Online Bathrooms Blog

With many people still unsure about what extra products they may need to accompany their bathroom purchase, at OnlineBathrooms we’re consistently trying to make it more simple to add all the products that you may need, to your cart. Originally done with the ‘Related Items’ tab placed on each product, it came to our attention that only the minority of customers thought to click through the tabs to the related items, resulting in customers only receiving half the number of goods to get started. For example, a bath, would not come with taps or a waste, so what were aiming to do now is, upon placing your product into your shopping cart, a small pop up will identify any products you may need to fully install your bath. For inexperienced home owners wishing to install their new bathroom suite, this information will prove invaluable, and save them having to make a trip to online bathrooms to pick up the £5 part they need, or paying an additional delivery charge for us to send it out to you.

So how will we go about this? Well, over the past week, I have been putting together the suggestion box, which uses CSS and a small amount of JS to grab related items from the database, and allow you to add these to your cart alongside your main product. A screenshot of what we hope to have in the near future is below. Some final design tweaks upon completion will hopefully keep with the current OnlineBathrooms colour scheme and fit in perfectly.

Sneak preview of the awaited pop up suggest!

Also, if you registered within the past week or so, you will have noticed a ‘Where did you hear about us?’ select list on the ‘Create Account‘ page. This allows us to see the effectiveness of the marketing we have in place. So if you intend to register, please be as accurate as possible to put where you heard about us, it would be greatly appreciated! This information will allows us to see which of our marketing, i.e. TV, radio, Google, is the most effective, and will allow us to then see where we can further branch out to get our products to more potential customers!

Another small behind the scenes mod, now allows us to change a customer’s account password on demand. This has given us control over the customers confidential details, without anyone ever laying their eyes on their data. Our encryption secures this, and this new mod lets an administrator change the password, allowing the customer to log in and then change their password in the ‘My Account‘ section to anything they wish!

(If you have forgotten your password, you can change it yourself via the ‘Forgotten Password’ page, or call us on 0800 389 4857 and one of our technical staff will be more than happy to help!)

As I always say, we at OnlineBathrooms are always trying to make the site as functional and easy to use as possible, and its these small changes that all add up to give a memorable OnlineBathrooms experience!

I will begin this blog by first apologising for the post Happy new year, happy new checkout! which states we installed a new checkout at the start of the year, in order to reduce the number of pages you pass to make an order at onlinebathrooms.com. We had to remove the checkout as some data wasn’t being passed through into our sales area. I cannot stress enough, this in no way affected the customers or their orders when this checkout was live. But noticing this small problem we immediately reverted back to the original checkout and orders continued to come in. I have been working on and off to resolve this problem and after thorough testing, testing and more testing, I can now announce that the new checkout is live once again! So to experience our reduced page checkout, visit onlinebathrooms.com, place goods in your cart and follow the on-screen instructions through the checkout process! This new condensed checkout is fully compatible with the Next Day Delivery request, meaning we can process your order with added priority if it is possible to get your goods to you next working day.

I can also announce that that a modification to the search feature on the site has also massively increased the accuracy of your search. A bit of code which removes the ’s’ from a search has increased the number of products which display when typing in a plural search. For example, a search for ‘vanity units’ may list no products, as we have no products called, ‘anico 750 vanity units’. Your search now, for ‘vanity units’ would be the same as a search for ‘vanity unit’, (as in 750 vanity unit!). This will make searching easier and much more intuitive.

Alongside this mod to the search, I have been putting myself in the place of the customer, and searching for products and seeing what result I get to ensure your search gives you exactly what you want! Some of the product searches we log are as vague as ’showers’ or ‘baths’, so we made the search navigate to the relevant category for you to further narrow down your search to a product list of exactly what you want. (Good Eh!).

So head on over to onlinebathrooms.com now, to experience our new, more powerful search and our improved checkout!

You may have noticed the website has changed slightly, again! but don’t worry every change is designed to make the website better to use.

The twitter gadget has gone from the right colomn on most pages, although it still can be found on it own page here. It now has a new appearance which allows you to see the last 5 tweets rather than just the most recent one. In it’s place on the right column there is links to our next day delivery section, top ten products of the week section and information for if you’re having any trouble while on our site (we know it’s highly unlikely of course but best be on the safe side).

Don’t forget you can follow us on Twitter and be the first to be instantly notified of our amazing offers and sales.

Stay Tuned

Weve been working alot on the banners this week as mentioned earlier by Michael. But another thing we have been focussing on, is making the landing pages more defined. This means we can focus more on creating links to these categories, thus giving you a much more accurate result when you search in google. (Or at least that’s what we’re aiming for!) These categories banners have been up over the weekend and are looking great!

Technically there were a few hiccups and typical cross browser compatibility issues, but these have been removed and as far as im aware it’s running perfectly. We can now start working on combinig these banners with more category specific offers, so you can finsd a great deal on exactly what you are looking for.

In terms of technical modifications to the site, this week i have been mainly fixing small errors which crop up without notice, just to keep me on my toes. Alongside this we’re continually looking to advertise around the UK to get our products out to as many people as possible. With a recent listing on hotfrog, more people looking to buy bathrooms outside of the manchester area can see a detailed business card of Online Bathrooms and navigate to the site from there.

I also made some small changes to the account login area of the site. Cleaning up the layout and alligning the input fields so they no longer looked scattered over the page. The small things like this are rarely overlooked at Online Bathrooms, as we know that you want to place your order and get your goods as soon as poissible, and a clean site makes this so much less of a chore, and more of an experience.

So for the best deals, dont forget to
bookmark our homepage, or keep checking the blog as it is constantly updated!

Just a quick update,

You will have undoubtedly noticed the website has acquired some larger banners along the top of the site… two of them to be exact… so now you really can’t miss the most amazing deals with Online Bathrooms.

Here’s one of the new banners on offer at Online Bathrooms:

Click the image to see our Anico white vanity unit (with basin) range at unbelievably low prices

Stay tuned for more offers and updates

At online bathrooms we consistently try to make your shopping experiece as pleasurable, easy and as safe as possible. We also aim to come up with new ways to get accross our massive online and showroom price deductions, and our most recent development is our daily top ten products list. Although not as eye catching as we would like at this moment in time, now that this feature has been implemented, we can display the top ten products as chosen by you. This is a list of the most commonly purchased items updated on a daily basis, so you can keep in touch with the latest trends and design your bathrooms around that.

Click the image to view the latest top ten list

Also brought to our attention was that within the new products section of the site, a full list of products was being displayed, newest first. This gave a result of thousands of products! We decided that we would much rather give you an accurately generated list of new products, placed on the list as they are available to buy or if a product is modified in some way.

Some future improvments of the site will include a recommended products popup upon clicking add to cart, to give you professionally combined products list, sparking ideas on how you could enhance your order wth some extra touches. Perfectly formatted category landing pages will show you exactly which category you are in, and contain offers / promotionms within that category. A tweak to the home page, will generate more space to promote further reductions and offers.

We are also adding new products everyday and will continue to give you the latest Onlinebathrooms news before anyone else, right here.

Stay Tuned.

The snows still thick and the colds still chilly but why not buy a steam cabinet and warm up your shriveled…feet. We have a great range of products here at Online Bathrooms designed to warm up your bathroom experience and relax you in these harsh times.

To keep your bathroom and towels cosy and warm why not check out our radiators/heated towel rails.

This elegant silver Palero Wave radiator is not only beautifully modern but produces a massive 4296Btu/hr (the higher the Btu/hr the quicker and more efficiently it can heat a room & towels) which for only £259.59 is a massive bargain. Also available in Anthracite.

For the ultimate in luxurious and warming bathing, why not treat yourself to a steam and shower cabinet.

This Sierra Luxury Shower Cabinet is packed full of features including: overhead shower slide rail, 6 body jets, a foot massager, radio, lights, integrated seat, mirror and shelf . All for only £853 saving you over £400.

The Trinity Steam Cabinet is putting it simply an offer that cant be missed, for only £999 saving you a massive £1,991 off the RRP, you get all these features: Overhead shower, 4 Multi-way body jets, Steam generator, Hand held shower head, Foot massager, Micro computer with LCD display, Radio and speaker, Blue background light, Seat and towel rail, Safety glass doors, Chrome shelf, Silver frame.

So why not beat the big freeze with Online Bathrooms and don’t forget to check our winter sale for more great offers.

Stay Tuned and Stay warm.

A new start the year, starting with a new checkout page. At onlinebathrooms we have now implemented some changes to our checkout process cutting out some unnecessary pages which drag out the whole process. We want to make this as quick and simple for you as possible, and we will not stop here in making improvements to our site. We are continually looking for possible problems and making the neccesary improvments no matter how big or small. We are still working towards implementing a onepage checkout and feel that this milestone in the development of the new checkout is a good place to put the changes onto the live system.

I would like to also remind you that the next day delivery option is now available on seleted products and will appear on orders which qualify. See the Next Day Delivery section for a full list of products which qualify for next day delivery (Conditions apply).

We are also considering the development of an Oninebathrooms iPhone app, which will keep you in touch with the latest products, blogs and offers at onlinebathrooms. However this is still only currently an idea and any progress on this will definately be blogged.

Much more to come throughout the year and we will of course keep you posted!

From everyone at Online Bathrooms we would like to wish you a happy new year and all the best for 2010 and you can find the best deals of 2010 in our up to 70% off winter sale which is still on. Full bathroom Suites (Bath/Shower, Toilet, Basin & all required taps) starting from as little as £249, Yes only £249 for a complete bathroom.

Click the image to see the great deals in our Winter Sale

Just to let everyone know that the Online Bathrooms showroom is now open on Sundays 11am - 4pm giving you more opportunities to sample the products we sell before you buy.