Being a designer I inevitably get through a lot of pens. In recent years I’ve actually started a little collection and have used many different types of pens to help get my ideas down onto paper.

The website that I use to buy my pens is CultPens, and I really love this site. I thought it would be interesting to try and contextualise why I like this site so much. So today we are going to do the first of many website evaluations to see what they do right and why I decided to purchase from them.

The Homepage

One of the things I liked about cult pens when landing on it was the bulkiness of the elements on the page, the menu instantly stood out and just glancing at it I knew I’d likely find the product I needed.

Apart from the menu CultPens did a few other things that caught my eye, first by highlighting a few social signals such as winning the internet retailing customer award and also having an amazing 9.9/10 Trust Pilot rating. From seeing these 2 awards I felt safe that I was on an authority site when it come to buying pens.

Its amazing what a few badges can do for a companies profile. Trust pilot seems to be a great gauge for an ecommerce stores reliability and customer service. I’ve seen many websites using them. Check out some of their case studies:

• Thrift Books doubles revenue. Take a page from their book.
• CitizenShipper improves conversion rates by increasing consumer confidence.

Below the menu CultPens also highlighted just a few of the many brands they stock. This can help the user quickly know whether they stock a popular brand they could be looking for. This piggy backing off another companies brand appeal can work wonders for bounce rates.

Moving down the page we have various offers which are usually pretty good and then various different options to browse the products.

I personally never even get below the fold on CultPens as the menu is very well designed and well emphasised it’s all I need.

Explore Pages

What I really like about CultPens was that they go to the trouble of trying to inform the visitor every step of the way. Their category descriptions are not bland or generic but full of helpful information and even sometimes a little history about the product. This can help direct users to the correct product.

They also link to their popular and premium models in the descriptions which gives you a good starting point to check out the features of the category.

Filters

Cult Pens has a very comprehensive set of filters that allow you to narrow down exactly what you are looking for. They have just about every criteria you could think of when trying to describe a pen.

Something I also find handy is on the category pages they also show you what colours are available in the pens. Its good to have this key information available on the search pages. We can see other sites such as ebay offering this kind of information too.

Product Pages

For a product page I do feel there’s quite a lot going on in this page. However, the clean white background and well spaced interface makes it feel not so crowded and navigating the page was easy. A few things to point out that I like:

• High quality product photography (it’s only a pen I know, but it still helps sell the product).
• Price is clearly shown as soon as the page loads.
• When selecting different models the images change to show the appropriate product.
• Allow you to buy 1 pen, no minimum order.
• Same day dispatch.
• Show you what other people bought along with the product (similar to Amazon).
• Detailed descriptions.
• Show refills and spare parts to products saving you having to search for them.

Where could they improve?

I think their content marketing could be improved. They could setup a Youtube channel and start reviewing some of their more expensive products. They could also start writing more guides and art based tutorials. For example when I was looking for a brush pen I came across this great article by JetPens that reviewed many brush pens, their site is based in the US so I ended up not purchasing from them but I would have certainly thought about it if they were in the UK.