This week’s micro-ISV volunteer for my Weekly Site Review post is Robin Kohli, founder of Tucson, Arizona-based E-junkie.

E-junkie is a micro-ISV and provides a service to micro-ISVs who want to streamline their ecommerce processing and followup. Specifically, E-junkie sells a shopping cart service that works with a variety of payment processors (PayPal, Google, ClickBank, Authorize.net) without delving into each processor’s API and with a variety of useful features like storage and delivery of electronic products, registration code delivery at the time of purchase, automatic follow up email, shipping/postage/sales tax/VAT calculation, affiliate program discounts and more.

That’s quite a monthful, isn’t it? J We’ll get to that in a moment, but here’s how E-junkie scored out (1 is great, 5 means it really, really needs work):

USP

(The USP – Unique Selling Proposition – is the most important part of your site. It’s your first foot forward, you first impression and the basis for all else on your micro-ISV product’s site rolled into one.)

E-junkie lack of a clear, concise, understandable USP is in my opinion the biggest thing working against it. Here’s what a prospective customer sees when they arrive at E-junkie for the first time:

What’s the USP? “We help you sell online” doesn’t cut it. Someone else saying “since we started to use it, our sales have increased” makes no sense yet – it? What is it?

The USP sets up the story, gives the prospective customer an anchor of understanding what all these features, boxes and stuff mean. For example,

“E-junkie’s advanced ecommerce cart makes it easy for micro and small businesses to start selling in minutes. Unlike other ecommerce cart services, E-junkie doesn’t take your customers away from your web site, doesn’t require a programmer, doesn’t restrict you to one payment vendor and doesn’t run out of features you might need.”

The above is still a bit wordy, but it makes clear what the cart service does, who will get the most out of it and why it’s better – for those micro and small businesses who want to sell now. Orientate. Relate. Differentiate.

The lack of a USP is bad, but there’s something even worse. The eyes in presumably the E-junkie logo. They stare at you. Then they blink. Then they go back to staring at you. Then they blink. I kid you not. They are decidedly creepy after a while – a short while. To say they detract from the marketing message is a gross understatement.

Benefits/Features

This is a mixed bag. On one hand we have this as the main feature:

“We provide you shopping cart and buy now buttons to let you sell downloads and tangible goods on your website, eBay, MySpace, Google Base, Yahoo stores and other websites using PayPal, Google Checkout, Authorize.Net, 2CheckOut and ClickBank.”

Try saying that sentence. Take a biiig breath. Fourteen nouns and a missing article do not make a feature.

On the other hand, there’s Lower your cart abandonment rate with our lightweight, pop-up free, installation free shopping cart that works in your site. Ah, that’s more like it. A benefit – fewer cart abandonment (losing sales, bad thing) – backed up by the features that give plausibility to the benefit: lightweight, popup free, installation free, works in my site. That’s a reasonable argument to advance – it’s not proven yet, but it’s going in the right direction.

My advice is leave the text of the sidebar of benefits alone (although separate it from the podcast box with some sort of headline like “What E-junkie does for you”) and replace the main text with simple a simple to understand narrative. It should connect to and further explain the (missing) USP, restate the big benefits and cover the other benefits of working with E-Junkie like a one charge with no hidden fees.

Visuals

The longer I was on E-junkie’s site, the creepier those staring/blinking eyes became. Logos are worse should be visually pleasant things to look at – and they should not look back at you!

You know what got my attention about this ecommerce cart? The cart demo when I finally found it. Here’s what you see when you add an item in the demo:

Cool. The cart pops up, but you are still on the site and you can pick which company you want to pay for. This I get. A screencast/video of someone buying something at an E-junkie-enabled store versus buying something without the E-junkie cart would powerfully sell this service. In fact, when I went to one of the two actual stores shown on the demo page that I could really see how E-junkie (despite the name) might be a good thing to go with.

Testimonials

E-junkie has a very nice page of happy customers and excellent testimonials – buried on its own page, with the blurb from Damon Williams, PayPal Developer Program overused on each and every page. I count 21 excellent testimonials – they were more informative than the main copy – that are at the bottom of this page. This is like flushing gold down the toilet.

I strongly suggest you get these testimonials to the home page where they belong. Not all 21 at once – either 3 or 4 with a more button, or some sort of gallery. And while you’re doing a gallery, some sort of expando gallery of your clients or self changing display would be good too.

Buying a software application requires X amount of trust, where X equals the number of dollars, euros or pounds you want from me. Wanting to be involved in the process of how I get paid requires a lot more trust. E-junkie needs to first use the testimonials it has better, then go get more (customer videos, audios would work well).

Credibility Markers

The PayPal badge on the home page and the quote (once) are nice, but I’d like to see a Better Business Bureau badge there, or some other third party business endorsement, such as a VeriSign Secured badge. The more, the better. For the same reason, E-junkie needs a phone number, physical address and a link to its privacy policy (which I could not find) on every page.

Tech Support

E-junkie seems to have its heart in the right place, although sentences like this: “please e-mail us at info@e-junkie.com or contact us here and we will help you out.” need some polishing. The big letdown is the help page – its one really long page (19 pagedowns~!) with lots of complicated-looking instructions. This information needs to be restructured so that if you are looking for an answer to a question you will not be overwhelmed by all the other answers to all the other questions available.

If you dig, really dig, you’ll find a forum – either this forum should get the attention it deserves or be put out of its misery.

Blog

There’s something that might be meant as a blog on the Community Tab:

A blog is a web page with categories, an RSS Feed and posts in reverse chronological order, right? Wrong. There is someone home at a blog, this “Community” blog has the lights on, but no one is minding the house. Too strong? Well, check out the bottom of this post and explain why an ecommerce site would want this post on it. And lose the Google ads while you are at it – they make no sense whatsoever on a company-sponsored blog.

Communities are a good, good thing. But they need leadership, attention and above all else moderation.

Overall

Overall, I think E-junkie has a sellable product that people – including micro-ISVs – would benefit by. Certainly, their client list and testimonials are very impressive. But they need to get their USP together, use their testimonials better and clean up some very dusty corners of their site if they want a micro-ISV site worthy of their product.

As a first doable set of steps, see the First Actionable Tasks at the top of this post.

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The Weekly Site Review is a regular feature of MyMicroISV.com. Please add your comments, rebuttals and opinions! If you’d like to volunteer your micro-ISV’s web site for a free public review, please email bobw@safarisoftware.com. Micro-ISV’s only need apply!

Technorati Tags: Micro-ISV, Weekly Site Review

Simply put, so I get emails like this:

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Hey Bob!
Thanks for all your great input. I’ve considered your excellent input and have spend the past couple of weeks concentrating on giving a better user experience:

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The results? Amazing!

- FreeHouse was up running for 3 months and resulted in 34 Ads

- Share-House has been up for 3 days and has 36 Ads

That’s 36 ads in 3 days!

Once again – Your advice has been incredible!

Thanks,
Alfie John
http://www.share-house.com.au/

PS: If you want to do a bit of a plug on your show, I’m having a Linkback Contest

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If you would like to have your micro-ISV site considered for the Weekly Site Review, please email me at bobw@safarisoftware.com.

• Bob Walsh, author of Clear Blogging, on startup blogging do’s/don’ts

This week’s micro-ISV volunteer for my Weekly Site Review post is Sergey Petrov, founder of Russia-based SoftLogica.

SoftLogica has no less than 7 products, but this review is focusing on the one product site Sergey volunteered: HandyRecovery – a small application for recovering deleted Windows files. However, since the other 6 product pages/sites follow the same layout and have the same issues, this is really seven reviews in one!

Here’s how HandyRecovery scored out (1 is great, 5 means it really, really needs work):

USP

(The USP – Unique Selling Proposition – is the most important part of your site. It’s your first foot forward, you first impression and the basis for all else on your micro-ISV product’s site rolled into one.)

There is no USP on this site, only features and features rehashed. The tagline at the very top, “Data Recovery Software. Undelete files. Partition Recovery.”, and the Stumbleupon.com button are cute, but not a USP. Given that there are many, many Windows file recovery apps out there, what does HandyRecovery put forth as its value in a nutshell? Nothing.

Which is a shame. This product has lots going for it:

• It’s Certified for Windows Vista by Microsoft.
• You’ll see what the odds are to recover on a file by file basis.
• You can create a disk image of what you’ve deleted before attempting recovery.
• It’s been around for a while.
• It’s easy to use.

Sergey needs to put forth the HandyRecovery USP. For example, “HandyRecovery gives you the best chance to recover files deleted in Microsoft Vista and older versions of Windows. Unlike other file recovery utilities, HandyRecovery is robust, affordable, easy to use in an emergency and proven.”

People spend money on things they want and things they need; HandyRecovery is in the latter category, and the more compelling the need, the easier it is to sell. But, you have to put the product in terms of that need.

Benefits/Features

Sigh. HandyRecovery overhypes its features and completely misses the boat that these features in and by themselves are little floating bits of information, with nice little graphics, but unconnected to the prospective customer. One third of all pages at the site are surrendered without a fight to the same six features.

Here’s how meaningless features become compelling – or at least positive – benefits.

• Feature: “FAT12/16/32,NTFS and NTFS5 + EFS file systems support.”
• As a Benefit: “Whether you bought your Windows PC last week or last century, HandyRecovery can recover your files. It supports the four most common hard disk formats nearly all Windows PC use: FAT12/16/32,NTFS and NTFS5 + EFS file systems support.”
• Feature: “Option to create disk images for deferred recovery”
• As a Benefit: “Unlike other file recovery applications that demand you stop what you’re doing, HandyRecovery lets you defer recovering files by letting you create a special image file on another logical drive.”

Visuals

Again, missing and presumed lost. If there are screenshots, screencasts, or any images at all of the app, I can’t find them. This is bad. Prospective customers don’t want ugly app on their PC’s, especially on their Vista PCs. You’ve got to pass this sniff test with at least a few visuals; it’s a great opportunity to nail down the sale with a 2 minute screencast.

Here’s what HandyRecovery.com looks like:

On the left, “Key Features”, middle is solid text, right sidebar are download, order and various badges.

Frankly, I hate this layout because:

• About 25 % of the above the fold site is taken up with a meaningless graphic. SoftLogica has a perfectly good – and small – logo in the right sidebar.
• The top left area – the second most important part of the screen – is an out of context sidebar of features.
• The main area is a block of unappealing text, written in unexciting prose.
• The layout is fixed to 800 x 600; this is way out of date.

Testimonials

Wounded and left for dead. At first, I thought there were no testimonials. Then I found one – all 413 words of it – as a link lurking on the Download page. Huh? While one is better than none, burying it two clicks away from the home pages makes very little sense.

The more urgent the need, them more testimonials matter. If you’ve just accidently deleted your manuscript, you are completely freaked out. Seeing on the home page three short testimonials by people just as freaked out as you is a strong inducement to buy.

Credibility Markers

This is the site’s strong point, such as it is. HandyRecovery has badges from Microsoft, Tucows (5 cow rating), and something called Top Ten Reviews. That’s good. But the badges don’t link back to those pages, and that’s bad.

Other self inflicted wounds: No 30 day money back guarantee, yet they take credit cards so there’s one in effect anyway. The web site does have a decent Contact Us page with a physical address and telephone. But it’s missing a privacy policy and it should have one, given there are a number of Privacy Policy Generators out there, including this one.

Tech Support

Could – and should – be a lot better. There’s a minimal bit of online documentation. And there’s free tech support for customers in 2 days and prospective customers in five days. This approach to supporting your current and future customers practically guarantees a shortage of the latter. What message are you sending when you treat people with their credit cards in their hands worse than those who have already bought the product? Further, SoftLogica’s prominently displays their phone number right next to where it says 5 days email support for prospective customers:

I’d recommend working towards 1 business day email support for everyone, and reserving toll free support to registered paid-up customers. Two days is simply too long given the nature of the product and what need it serves.

Blog

None. There are a few white papers if you dig for them, but you should not have to. A blog – covering permissioned testimonials, file management techniques, storage and backup innovations (including some on SoftLogica’s other products) done on TypePad and posted to at least three times a week would do wonders for this product.

Overall

I get the strong feeling that the product and the company are were fitted into the web site template used for SoftLogica’s seven products years ago, much to the detriment of the product and the company. I realize that converting what are 7 different sites to a better layout, one that puts front and center a USP, a clear set of benefits and testimonials when prospective customers need them is a lot of work, but that’s what is called for.

As a first doable set of steps, see the First Actionable Tasks at the top of this post.

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The Weekly Site Review is a regular feature of MyMicroISV.com. Please add your comments, rebuttals and opinions! If you’d like to volunteer your micro-ISV’s web site for a free public review, please email bobw@safarisoftware.com. Micro-ISV’s only need apply!

[tags]Micro-ISV, Weekly Site Review[/tags]