ExPen has a special case in that his company does a brisk business on the B2B side -- but not enough in the way of B2C e-commerce sales. What to do?

We have recently relaunched our Web site to include an online shop. We are consistently attracting over 200 unique visitors to the site per day and our prices are among the best in the country. We are getting more Web site enquiries than ever on the bulk side. So why are we not selling more units on the retail Web site? I have been involved a lot in the development of the Web site -- any fresh opinion on the site would be great.

So far, other members in the forums have suggested that ExPen tweak his design to appeal more to end-users, rather than B2B shoppers.

User OnlineShopper suggested,

The average shopper who is looking for a drive is very different from a b2b shopper who is looking for 100 drives with company branding to hand out at a tradeshow. The average shopper needs a little more merchandising and pictures. A b2b shopper is just looking for a quality product and volume pricing.

OnlineShopper suggested that ExPen put stock pictures next to each drive on his site.

They also recommended beefing up product listings.

You could also include [...] a little more information about the product. Again, the average shopper needs more info like: 1. How much info can the 32mb hold? 2. If I'm a student who writes papers, should I get the 32mb or the 64mb? 3. Why are your drives better? 4. Maybe a little paragraph telling me.

That is, OnlineShopper suggested that ExPen take more time and Web site copy selling both the product and his Web site, since the audience might not be as familiar with the products as an experienced business e-commerce shopper.

User Steve Windhaus also chimed in on the subject of presentation.

OnlineShopper is absolutely correct. You need more images at your Web site, index page included. I just went to Google and sought sites with the keyword phrases "pen drive" and "pendrive". All of the relevant sites in the top ten listings did a wonderful job of graphically displaying the pen drive and it functioning. Yes, more graphics and less text on your index page. Leave that work to other pages where details are noted. Even then, you want graphics on the spec pages.

Any experiences or further suggestions to share with ExPen? Be sure to stop by the forums and share your thoughts on the subject.

Call for recommendations: basic shopping cart
Meanwhile, new member MatthewStarobin needs help with a shopping cart recommendation.

I realized that what I don't like about shopping cart sites is that 'aisle shopping' feeling. Buy, put in cart, look in cart, go back to aisle, find something else, etc., etc.

I don't want a shopping cart like that! We have a very narrow set of saleable software, and people don't really shop (i.e., by color size, etc.). They read about it, then purchase.

So I'd like a e-commerce solution that basically lets them check off what they want to purchase from this small list. I guess we could write that part of it, or it could be supported by an e-commerce solution. Then I simply want to take that total dollar amount, and do the sales processing.

So I want to do an 'end-around' the whole cart thing, and generate an order in our site, e-mail the order back to our sales department, and then send the order to get authorized. Seems like a fairly simple requirement, but I haven't seen a solution yet.