What happened to the letters on front page?

[muddoctor]

Like the thread title states, what did you do with the letters on the front page that were links to all the stores that start with that letter? I think having the search box for you to type in a particular store is fine and all, but a lot of times I'll search for a store that I can't remember the name of exactly. I think that you have made using this website harder, not easier, by eliminating the letter links.

What is it with all the websites I use to research with lately? They go modifying their website interface and end up making it harder to use the website, such as this bonehead move. Pricewatch also "improved" their website too over the last several months and now it loads slower and gives poorer results and now my favorite website for vendor reliability research has gone and "improved" their interface and made the website harder to use.

Come on, you all, give me my letter links back. The new interface sucks, IMHO.

[Admin RR]

I took it off because it's worthless and frustrating. It looks deceptively simple and easy to use, so people tend to click on one of the browse letters instead of using the search function - but when you have 12,000 stores to sift through, search is more effective than browsing. Click on a letter like "C", and spend the next 15 minutes of your life sifting through 50 pages of stores beginning with the letter C (but you won't see stores like My Computer Store or 1 Computers, in that list). I'd rather people use the search, which does work decently well, rather than get frustrated with our browse function and leave the site.

We use some pretty sophisticated analytics from a company called Omniture to measure the impact that the browse function has on our site. Removing it had a positive impact on the percentage of people that were able to find the store reviews page that they were looking for as well as decreased the number of people that exited ResellerRatings from an intermediary page like the store search/browse.

Expect to see an improved browse feature as well as an improved search feature within the next week or so.

[llll Pissed llll]

Worthless and frustrating????
Is that why people are now complaining thats its gone?
Alphabetical searches were way faster especially if you weren't sure of the spelling of the company's name.
What was the harm of just leaving it in place? And why has it taken you 5 years to realize that its now worthless?
I certainly hope you do improve the present search feature because it sucks.

[Admin RR]

What was the harm of just leaving it in place? And why has it taken you 5 years to realize that its now worthless?

The "harm" is that a high percentage of people were leaving our site because they were not finding what they were looking for with the browse feature. When a website gets nearly 1 Million unique users per month, a few will dislike any changes. But we have to make changes that improve the site as a whole, and our numbers show that removing the browse feature results in moe people finding what they're looking for.

It would probably be helpful if you could be more specific about why you think the search "sucks" - i.e. did you use a specific search term and didn't get good results?

[muddoctor]

OK, here's another reason for leaving an alternate method of looking for a store for you. I just ran into this problem on your website; the freaking search is broken on the search box on the front page!

I just tried typing in "monarch" in the "Find a store" box and searching for it, like you in your all-seeing wisdom thinks should be the only way to look up a store. And the damn thing returned no results. It just produced this page. So I went back to the front page and input "newegg", which should return something since that store probably has the most ratings of all the stores in your database. Again, it brought me to the same page. The only way to actually get to a store's ratings was to search from that page your original search brought you to itself.

And this is why you need to leave and alternate way to search for stores! For when your stupid search feature is broken, like now!

So like old Pissed said, your search sucks!

[nomaxim]

Are you sure you spelled "monarch" correctly?
When I type in "monarch" I get this http://www.resellerratings.com/resel...search=monarch.
Which is the same page that I got a year or two ago.
A search for 'monarch' should give you three returns;

Monarch Computer Systems
Moth Y Monarch Books
Vaultcom (formerly: SupplyTech, MonarchTechnology.com)

EDIT:
What browser are you using, and is it fully updated?

[muddoctor]

Yes, I spelled it right. And the browser is FF 2.0 and should be up to date as automatic updates are enabled in the program. The spelling was the first thing I checked.

And I just tried it with internet exploder 6 on my computer and it does the same thing. It just gives that same page I linked to earlier, where you can do a search that actually will give you some results.

This sucks!

EDIT: And I guess that it would hurt so bad to just leave a line of alphabetical search letters in the whole freaking front page, huh?

[Admin RR]

the freaking search is broken on the search box on the front page!

It broke late last night during a site update and has been fixed.

[Admin RR]

And I guess that it would hurt so bad to just leave a line of alphabetical search letters in the whole freaking front page, huh?

Again, as explained above, when people visit our homepage the A-Z browse bar stands out and appears to be the easiest way to find a store's reviews page. So, if the person is looking for Club Computer for instance, they'll click on C. On page 1, nope, page 2, page 3, page 4, page 5 etc - oh found it. That took about 2 minutes, whereas they could have just searched for the term club computer in about 5 seconds.

There are 12,000 stores in our database and each A-Z browse letter has between 10 and 50 pages of results. It isn't a good way to locate a store. What's more, if you're looking for a store called The Apple Store, but you think it's called Apple Store so you click on "A", you'll never find it, because it's under T. Again, these factors were causing people to abandon our site because they couldn't find the store they were looking for, whereas the search box gets people to where they're going.

Just type the first few letters of the store's name or one word of the store's name in the search box. I guarantee you it will work better and faster than the A-Z bar.

[muddoctor]

Originally Posted by Admin RR

It broke late last night during a site update and has been fixed.

Thank you. I checked it out and it's working again for me.


But this does bring up the point I am making about just deleting the alphabetical list search too. Why not have both searches on the front page, with your new search function as the prominent one like now and then maybe at the bottom of the page, put in the alphabetical search feature? That way, if a site update does break one or other of the search methods, you still have an alternate search method on the front page.

And talking about the alphabetical search and usage of it, if you had a spot to input a certain page number in each letter search, it would make searching much faster that way than just hitting the numbers shown at the top like it was last fixed up with. I don't know how hard something like that would be to implement because I don't know squat about programming, but it would make an alphabetical search much faster, if you would decide to implement both search methods on the front page.

I know I am whining and moaning about this, but I did like the alphabetical search and with the modification I'm talking about it would have speeded searching like that quite a bit.