New Website Features – What Would You Like To See?

The Aidan’s Toy Trove Website Store has progressed a lot in the past year. I’m still not entirely happy with it. I want to move the blog to it’s own page so that it isn’t the landing page but non artistic me can’t design a landing page. We finally have all of our multi quantity Breyers listed to the website. The unique Breyers (ie. Vintage) are listed only to our eBay Store right now. We don’t have any way of synching the website’s inventory with eBay and it’s very tedious to do this manually. Sales have been good enough on eBay that we haven’t felt the need to list vintage Breyer model horses to the website but theoretically we could set some aside for website sales only. However, like everything, this would take time (which I am short on!) Would you be more motivated to purchase from the website than eBay? The prices would be a bit lower because we would save on eBay fees. But the listing exposure would be much lower and the faster horses sell, the more we can list. We literally have 1000s of unlisted Breyer horses and there are some nice ones hiding in boxes too!

We have also been experimenting with Instagram and posting pictures and videos of horses on the shelves that are still waiting to be listed. We are thinking of adding a page for Instagram sales where there is a Purchase button for horses that people are interesting in purchasing and they can checkout directly from the website. Doing this would save me a lot of time as I wouldn’t be doing a full photo shoot and editing all of those photos. The downside is, you would have to see the horses on Instagram and the picture quality wouldn’t be as high as you see on our eBay listings. What do you think? Would you be interested in purchasing lower dollar Breyer horses using this method?

One addition to the website has been a search bar at the bottom of the product page where you can search for Breyer horses by name. Previously, this search function was only available on the landing page. We were completely unaware of this until I tried to search for something myself, ack! One user kindly pointed out that there was no way to register for a new account without going through Checkout. As I don’t buy from myself, I never knew that this was a problem. This has been remedied and you can now create new account directly from My Account at the top of the page. We do not require that you make an account but we recommend it. This way you can see your order history and save your address so that you don’t have to enter it every time. We will also be looking into adding a Shopping Rewards feature of some sort that would be tied to your account. We will not use your account information to send emails unless directly related to your order. We have a separate Aidan’s Toy Trove Newsletter that you can sign up for if you would like to stay on top of the latest news and receive exclusive offers.

The shipping on the website has been completely overhauled and now offers a discount for shipping on most multiple purchases and you can see the cost before you purchase. You can calculate shipping yourself from within the Shopping cart. Be sure to update your zip code or country before clicking Calculate Shipping. You may also see that there are 2 shipping options to choose from when ordering items with a combined weight of more than 4 pounds. The options are Flat Rate and Weight Based shipping. Please choose whichever is the cheapest shipping option for you. Because of the various shipping zones, we can’t automatically choose the cheapest shipping method for you. But you can do it yourself!

One feature that has been asked for is a Wish List. We spent some time exploring various options to add a Wish List Feature to our website. It is definitely something that we can do but it is a paid feature. We will likely be sending out a survey in our Newsletter to see how much interest there is in a Wish List feature. I think it’s a great idea but there would have to be enough interest for us to invest in one for our website 🙂

As you have probably heard, we have been hard at work creating our Aidan’s Toy Trove YouTube Channel. Our current goal is 100 Followers so that we can have our own custom URL that will make linking to YouTube much easier for me. We would eventually like to embed helpful Breyer YouTube videos on a the website but we won’t do this unless we have a big enough following. Again, this is something that would take a lot of time (ie. trial and error) on my part. I guess I really should add the Wish List Feature so that I can add ‘Time’ to mine, LOL!

So, what features would you like to see on our website? How can we make it easier to navigate for you?

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably wondering who the horse at the top of the page is. She is a Breyer Custom Huckleberry Bey by Jennifer Read of Unicorn Farms. She is part of my personal collection and is not for sale 🙂

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