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Every once in a while I gauge the effectiveness of online retail sites by looking for something I need.

Today I tried just this with my sites set specifically on home improvement sites.  The results were far from stellar and, in fact, quite discouraging. 

If you are a brick and mortar retailer that has a website, consider the following situation.  Chances are your customers are just as frustrated with your site as I was with the ones I visited.  This could be costing you sales and, more importantly, customers.

Where I live there are at least four major building centers that have almost every product under the sun.  Whether you want to buy a paint brush or an entire house, these stores are designed to help you.

I have yet to be disappointed when visiting many of these stores as they always have what I want at competitive prices.  Today, rather than going into the stores to compare prices, I attempted to shop online to save time (and hopefully money). What I found concerns me.

As an online marketer, I’m always checking out websites to see how functional they are. However, of the four sites I visited today, three received failing grades.  And the site that passed isn’t actually a building center, but a store that has a great online and offline presence.

My findings may not be the same as yours as I live in Canada. However, I have found similar results with other sites in the past, so I think my findings and recommendations will apply to many sites in general.

The Scenario

I have been doing some minor renovations in my home.  I am in the process of converting a spare bedroom into an office.  As one of the tasks, I had to remove a doorway which is no longer needed and fill it in so that it looks like the rest of the wall around it.

The reason I work with computers is that I am trades challenged.  Even with all the proper tools, making the measurements multiple times and taking my time, I still manage to have a 1/8 inch gap at the top of my patch job where the door used to exist.

No problem, I thought.  I know home improvement stores have textured wallpaper that will cover my construction imperfections and will make the wall look much better than it is now (considering the 40 year old wallpaper of brightly colored flowers).

Rather than hitting every building supply store in the area, I thought I’d visit their websites to see what pricing they have for the wallpaper I want.  I know all the stores in question do carry the wallpaper as I’ve seen it advertised quite recently by all of them, or have seen it in their stores recently while shopping for other products.

So I decided to work my way up from the smaller, neighbourhood stores to the larger building centers.

My first stop was Home Hardware, a large Canadian chain which has been around for years.  In fact, prior to working in this industry I worked for a few different Home Hardware stores, so I know they carry the wallpaper I’m looking for.

My experience with their site was pretty poor, to be blunt.  It was extremely difficult to navigate and when I did find a catalog to view I got kicked out of the site for an expired session even though I’d only looked at one page of the catalog and had only spent at most five minutes on the site.

Technical issues aside, I found the overall usability of the site to be incredibly lacking.  There wasn’t any search feature that I could find and the browsable navigation was sub-par.

My next stop was Rona, also a large Canadian retailer and one whose stores are generally larger than Home Hardware’s. 

My experience at the Rona site was actually worse than the first site.  I tried their site search for “textured wallpaper” and it returned no results.  I then broadened my search by using just “wallpaper” and while I did get results, it was all for tips on how to hang wallpaper, how to prep the walls, how to measure for the amount needed and so on, but no product listings.

I grew frustrated with the search feature after trying a few different queries, so I tried to browse the site to find the product.

As I said, I’m 99% sure this store also has this product.  After all, I seem to remember an entire 100 foot aisle of different types of wallpaper in the store.  Yet, when I did find the “wallpaper” category in their online catalog they only had two products supposedly from my local store.  And neither was the wallpaper I wanted.

By now you can imagine my growing frustration.  There’s really only one other building center to try so I thought “what the heck.” My next visit was to Home Depot.

Many people are familiar with Home Depot.  Where I live it is the largest of the building centers.  If it isn’t in Home Depot then it isn’t found in our area.  I assumed the store must have it, so the website should also have it.

However, as with the previous two examples, the Home Depot site was difficult to navigate and the search feature didn’t work right.

So, of the three sites so far, the first site didn’t have a search feature that I could find, and navigation was clumsy at best.  The search on both the second and third sites was a waste of time in my opinion and the browse feature for both sites was very cumbersome.  In addition, both sites seem to be quite limited in the inventory they show.

The final site I visited wasn’t even a home improvement site, it’s a general purpose site similar to Walmart.  It’s called Canadian Tire and it’s an institution in Canada.  It’s such an establishment here that friends actually meet at the store on Saturdays to socialize and shop (but that’s a topic for another time).

In terms of their website, however, I felt it gets a passing grade all around.  Its search feature is by far the most advanced and user friendly, and the browse works much more effectively than the other sites.

The stakeholders for this site have obviously put a lot of thought into what is needed to make it successful.  In fact, they’ve done such a good job with the site that it seems as if the atmosphere of the store itself is somehow transferred to the site.

In general, I’ve found that I’ve become frustrated with most e-commerce sites, particularly those that belong to brick and mortar businesses.  Its almost as if the stores consider the website as a brochure and not a valid form of commerce.

There are very few retailers I’ve visited online which have come to realize that the website can and should be part of the marketing campaign and not just a line item in the yearly marketing budget.

Really the theme here is similar to an article I recently wrote about Superbowl ads.  In the case of the Superbowl ads, advertisers failed to carry the marketing message from the ads into the website.  In my examples above the stores fail to carry the most basic of services through the website:  customer service.

So, if you are a brick and mortar retailer who also operates an e-commerce site, please heed my advice:  Make sure your site has a functional search feature, is easily browsable and is tied to the store so that if someone is searching they are seeing inventory that actually exists in the store.  If it doesn’t accomplish these basic tasks, you can be sure you are frustrating customers at best and, at worst, losing them to competitors with more effective e-commerce sites.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.