Frontgate, the upscale cataloger of gifts and gadgets, rolled out its fall collection on a redesigned Web site (www.frontgate.com). It’s the first time e-shoppers got a chance to see new Frontgate merchandise before it was made available to catalog customers.
However, this expanded commitment to e-commerce doesn’t mean a reduced commitment elsewhere. The point, director of public relations Daniel Lally says, is to serve customers in whatever medium they feel most comfortable.
“Our relationship is not with the catalog, the telephone or the computer terminal,” he adds. “It’s with the customer.”
Nevertheless, the computer terminal is becoming an important part of Frontgate’s business as more people familiarize themselves with e-commerce. The Frontgate customer, Lally maintains, is from a technologically savvy household.
To support the initiative, Frontgate reworked its site to make it “easier to find what [customers are] looking for and to add more useful information for them,” Lally says.
The site is easy to navigate, from the well-designed home page to the shopping cart.
Product pages are clear and laid out for easy viewing. A typical page has six products, each photo about the same size as the others, with brief specs. Click on the product that interests you, and you get another page with a larger picture and a more detailed description, plus links to related products.
Despite having a database limited by the number of products offered, the search function seemed a bit unfocused. While trying to track products by keyword or name worked well enough, browsing by choosing category, price range, brand and “life event” (say, a birthday or anniversary) tended to provide more choices than were useful.
As for the catalog, which reached customers during the week of Sept. 20 – some 10 days after the collection debuted on the Web site – it displayed a reminder on the cover, “Order online: frontgate.com.”
There wasn’t much new about the rest, though, for anyone who’d viewed the e-collection. While the pitch and photography were the same, the page layout was often crowded. No clean, orderly grid here.
Perhaps Frontgate should consider revamping its catalog as well.
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