Monthly Archives: August 2014

On display

Being primarily an online store, it’s not often we see our products collected together and on display. Last Saturday proved something of an exception as we presented a stall along with Scottish Fire and Rescue Service at the Glenurquhart Highland Games at Drumnadrochit.

Although we exhibited only a very limited selection of our range which focused especially on our Fire and Rescue Toys, the day was nevertheless a very good reminder of quite how many products there are now in stock at Comaco Toys Direct. Below is a picture of our items ready to go the games with some extra items added!

Comaco Toys Direct

Comaco Toys Direct

Lego Storage Bricks

Need somewhere stylish and convenient to store your Lego pieces? Or just need somewhere to put toys your are permanently tripping over?  Check out these Lego Storage Bricks at Comaco Toys Direct.

They are shaped like bigger versions of the classic Lego brick, with the really big ones having 8 buttons. These measure 50 cm by 25 cm by 18 cm and weigh over 2kg each. They come in a variety of colours with some produced exclusively as a tie-in to this year’s hit Lego Movie.

Check them out now!

On the hunt for a new website provider

I went in a couple of business courses earlier this about improving websites and SEO which I found extremely useful but also a little disconcerting, in that they highlighted how many issues we still wanted to resolve. Our ecommerce website – www.comacodirect.com has now been running for 5 years. At the time our choice of provider seemed an appropriate one but 5 years is a long time… Also if I’m being brutally honest it has never quite delivered the results we had hoped for. The majority of our sales still come via other online sales platforms.

comacotoysdirect

The Comaco Toys website as of early August 2014

So what do want a revamped site to do? Well we need fast download speeds for a start, our current provider is steady but slower than average. We would like the facility to export our listings to other sales platforms, currently this is all done manually and it is a time consuming task! We would like the facility to be able to write meta tags for all pages on the site; we need a responsive design which will adjust for mobiles and ipads; and we want an integrated blog so that this one can be quietly retired.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need to find a provider who will give us the maximum confidence that the site will have improved SEO and better sales will follow. A tall order? Possibly. Obviously the content of the site is ours, but this can only get us so far if the design is not up to spec.

And where do we find this miraculous provider? I don’t know yet. Magento has certainly been mentioned to me more than once and I am hoping to get some further advice through the Highlands and Islands Digital Health Check for businesses, although they haven’t replied to me yet. Clearly though it is something that needs to be up and running by October for the run up to Christmas.

Watch this space!