WCCC's New Website - Sneak Peek!

Cougar Community Classic Cougar Community Discussion
1

Behold! http://www2.cougarpartscatalog.com

This has been a long time coming. For over two years we have been developing our new website in secrecy. Call it Cougar Parts Catalog 2.0 if you want. And at this moment, even though it’s fully functional, it isn’t 100% buttoned up - much like our Cougars, which are never really “finished.” But it’s close enough to completion to unveil it to a select crowd. Some of the features of our new site include:

-Wishlist building
-Save / email your shopping cart for later
-Back-in-stock email notification
-Store your email / credit card / address in a secure account for easier future use
-Vastly improved search function
-Overall looks way better than the old one :thumbup:
-Many more cool features coming in the future!

We have chosen you, the members of CCCF, to be the first audience we announce our new website to, before we unleash it on the general public. Part of our motivation for doing this is because you guys are probably the most active and loyal members of the online Cougar community. Your ongoing interest, participation and feedback are what help us to be better at what we do.

The other big reason for announcing the site early to you is this - we need your HELP!

As with any new website, there are mistakes and errors hidden all over the place. We can’t possibly find them all by ourselves. It could be something as simple as a product description that is missing inline pictures, or it could be a functional problem where the website doesn’t act like it’s supposed to.

So, for any error you report, we will give you an automatic 75% off shipping for your next order. This discount only applies to UPS Ground, and the order must me made through the new website.

To report an error, simply click the small button in the upper-right hand corner that says “Report Error”. You will receive your discount code by email shortly thereafter.

Thanks for your continued support, and we hope you’re as excited about the new website as we are! Your feedback is important to us, even if you think it sucks. :poke:

2

The sneak peak looks good from what I see so far. I like the look graphic wise. iPhone friendly in the search products.
Steven

3

I’m on my iPad here and it looks great here too. Great job.

Now I need to find an error. :buck:

4

Does anyone else besides me feel the the list of prices and discounts on some items looks convoluted and gimmicky? Just sayin…

Retail:$15.00
Was: $11.85
Sale: $9.85
10% Web Discount:
-$0.98
(applied at checkout)

Your Price:
$8.87

5

That’s going to cost you when Dawg sees it. :buck:

The pricing does look a little busy. I didn’t really mind it though.

6

I do all my reading of this site on my iPhone, using the Tapatalk app. Clicked the link and it launched the site and it described itself as the mobile version which is a great start.

I LOVE the concept behind this as described on that home page, not just to sell parts but also as a document of every part that appeared on the cars, a library sort of resource? Brilliant! Love it!

Then some thoughts on the rest of the home page…

The “My Account. Shipping Information” etc links near the bottom of the home screen are far too small of a font size. I could not at all read any of the words when zoomed to the default zoom of the page. I had to zoom way in to read the words and understand those were links to sections of the website.

There’s no button to report that. :slight_smile:

Also where you list all the years of cars, “your 1967, 1968 … 1972, 1973 Cougar”, you could probably stand to add an “or” or maybe an “and/or” before the 1973. I don’t know that it’s entirely necessary, but it just felt a bit wrong to read a list of items without an “and” or “or” or “and/or” before the last one.

I’ve never bought anything from WCCC on my iPhone, always moved over to an actual PC for that. I’m gonna go see if I can figure out how to buy a horn using my iPhone. Wish me luck.

7

Nice work Andrew,… I do like the new site pages, more legit and serious layout, richer colors…not so cartoonish. Part photos seem larger and clearer,…easier to see fine details. Sub category titles could have a little larger font, so they are not being overwhelmed by the darker boarders. Looks very nice. When’s the launch date?

8

Looks great. Very easy to use, and I like the prices listed as they are; makes it very clear what you actually get the part for.
Since I do all my online work using my PC (laptop and desktop), the links all show up fine and are where I’d expect to find them.
Excellent work … I work for a company that does website design and this looks as good as we’d be able to do for $$$$.

One suggestion:
The Newest Items selection could also made to be a link to a complete list of these items. As it is now, you have to page through the entire list to see them individually and if the list is long, I’d likely give up paging through it entirely.

Otherwise, I like it.

9

Well, I couldn’t find any button to report an error, so maybe that’s finding an error in itself? Or maybe there isn’t supposed to be one on the mobile version of the site? Well, there should be one! I went to check out the passenger side mirror for my 68, and here’s what the page looks like:

You can see text on top of images, and up in the top right area a hint of black text that’s totally invisible due to being on top of a black image.

To be clear, this isn’t just me zooming in weird and the screen scaling text and images in a weird way. Whether I zoom in or out or whatnot, it always looks the same as far as orientation and overlap. There’s no way to make it look right.

Where’s my prize? :slight_smile:

10

I was playing around with the wishlist feature and a text box would appear out next to items I’d add. I played around with it but couldn’t get it to do anything. Checked to see if it was a memo box, but it never would record. I probably just haven’t figured it out yet. Because after searching through parts like rubber grommets and not finding any noticeable mistake, it appears you guys have it together!

Screenshot of what I’m talking about:

11

Are there any plans to have links to our wish lists that can be given to others so they can access them for gift purchases? My family is always asking me what I want (birthday, holidays).

12

I love the wish list… once finding something just toss it in there. and you don’t have to search again… I have already added to it! i did notice that if an item is out of stock you can’t add it to a wish list. You can request an email notice when it’s back in stock but I personally would like a way to toss it in a wish list also.

13

I think the site looks professional and well done. Great work!

14

I also had some problems getting the wish list to work but I think I figured it out. I think it might be the option for multiple wish lists that is complicating it for me. Overall, it looks great. Fantastic job, guys!

15

This is all great stuff guys, thanks for the feedback and suggestions. We will start working on these issues.

One thing that we wanted to do was have the “move to wishlist” button in list view underneath the “add to cart” button, so you wouldn’t have to go into each individual product page just to add it to your wishlist. Unfortunately the template doesn’t let us put the wishlist button in list view. There are some limitations as far as what we can and can’t customize.

About being able to share wishlists - I’m pretty sure you can do that, but I haven’t personally played with it enough yet. From messing with it a little, I see what you guys mean about it being a little confusing to use. Anyway, I know you can email your shopping cart, so maybe that’s a way you could send someone your wish list - after you have the list filled with everything you want, you can move all the items to your cart and then email your cart to whoever.

I agree about the sub-categories being a little harder to see / less intuitive. On our old site they have icon pictures, but unfortunately with this template we can’t do that either. Maybe increasing the font size slightly would help.

As far as the issues with the mobile version, I’m not sure what’s going on there. We’ll look into it.

The guy who gets 99% of the credit for making this new website a reality is our IT guy Joshua. He takes care of all the technical mumbo jumbo that the rest of us have no clue about. It’s been much harder than you might think to get some 14,000 products transferred over from a different system and keep them intact. A big hurdle was separating out items with options (drop-down menus where you would choose a color / size / etc) into separate listings. Just take a look at the leaf springs section! There are over 800 different listings for leaf springs! All I can personally take credit for is the graphics, a fair amount of the photos (can you tell I still have a ton of work to do?), and giving feedback for aesthetic “tweaks” to make things look better. Having said that, the informational content on the site has been a huge collaborative undertaking for all of us.

Keep playing around with it and let us know what else you find!

16

Doing a great job… One thing… I don’t see the 75% off link anywhere!!!

17

You need to report the problem through the website in order to get the code. In the upper-right corner on the white bar next to “Cart Summary” and “Login” there is a tiny button that says “Report Error”

A word about accounts - most of you probably already have an account on the new site and you don’t even know it. If you’re bought anything from us in the last couple of years, we’ve imported your information. Go to the Login interface and read the instructions.

18

Okay, we’ve worked on the mobile template a bit. For you guys using tablets, smartphones, etc - check it out again and see if it works better! Also added a ‘report error’ button to the mobile version.