Okay. Let me just start by saying that your graphics are gorgeous. Don't change a thing with those. Except for suggestion 4 below, but I'll get to that in a moment.
1: Firstly, and most importantly, you have
far too little information for each one of your products. One of the most effective ways at communicating the strengths (lots of these!) and weaknesses (but only a few of these!) of your products is through a write-up, something that your storefront does not have, Unfortunately, this is also a heavily emphasized part of the GE&TAA rating sheet. So, allow quote a short little section from my common storefront suggestions list
(link) that should point you in the right direction.
Cen's Common Storefront Suggestions List wrote:- Do your products have comprehensive write-ups?
For a military storefront, this is the single
most important thing to have. In short, your storefront is doomed to get a terrible rating unless you actually talk about your product in a reasonably comprehensive manner, and have more text than statistics. Take a look at storefronts such as
Wolf Armaments, and notice that it has
way more description of the product that statistics. Now, Common Territories' (WA's owner) write-ups are pretty much the pinnacle of what they should be like. Five to ten sentences can suffice for things such as hand-held weapons, but the length and detail of write-ups should drastically increase along with size (and price). Talk about performance in combat, history, materials, electronics, drive systems (if applicable), etc. Just give your customers a very full description of the product and what it can do. Ideally, someone who has read over your write-up should be able to write a perfectly accurate story involving your product.
If you'd like more than that on the topic of making products accurate and (hopefully) successful, then I wrote a much longer spiel on it
here. This is the most important suggestion for the time being, so I recommend focusing your efforts on write-ups at first.
2: Secondly, while you do give a little bit of information about your company in the opening paragraph of your storefront, I don't feel that it's really enough to grab a potential customer's attention. Again, I'd like to point you towards by list of common suggestions.
Dat List o' Suggestions wrote:- Do you actually talk about your storefront?
One thing that many storefronts lack is ample description of the storefront. This can be anything from a paragraph explaining the history of the company in question to a long biography of the company's Chief Executive Officer. While we do not recommend drowning potential customers in information, allowing customers to get a feel for the company as well as what it sells is imperative to running a successful storefront. A list of common informational sections is below.
- Letter from CEO/Manager/Owner
- History of the company
- Company executives and employees
- Why you should buy from the storefront
- FAQ
- Contact Information
- Eco-friendliness
…et cetera. There are endless possibilities for introductory content for your storefront. Just pick something, go for it, and see what happens!
3: Something that you may want to consider adding to your storefront is an order form. While I know some storefront owners prefer to not have one so as to encourage well-considered formal letters, in many cases it can just compel certain customers to write such things as "Hello we would like to get 100000 rifles for our armed forces! we will pay you in 189 attack elephants, just please deliver them to our capital". Which isn't really what you want. An order form means that there is a definitive minimum amount of information that can be given, so it improves the quality of the baseline order while still allowing customers the option of writing a formal letter.
4: Speaking of formal letters, you may want to do a couple of changes to your formal reply. Firstly, I'd recommend decreasing the size of your letterhead (the logo at the top of each letter) by at least 1/2. Let your words do the talking. Along those lines, you should probably also include more content in your replies, even if it is a cut-and-dried form letter like the one that I used outside of the spoiler above. For my rant on how to do this effectively, click
here.
Okay. Whew! That's all I have for you right now. As I said, the main thing that is keeping your rating down right now is the lack of product write-ups, so just focus your efforts on those and I'm positive you can re-apply for a better rating. Great job so far (especially with those glorious graphics), and good luck with Redseed!