Minimising front page bounce rate?

The most import area of your website is the top left of the first fold.

Since you have arranged your goods in alphabetical order the first item may be a bit strong for many potential customers.

Over all however I think your site is not as attractive as say lovehoney or natural instinct - but then I'm a woman and those sites are designed to attract women. Given your first item perhaps you are looking at a different market.

I think your site looks very much like a shopping directory and therefore many people may click away because they are looking for a shop.

I was more wondering if adult sites in general dont get more bounces off the front page than traditional sites anyway? All those 15 year olds doing searches for some of your keywords and then running scared when actually seeing photos (or going off because you are a price comparison site rather than hardcore porn)

Your original design to me looked like a store more than a price comparison which wouldnt to me explain why people left off of the first page. I think your redesigned page does more clearly state you are a price comparison site rather than a store/ directory.

Not having ever really been into adult toys (honest) is there a significant market for this comparison site? Having a look through there didnt really appear to be any directly comparable goods (ie the same product at different stores) or sufficient information to cross compare similar goods. The one thing I have always liked about pricerunner over the other comparison sites is that identical items are grouped together with a list of all their retailers and prices.

To be blunt... I think the new page says what you do better, that high bounce rates off the first page is natural for any sex store (or related site) but I would unfortunately question the market size for this service.

I was wondering if you could help me out, we are trying to redesign our front page to minimise the bounce rate. We feel people maybe coming to the front page and seeing the category listings and just thinking “links directory” and leaving rather than thinking “comparison engine”.

Well, the first question shold surely be "what are you doing to bring people to your site?"

It may be that a large percentage of the people who are coming to your site are expecting to find something that isn't there.

Without this information, I think that people who are answering your question are forced to speculate.

And, maybe part of the reason you're not getting a lot of answers to your request is that many people realise they don't have the information to answer the question.

(plus many people in the forum, like me, don't come into the 'techie' forums very often)

Now, if I were to speculate, it wouldn't surprise me if visitors thought your site was a directory as it has a "directory" feel about it.

And my own feeling was that many of the references to price searching actually made it look like price comparison wasn't the key function of the site.

The alternate version doesn't do it for me. I'd suggest some brief and clear copy about the purpose of the site instead.

Having said all this, my advice will be completely meaningless if people come to your site knowing that it's a price comparison site.

Hope this helps (though it probably won't!)

Steve