Thanks to the wonderful worldwide web, shopping for specialty items such as body jewelry has become a much simpler task. Before the appearance of ecommerce stores, (such as amazon or eBay) searching for a unique good meant driving around town, often to many different stores only to maybe find the item you desired. Now the search can be in your home while wearing pajamas and your item is only a few keystrokes, a simple click and $7.95 worth of shipping away.

While piercings are becoming increasingly popular, it’s still difficult to find quality jewelry at a reasonable price without going to a tattoo parlor. Thus, I did some “googling” and came across the website, freshtrends.com. Fresh Trends is a website that sells all types of body jewelry for both men and women. I was interested in finding some new dangling belly jewelry and clear retainers for my nose piercing.

Upon arriving on the site, the first glance was clean and pristine. The logo and site name was on top and the navigation bar was underneath. There were highly colorful ads and all of which looked clickable. But with a second glance, I could see the site was going to have its frustrations. The navigation bar listed each type of piercing for which they catered in addition to two puzzling tabs one labeled “gold” and the other “jewelry”. Wait, what? I thought I already was looking at jewelry? And gold? Couldn’t all the piercings come in gold? It seems like a subcategory. I hovered over the “jewelry” label. It consisted of a spew of random links. I assume a very lazy designer probably just couldn’t fit into any of the other categories. Had this “jewelry” button been before “belly rings”, I may have clicked on it out of confusion. I came across similar circumstances throughout my shopping experience. For instance, I really love UV belly jewelry, but they didn’t have an option for it so I decided on “basic” belly button rings. This ended up giving me a lot of randomly place studs. I ended up settling with a site search.

A second mistake I noted was the overwhelming amount of labels and links offered once I left the home page. The sheer amount was dizzying. Just underneath the “Themes” category there are 40 different links, many of which only led to one or two different items. A worse crime was that many of these links were categorized incorrectly. For instance, the category “style” had the underlying labels of “basic belly rings”, “logos”, “belly chains”, “add-a-charm”, “eternity” and so on. “Style” is such a broad term I feel it could stand for anything. Plus, they already have a category labeled, “Type” which to me means almost the same.

So why do these little mistakes make a difference? Think of it this way; a shopper at supermarket is looking for a particular brand of cat food. Their goal is to go directly to the correct aisle, pick it up, throw it in their shopping basket and proceed to the checkout. They don’t want to go down every single aisle in the store or have to ask somebody. If they do, they become frustrated. They may even feel stupid, because they can’t find something as simple as cat food. You can now almost guarantee, this consumer will think twice before coming back for cat food. Just like in a supermarket, people do not want to have to search the site or wander around aimlessly to find what they want. In conclusion, the site isn’t a gem, but neither are any of the other body jewelry sites. People are going to either have to muddle through the site or travel to a tattoo shop.