- I understand your point about the drop down boxes and will reconsider them!
- Availability date, where to buy will be updated in due course.
- I also understand that by having a web-presence people may assume that I'm retailing but surely It would be stupid not to have social media accounts in our name?
- Don, too much like a shop? I didn't think it was a too obvious shop format but I guess I do see what you mean. Hopefully all will become clearer when we add a list of clients and 'where to buy' etc. I felt that it wouldn't hurt to have some of the details publicly available now and certainly didn't set out to waste anyone's time!
By the way it is perfectly common for wholesalers to have websites that are exactly what is being described- a shop format without prices and a price-list available upon request. Perhaps the confusion arises from the site looking nice rather than purely functional but imagine how bad it could look being purely functional with just two products. I couldn't bring myself to build a deliberately bad looking website!
OK, this is pretty much a summary of what others and I have come up with, explained one piece at a time...
* Instead of all the sections on the home page, place them on separate pages with a menu of links to reach them. The home page takes a good long while to load in its present state, especially during peak usage hours.
* You already recognize the problem with white text on a light background. Perhaps simple black text would be better? Looks lovely on a light background, after all!
* Make it a little more obvious that you are not retailing the products - that you are wholesalers and will sell to people possessing a retail license. You raise a point about the site's appearance - it does look closer to a retail site than a wholesale site. Most of the wholesale sites I've seen are actually fairly simple and pedestrian in design, because your typical retailer is more concerned with the bottom line than the bells and whistles. Your design is far from pedestrian, but that might not be a good thing in this case. The K.I.S.S. principle applies.
* Instead of breaking all the descriptive text for each product into separate tabbed sections, just make one section, nice and simple. I could understand the separation if we were talking about voluminous descriptions, but they're really short, so why make people jump through hoops to see them?
* You recognized that some of the photos in the gallery are kinda small. Thinking on it now, since you're a wholesaler, is the gallery really necessary? If I'm a retailer looking to buy, I'm going straight to the products, period - I don't have time to waste on anything that doesn't get me straight to the products, 'cause I have my boss breathing down my neck and bitching if I look at YouTube or Amazon! Time really is money - don't waste your clients' time.
* You know you need a clients' list/"where to buy" page. Put a placeholder page there, inviting retailers to be the first to carry your fine products, with contact information (or a contact form) for reaching your company and getting on the waiting list (or at least the mailing list). Request the retailer's license number as a mandatory field, to make it clear to the public that if they aren't a retailer, this form is not for them.
Now that that's out of the way, open this link:
http://www.kardwell.com/index.htmThis is a company based on Long Island, east of New York City, that sells gambling supplies and equipment wholesale and retail. I've purchased from them before - I bought two gross of Streamline decks with the money raised from my first fundraiser to buy cards for the kids I perform for at a hospital in Brooklyn.
It's a perfect example of simple, straight-forward design that's not difficult to figure out, read or navigate - and it's the kind of site a retailer expects to see when buying from a wholesaler online. It's as boring as counting grains of sand on a large beach, to be sure, especially compared with the site you created, but it's also far easier to use. Strip down and simplify your site if you want to be a wholesaler and not a retailer and I think you'll find the retailers who buy from you will appreciate the plain, simple functionality. Function HAS to come BEFORE form, not as an afterthought.