New Bachmann Web Site

[Butler Henderson]

You can instantly narrow down what is shown by using (from the top row on the web page) Products> Bachmann (or Graham Farish)> ...Steam Locomotives (for example). If they introduced a Product range choice before the Era selector at the foot of the page they could then remove the Branchline (or GF) wording from the descriptions. Either way the simple extra option that they could provide would be to sort by description.

Edited March 17, 2018 by Butler Henderson

[cs233]

I'm afraid that's where your analogy fails, as Bachmann clearly isn't "a large organisation of 110,000 staff", which presumably has an IT budget to match.  I doubt that Bachmann's, or indeed any small company's IT budget is anywhere near the same league.  I'm afraid you are doing what many people seem to do these days, which is akin to comparing Amazon with your local corner shop.  It's an argument that simply holds no water.  "Apples and oranges" etc...

 

Agreed the current Bachmann 'temporary' website is rubbish, but hopefully they will sort it out into something a lot better.

 

I have a different take on this for smaller companies every sale matters, every sale is that much more important due to lower volume compared to larger organisations. Lets not forget Bachmann according to companies house is still a 2 million pound business, IT should have enough resource in a company of that value. There should be no reason for a temp site the older one should have been kept until the new environment was ready.

[YesTor]

I have a different take on this for smaller companies every sale matters, every sale is that much more important due to lower volume compared to larger organisations.

 

There should be no reason for a temp site the older one should have been kept until the new environment was ready.

 

A fair point.  I totally agree that the above does indeed seem the most logical/ideal way to go about switching over to a new website.  That said, I know from my own experience that any number of unforeseen things can go wrong when upgrading software of any kind.  Even with the best of intentions, it doesn't always mean that progress moves in the right direction, so perhaps there are other factors involved that we know nothing of, who can say.  ("The best-laid plans of mice and men etc...".) 

 

With regard to affecting sales, sure, even more so if a company is relying on that website for direct business, although in the case of Bachmann they don't handle direct sales to customers via their website anyway.  With all of their range very easily obtainable via many, many retail outlets via a quick Google search, perhaps it isn't quite so catastrophic that their online point-of-contact isn't totally as it should be for a period of time?  I'd imagine like most businesses that they are likely juggling umpteen tasks at any one time, which means prioritising, and maybe, just maybe, with a strong retail presence already in place then perhaps a fully functioning website isn't quite the be-all-and-end all that many presume it to be. 

 

At the end of the day there is a live website and it does show all of the current range.  Agreed, the website is far from great, as someone else pointed out having to click through numerous product pages to find what you want, then having to click back through again when you realize you want to view something else in the same category is damned annoying; but let's hope Bachmann read some of the feedback and maybe take note whilst still designing the final version.

Edited March 17, 2018 by YesTor

[Ozexpatriate]

Lets not forget Bachmann according to companies house is still a 2 million pound business, IT should have enough resource in a company of that value.

It's harder than you might think. I've seen companies with $1,000M revenues with really big IT departments, superfast networks and servers that still have lousy websites.

 

What is important is knowing what functionality is really needed and building that. A £2M business with low margins will have very little money to spare for website design. Any money spent there is a big strategic investment for them and the result should be an improved user experience than what they had before.

[Ozexpatriate]

If they introduced a Product range choice before the Era selector at the foot of the page they could then remove the Branchline (or GF) wording from the descriptions.

The ability to filter is more important than sort. Filtering needs to work on some kind of metadata like tags. Tags would include scale, gauge, era, company, category* etc.With this in place, all is well. 

 

* items like locomotives, coaches, wagons, scenery, track, etc.

[montyburns56]

Something I've just noticed is that it seems that now when supplies of an item are exhausted at Bachmann then they delete the listing for that item instead of marking it as Sold Out like they used to. 

[brushman47544]

On 26/02/2021 at 19:20, montyburns56 said:

Something I've just noticed is that it seems that now when supplies of an item are exhausted at Bachmann then they delete the listing for that item instead of marking it as Sold Out like they used to. 

 

Probably quite sensible. Avoids people asking "If it's sold out, when will you be getting more in stock?"