Is there a venue for critique of cards?  Only positive advise, I hope.

There is no forum for critique as on stock sites. A lot of the problems on the stock sites are technical, that does not apply here. Artistic interpretation is so individual, a critique would be meaningless.

I download the data from the Top Selling categories report into a spreadsheet then do a series of sorts and sums.
http://www.greetingcarduniverse.com/community/topcat.asp
 
Yes, the title of the card is the most important to google.  Read this:
http://www.greetingcarduniverse.com/forum/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1252015904
 
TOM

Quote from Jeff_135713 on Sep 20^th, 2009, 7:23am:

Ah, Jeff ... you gave me a good reason to generate a "seasonality chart" for my store.
http://i34.tinypic.com/2niv7kj.jpg
 
Frankly, this is not exactly what I expected to see!

Hi Jeff,
 
Well the data wouldn't be complete without showing card sales too so I have added that.  It is interesting that the correlation is not as linear as one would think.  My store visits went up 7x over the period Nov08-Mar09 but card sales/day at best only doubled.  
 
Frankly, it seems in my case that my store visits correlate well to how active I am here. I was basically inactive last Oct/Nov and again Mar/July this year.  When I am active I tend to be "Forum chatty" (like right now) and I suspect many of my visits simply come from curious GCU artists stealing a free giggle by visiting my shop.  Also, when I am active I am adding cards so some of the visits are search engine crawlers collecting data even though GCU tries to filter these visits out of the count, some likely get through.  Therefore, I'm not sure my case is representitive.  Hard to really say.
 
http://i33.tinypic.com/24ffrm1.jpg
 

The big focus at GCU is to get GCU cards to show up on page one of Google/Yahoo searches, and ahead of similarly named ecards.  Generally speaking, this has worked well to get people to come to GCU.  Also generally speaking, shoppers will "land" either on a card details page, a category page, or on the BIG category page.  What they do and where they go after arriving at GCU is the next big mystery.
 
Some will click on the first applicable card they see
Some will immediately browse the category that the first card they see is located in
Some will do a GCU wide search
Some will do a GCU in-category search
 
It's my belief that people avoid doing any typing, if they can, since this takes 2 hands, so they will click around on a site before they realize that clicking is not really getting them any closer to what they are looking for.  Clearly if someone wants a golfing birthday card for brother, they will have to type that in at some point.
 
GCUs main focus is to increase visits, thus the focus on card titles and getting page-one Google results.  They have also made on-site navigation and search better, but they haven’t really collected the statistics on how people navigate the site (footsteps) once they arrive before they make a purchase or leave.  That is where a drive to improve conversion rate comes about.  The best sites are able to turn 1 in 5 visits into a sale.  Most do no better than 1 in 20 which is where GCU is I believe.  It takes a lot of effort to improve this rate and there are competing ideas and methods to make improvements.  We artist have suggested many ideas and GCU tries to do what is the best bang for the buck given their own constraints (programming time and expense mainly).  I love it when they do make improvements but fundamentally the site still is stuck in the “view results by popularity or newest” paradigm.  “Smart” shopping sites are more advanced and quickly present more relevant products to shoppers with each subsequent click.  They let shoppers “reduce” what they are exposed to by allowing them to filter-out or filter-in offerings using “more cards like this style” or “cards by artists near you” methods, all to rapidly allow shoppers to not have to wade through 100s of pages of browse or search results sorted mainly by popularity.
 
What I’d like to see is that as the shopper reaches a certain subcategory equivalent level (ie: birthday cards for brother) that a keyword cloud appears on the left just below a highly collapsed category module.  The keyword cloud would be alphabetical but use larger fonts or colors for the most common keywords used by those cards, like “flower,” “golf,” and “sports,” for instance.  Once a shopper clicked one of these words then a whole new set of cards more to the front of the sort.  That would be a huge improvement in getting cards stuck many pages down to finally be seen, clicked, and purchased.  GCU already has this keyword cloud feature in the stores, but if properly applied at a certain point in the shopper’s visit, it could be a pretty effective “bang for the buck” in my opinion.
 
A similar scheme would be to have a checkbox next to a list of top category keywords (rather than a cloud) and allow the shopper to uncheck ones that clearly they don’t want, such as “adult” or “puppy.”  Ideally the displayed cards would autosort with each click, and not required the shopper unclick a bunch of keyword boxes prior to clicking “GO.”