Swanson Vitamins Blog

Website Update: "Yes, We’ve Been Listening!"

 

Special Guest Post by Kerry A., Swanson's Web Guru

I’d hardly call myself a web guru as Ben so mentioned last week in his birthday blog, however, I really am the Supervisor of User Experience for SwansonVitamins.com.  My job is to ensure the best possible experience for each and every visitor that comes to our site.
 

My team spends quite a bit of time listening to customer feedback and incorporating suggestions into improvements to the site.  As a result, you will start seeing many improvements over the next few days, weeks and months.  Along the way, I’d love to hear your feedback as to whether we’ve gotten it right, if we still have minor tweaking or if you love it all!
  

Swanson Vitamins Turns 40: It May Be Our Party... But You Get The Presents

   
Posted by Ben
 

This month marks the 40th Anniversary of Swanson Health Products (aka SwansonVitamins.com). And we’re celebrating 40 years of delivering affordable natural health products, nutritional supplements, organic foods and superior customer service by giving away the cornerstone of our business – the secret to natural health.
 
 
But first, a look back at our roots… If you’re not familiar with the story of Swanson Health Products and its founder, Leland Swanson, you’re missing out on a very interesting and inspirational story. Leland, born to a Swedish immigrant father and American mother, went from small-town ND roots, to the South Pacific to serve his country during WWII, to selling vitamins and other dietary supplements through the mail and launching what has become one of the most successful, family-owned companies in the country.

Get in the Swanson Loop!

You know that confused feeling you get when you’re out of the loop on something? Well, you never have to feel left out with what’s going on at Swanson Health Products. We have several ways you can keep up with the latest happenings at Swanson and the natural health industry.

Swansonvitamins.com Goes Under the Knife; Looking Better than Ever

Cars are overhauled. Roads are repaired. Furniture is refinished. Noses are straightened. And with each of these improvements comes a considerable amount of blood, sweat, tears--and sometimes even pain. Websites are no different. They get upgraded. As many of you well know, swansonvitamins.com recently underwent this type of rejuvenation. Be assured that your shopping experience is destined to be better than ever just as soon as the remaining kinks are smoothed out--promise.

Of all the new features on the site, the revamped item detail pages are perhaps the most obvious. As we've been accumulating many customer ratings and reviews over the months, we knew we'd have to redesign these pages sooner or later in order to help you locate them. When a product contains many ingredients (like SWL001 Longevital), the supplement facts box is unavoidably l-o-n-g. Consequently, the reviews were not readily apparent because shoppers had to scroll beyond the supplement facts box to find them. So we borrowed an idea from our contemporaries, and set up an information box with tabs. Now shoppers can choose what they want to read about first--a description of the product, the details of it such as the supplement facts, or the customer reviews. Down the road, we can easily add tabs if we decide to expand information about a product.

We're also including more payment options to be rolled out within the coming weeks (you requested Paypal!), and streamlined the shopping bag and checkout process to be in line with e-commerce best practices. You'll find the promotion code field in the shopping bag where you've seen it on many other shopping sites, as well as at the top of each page--old habits die hard. The shopping bag tally is visible from any page in the upper right corner. Also, notice the URLs--that long string of numbers, letters, and symbols in the address field on each page. They're shorter--much shorter. Thousands of pages were completely rewritten to enable search engines to crawl them more efficiently; plus, they just look a whole lot better when you cut and paste them into an email or blog.

We truly regret that a few of you have experienced the "stitches and bruises" that resulted from the new upgrade. Just as I imagine those who have had a face lift are hesitant to make their debut in public too early, we were somewhat reluctant to switch over to the new platform. Despite thousands of test orders being placed on the development site, we realized some issues wouldn't be discovered until the site was actually up and running in realtime, and unfortunately, a few of our customers would be impacted. For anyone experiencing this sort of trouble, we tremendously appreciate your patience. MIS and our web marketing staff have already resolved many of the problems you contacted customer care about, and they're diligently working on the rest, even as I blog. My cube is right next to the MIS office so I know this to be true. Even though I smell pizza coming from it every now and then, the techs are still in there conferring with each other and furiously pounding away on their keyboards.

To millions of shoppers, swansonvitamins.com simply looks refreshed, like something's new and different, yet hard to pinpoint. Even though the upgrade appears to be as subtle as Uma Thurman's nose job, the mammoth efforts required behind the scenes to get it there made it a project more on the scale of Joan Rivers' face lifts. And because of this fact, the web team unanimously decided the next time our website goes under the knife, we're definitely notifying friends and family (you!) in advance.  This was major surgery!