The new website enables customers to search for products based on vehicle symptoms, instead of scrolling through a more traditional catalog design. New icons enable visitors to quickly identify problem areas and solutions visually, at a glance. The website redesign was driven by the high volume of calls the company receives daily from customers who are unsure which Bar’s Leaks or Rislone products would provide the best results for their particular vehicle issues.
“We take an insane number of calls every day from customers asking our tech department which product will work best for them,” explains Jeff Ventura, Bar’s Products vice president of digital strategy and new media. “We realized that while we had a full catalog of products on our old website, we had nothing that addressed the context of the problems our customers were having with their cars. So we created a ‘Choose Your Problem Area’ section, and put it front-and-center on the new website. More often than not, our web visitors have fairly urgent problems with their vehicles and they need our help right away.
The new layout lets them easily find our best products for their particular problems by selecting which part of the vehicle they’re having trouble with. They can then narrow their search by choosing the symptoms the vehicle is showing. As a result, with just one or two clicks, we can identify the key products that will best meet a particular customer’s needs.”
The site’s navigation and design also has been optimized to be cleaner and more intuitive, even on mobile devices. Behind the scenes, the company refreshed everything, from aesthetics to navigation, user tools to server response and the ability to handle more concurrent users.
“Nobody should be frustrated by a slow website when standing in front of an auto parts display trying to figure out which product will work best for a car’s problems,” Ventura says.
Bar’s Products also addressed rumors and forum grumblings head-on by adding a “Chemical Additives Myths” page to the site.
“The number one thing we hear from folks every day is a hesitation to trust our chemical products to fix the problem their vehicles are having,” Ventura explains. “We don’t blame them for speaking up. A great many products in this market don’t work, or work very poorly. Like everything else, when a few products in a category don’t perform as claimed, it’s easy to broadly label the entire category as ‘junk.’ We’ve added this section to the site because our chemical products do work, and they’ve been working since 1921.
For more information about Bar’s Products, visit the website at www.barsproducts.com or call (800) 345-6572. You should also follow Bar's Products on Twitter, on Facebook and YouTube and through the blog.
