created for the quest bot that are aimed at grinding, that do dungeon farming and it wouldn't even be hard to do professions with it. The store itself is designed in a way that locks purchases for german users in regards to store categories. This results in an unintuitive category layout with a few categories missing altogether and some products not displayed together even though they do the same, just because they utilize a different bot.
Proposed solution:
- Come up with a complete list of product-based categories with community developer input
- Change the region lock to being product-based
- Enable/Disable the region lock for existing products based on their current category
- Enable the region lock by default for new products with an active confirmation to disable it
- Make a check of this option a mandatory part of the new 2-step approval system for new products and turn this option to readonly afterwards
- Hide products that german users can't buy completely. It is better to not find a product then to find something you can't have.
This should cover the legal issues as well as improve the store for customers which in turn leads to more sales for all of us. I do have more issues with the store, but I am trying to set things in motion one step at a time and I want to form a new opinion when the current changes are live. Since this specific topic has been shut down many a times I created a dedicated thread now to elaborate my reasoning and to let other developers chime in.