By Paul Lang, Editor, Sell It!
July 18th, 1998

See Also   Egghead.com   Shopirish.com   eToys   CDNow   Dell

Overall
Last February Egghead hit the headlines with the news that they were going to close their remaining 80 bricks-and-mortar stores along with their distribution centre in Sacramento, and switch exclusively to retailing on the Web.

Now obviously you'd expect their Web store to be a best-in-class operation for them to make such a bold step. But the reality is somewhat different. For the Egghead.com store is little more than a database (albeit an extensive one) interfaced to a rather rudimentary set of Web pages.

The search facility is crude, on-line support almost non-existent, and ordering and payment methods are limited.

Construction
The Egghead store uses a simple frame structure with a fixed menu bar running down the left-hand side. Although this ensures consistent navigation it excludes shoppers with browsers that don't support frames. There is no frame-less or text only version available.

The menu bar provides access to a hierarchical menu structure. For example, clicking on "hardware" brings up a list of hardware categories such as "CD Rom Drives" which then leads to a list of orderable products. This structure allows the store to pass then all-important "three- clicks-to-an-order" rule.

Products can also be located by using the site search facility. However, the search engine is very crude and provides the ability to search by keyword only. This results in searches returning a large number of results, many of which are irrelevant. For example searching on the word "modem" returns a list of all products that include the word modem somewhere in their description, including pieces of software such as WinFax Pro and PC's that have a modem built in to them.

Selling
Egghead's attempts at selling themselves or their products are extremely limited.

The front page does carry links to a few selected "hot items" and includes a well-highlighted link to competition. Beyond this, Egghead's selling efforts are restricted to a newsletter that visitors can sign up for in order to receive news of special offers and promotions.

There is no attempt made to explain who Egghead are or indeed, what the benefits of buying from them are. There is also no attempt made to sell the benefits of any of the products – product descriptions are limited to functional details lifted straight from their database.

Order processing
The order processing on the site is also fairly rudimentary.

Orders can only be placed either on-line or by calling a toll-free number. Online orders are supported by a good virtual shopping cart system though, and all transactions are secured via SSL. Payments can only be made by one of four major credit cards.

Orders are only accepted for the delivery to addresses in the US. Frustratingly, the order form doesn't actually tell you this. The only clue is that there is only one country – the US – available for selection on the drop down box on the order form.

Support
If you've read this far, you will not be surprised to learn that the pre and post sales support that Egghead provides is fairly limited.

There is no first-time visitor's section and online support is restricted to one, short help file in the form of a FAQ. In our review of the CDNow store we criticised their help file for being too large – some 11,000 words. Egghead have gone to the other extreme, with their help file being only some 500 words long, which is less than length of this article.

Beyond this, further help is only available by sending an e-mail to a single contact point.

On a more positive note, although the product descriptions are simply a raw dump of fields from Egghead's database, they do provide a significant amount of data to help savvy buyers make their selections. This data though, coupled with a smattering of low-resolution photographs is the only product information available.

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