eCommerce Site Analysis: John McCain vs Barack Obama

Posted Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 by Mike Pantoliano, in eCommerce Web Site Design

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions. With the election growing nearer, you may still be undecided. Let me do my part to help you decide. May I present, the John McCain vs. Barack Obama eCommerce Website Analysis. Read on to find out if our US presidential candidates have their eCommerce stores in order.

Before we begin, let’s just get this somewhat critical piece of information out of the way. John McCain does not have an official store. Instead, his website leads to this page, which points to a few for-profit stores. I’ll be taking a look at the first one listed, http://www.johnmccain08store.com. That being said, this is hardly a fair competition (i’m hesitant to even call it a competition), and I recognize the gigantic difference in time/money spent on each site. There isn’t much of a question which site is better, but there are definitely a few things each of them could do better.

The Homepage

Both the official Barack Obama store and the John McCain store have a very unique level of inherent security; they are linked to directly from a major US presidential candidate’s home page. So while neither of the sites feature the standard “VeriSign,” “McAfee Secure,” and/or “GeoTrust” logos, typically a must for increasing shopper confidence on an eCommerce site, we’ll forgive them for this one (though, is it that much work?).

Site Layout

Both the Obama and McCain store do a decent job of laying out their products. With the Obama store, I’m not particularly fond of putting the “Product Categories” section so far down. Typically, we recommend getting as much above the fold as possible, without crowding. This is one area where the McCain store does a bit better. For a window-shopping visitor, the McCain store presents more product images above the fold, which is that many more opportunities to catch the visitor’s interest. There is some unnecessary white space on the Obama store that could be eliminated, which may help a bit as well. Putting the “Product Categories” section up above the fold would be the best move, in my opinion. Also, the dynamic “New Arrivals” section at the time of this writing features mostly high-priced “designer” items. I find it kind of silly that I have to do a bit of searching to find the normally priced clothing. I will say that the tiny images next to each category in the category sidebar is a nice touch.

Category Pages

The John McCain store is disqualified from this section of the analysis, being that they don’t have category pages. From the visitor’s standpoint, I don’t see this being a problem. The store carries so few products, that breaking them up in categories might just create an unnecessary step in the funnel. From the standpoint of the search engine spiders, this is less than ideal, but I’ll touch on that later.

The Obama store category pages feature large product images, refinements, and a call to action for each item. Any changes I’d recommend would be nit-picking.

Product Pages

Eeek. The John McCain product pages are about as simplistic as it gets. They do feature very large images of the products, but the images themselves could use some work (check out the design hanging off this cap). Otherwise the product pages are lacking in upsells/related products. The “add to cart” call to action could also use some sprucing up to grab the attention.

The Obama store product pages do a better job, in that they do feature related products, although the styling of these could use some work. The call to action is nicely styled, but could use a size increase. The wish list and recent history features are a nice touch as well.

SEO Elements

For one reason or another, the John McCain store only has one page indexed in Google. The webmaster may need to submit a sitemap to Google, or make other adjustments. Fixing this should be priority number one. Otherwise, the McCain store should also work on adjusting their page titles. The title tag “ELBusa/Red Elephant - Mccain Store” runs throughout the whole site, which is a big SEO no-no. The site doesn’t appear on the front page for a Google search for “John McCain Hats”. Just adding those three words to the title tag of all of the hats on the site would help immensely. The same goes for their use of H1 tags throughout the site (they don’t use them at all!).

The Obama store does use different page titles, but not nearly as much as they should. The title tags remains static on most of the pages, but it changes on the most important categories, like shirts, buttons, and stickers. This is one of the reasons why a Google search for “Barack Obama buttons” has them at the number one spot.

Google Analytics

Both sites have Google Analytics installed, which is definitely a smart move if they’d like to track visitor patterns. In fact, the candidate’s main pages utilize tracking as well, with Obama sticking with Analytics, and McCain using Omniture. Kudos to the web teams on that one!

The Checkout Process

The John McCain store checkout process has its share of problems. There’s no real way to see the shipping rate until the very last step (they have a link to preview the rate, but it was returning an error when clicked). Product images aren’t viewable once you’re in the cart, making editing pretty difficult. The checkout process of the John McCain store is the Achilles heal. It is here that the lack of assurances and the bare-bones site design could really cause the buyer to step back and say, “Is this legit?” A question you do not want your visitors to be asking themselves.

Unlike the McCain store, the Obama store checkout displays product images, and the shipping rate is visible as well. The whole process on the Obama store takes less steps, which is always highly recommended, though its pretty difficult to find out how to move on from the first step. The “Proceed to Checkout” is below the fine print! The one page checkout is preferred, and the little padlock and text, “Secure checkout by Volusion” is the only assurance found on either of the candidate’s checkout processes (tisk tisk).

Conclusion

Put simply, there is a LOT of room to improve for both stores.

The John McCain store owners should really give us a call to get some of their SEO elements working correctly. Having one page indexed in Google is simply unacceptable, and the site owners are missing out on a ton of sales by not getting this corrected. Being linked to directly from John McCain’s official site is going to bring a ton of traffic, but they could be getting so much more from the search engines. The checkout process would be next on the list of improvements, but first things first ;).

The Barack Obama store could use some of our conversion consulting. The shopping cart is confusing and does little to instill confidence in the buyer. The layout of the products is hardly optimized, and with the amount of items the store sells, this can be a real average order size killer. Additionally, with the abundance of different products, I would recommend the implementation of an internal site search. It would certainly help where a customer is searching for say, a shirt with a particular phrase on it. With purchases from the store directly contributing to Obama’s campaign, any increase in average order size or conversion is an increase in campaign funds.

It may be a little late for changes this time around, but 2012 candidates take note! Give us a call when the time comes, we’ll be happy to help. Maybe we’ll give you a discount for a few .gov backlinks