Shopping experience so slow, losing business

jfriend

I just watched over her shoulder as my wife ordered some pictures from my site to have sent to some relatives. I couldn't believe how slow the shopping cart experience was. I timed a few of the pages and it was typically 40 seconds to respond to a mouse click and go to the next step of the ordering process.

To give you one specific example, she had selected all the photos from a gallery (about 40 pics) and wanted to change them all from gloss to matte. She did that using the bulk change function (apply the settings from picture 1 to all the rest). The site took more than a minute to make that change.

Her comment was that "smugmug is losing lots and lots of business because it's so slow". I concur. People will either goof-up because it's so slow, give up because it's so slow or just never come back because it's so painful.

Is something going to be done to fix this? I would think that once you've finally gotten a customer to the shopping cart, the last thing you want to do there is frustrate them.

--John

Cameron

What time of day(and day of week) did she order them? What kind of internet connection was she using? There do seem to be peak times where things slow down. Of course, ordering over a modem can be quite painful with all of the thumbnail loading, especially if you want to crop things.

If you provide a bit more info about the circumstances in which the order was placed, the smugmug folks will be more able to help out.

jfriend

More info...

CSwinton wrote:

What time of day(and day of week) did she order them? What kind of internet connection was she using? There do seem to be peak times where things slow down. Of course, ordering over a modem can be quite painful with all of the thumbnail loading, especially if you want to crop things.

If you provide a bit more info about the circumstances in which the order was placed, the smugmug folks will be more able to help out.

1:45pm PDT, Wed, 9/14.
DSL connection with measured download speed of 1.3MBps.
No cropping done.
Firefox 1.0.6.
Normal internet browsing fast at the time.

--John

amc

jfriend wrote:

I just watched over her shoulder as my wife ordered some pictures from my site to have sent to some relatives. I couldn't believe how slow the shopping cart experience was. I timed a few of the pages and it was typically 40 seconds to respond to a mouse click and go to the next step of the ordering process.

--John

I posted a similar comment last week, but never got a response from anyone. Over several days, and at different times I tried to order a bunch of 4x6 prints, using a 5+ mbs cable setup. I had pretty much the same experience as your wife. They were all pre-cropped before uploading, but still it was a very lengthy process. I never had any problems with Ofoto, so it's back to them until Smugmug get's straightened out.

jfriend

Sending to help@smugmug.com...

amc wrote:

I posted a similar comment last week, but never got a response from anyone. Over several days, and at different times I tried to order a bunch of 4x6 prints, using a 5+ mbs cable setup. I had pretty much the same experience as your wife. They were all pre-cropped before uploading, but still it was a very lengthy process. I never had any problems with Ofoto, so it's back to them until Smugmug get's straightened out.

Since you didn't get an answer here, I decided to send my feedback/question to help@smugmug.com to see if they will answer there. I'll let you know if I hear anything.

--John

Andy

amc wrote:

I posted a similar comment last week, but never got a response from anyone.

drew,

actually, i responded to you this morning during my first cuppa coffee . i didn't give you a great answer, but i did respond...

i too, emailed this thread and also my experience today with a test 130-print order.