Hey, Scott. Austin here. This podcast episode has an accompanying video. So if you're listening to the audio version and want to watch the video, go ahead and find the link in the show notes to the video. Now onto the episode.

it's election season. So I thought for this episode we do a little bit of an e-commerce showdown

And we're going to look at the swag sites or merchandise sites for the two presidential campaigns. Compare them side by side. Look at the pros and cons and determine who has the better e-commerce site.

now, before we start looking at the websites, I think it's important for us to think about how different presidential campaigns or any election has in the purpose of their store compared to most Shopify store owners,

in an election web site, the product you're selling in the hat, the t shirt, right? You don't have to go into a lot of detail about the quality of the hat and, you know, the materials and all that kind of stuff, because what people are really buying is the merchandise put on top of it, the name of the candidate or whatever other information about the campaign is on those products.

You also don't have to do a lot of brand building because the brand is the candidate, and people probably know a lot about them. So with that said, let's just, you know, think about that. As we evaluate these websites, they get to do a lot of things that you wouldn't get away with doing in a normal Shopify or e-commerce store.

Now, to get started, I went and looked at the Harris campaign website and the Trump campaign website. And this is a common best practice for every campaign that I've ever seen is their e-commerce store is a different website, right? In the case of the Harris campaign, which is under Kamala harris.com, they're e-commerce store is under store. Kamala harris.com.

And if you're going to have a separate store that makes sense to put under the same domain. And I bring that up because I got confused with the Trump store. So the Trump campaign is under Donald J. Trump.com,

But their e-commerce store is under secure dot win red.com/trump National committee FC forward slash storefront.

So I had to look at it a little bit. And what it is is they're on this e-commerce platform by win Red, which is a Republican red platform. So it's not just the Donald Trump campaign on this e-commerce site. There's other candidates on there. And he each each one gets their own view. It looks like a Trump Vance website when you're looking at it, but it's on this other platform.

It just makes the URLs really confusing. And I bring that up because when I first got here, I'm like, is this really the Trump official website? Because then I did a web search for Trump campaign hat and the top paid response was for the website that I found. Right. The campaign one. The official campaign one. The top organic result is Trump Store, which is another website Trump store.

Com which it looks like the Trump Organization, is doing not the campaign. Right. So this is a personal website, not a campaign website, even though it has campaign products on it. So that's why I say it's a little confusing. If you go back to that search result or the, actual campaign website. The official one, I oh, there it is.

It's, right there. So that's, the count how many organic listings down there it is. It's one, two, three, four. Past the news articles five, six. So it's the six, organic result. And that's a function of a couple things. One is it's on this shared platform which is under a different URL structure. And they may have spun it up less quickly.

So it might not have gotten enough time to get indexed in Google search. But I think that's a big miss when I search for Trump campaign hat. The official campaign website shows up six in the organic listings. Now they were smart enough to put it as the first paid listing, right? They're paying for the ads kind of thing, but they've got to do that to overcome the fact that it's organically not ranking well.

And then both of these websites are not on Shopify, so we're not having a Shopify conversation here. The, Harris website is on BigCommerce.

I'm surprised it's not on Shopify.

I think Shopify would be the right answer for both of these. Election campaigns or any election campaign for that matter. But at least BigCommerce is an established platform that they just did to leverage that platform, from what I can tell.

And I might be wrong in this, but what I can tell, from the win read, it looks like a completely custom built website, which to me would be a lot of expended energy. For what reason? Right. And maybe it's because, well, we're all on this, you know, one big happy platform together. All these different campaigns. But I still think, you know, it would be cheaper and easier and probably a lot more simple to maintain for the election campaigns to have each one have its own separate Shopify store.

And so being on this, this one platform and I don't I don't see the benefits that this platform gives me for each of the campaigns that is on it. All right. So that's the a little bit of background about the technologies that they're using.

So now let's look at the e-commerce websites. And I'm going to start off with the Harris campaign. And I've already looked at both of these websites. So what you're not going to see that they both do. A lot of it's pop ups that are in your face left right and center. You know, donate, sign up and all that kind of stuff, which, you know, totally expected for a campaign, especially a presidential campaign this late in the race.

So I've, you know, gotten rid of all the pop ups for you. So we're just going to look at the websites themselves and in the Harris, campaign, you know, on the homepage, they've got some merchandizing about free shipping on orders over $100. They've also, you know, a little shop now button, and then they're straight into products.

They're seeing what's new, they're showing for new products, and then they got some value props made in America proudly union printed official campaign merchandise. So those are all three good ones. You know, the official campaign merchandise. Anybody can say that. But the fact they're seeing it makes you feel a little more comfortable about it. And of course, in the United States election Made in America sounds like a good thing.

And proud the union printed that seems to make sense with the democratic message that's that's out there this this election season. And then they show more products. And what you'll see in all of these, products, they're doing very little job in merchandizing the products. They've got simple, product photos and they don't you have rich product descriptions.

There's not a lot of lifestyle photography because as I said earlier, a lot of the sales is already done. What they're actually selling is, is the name or the campaign or promoting the campaign versus the actual hat or a mug that you're looking at and you can totally see that they, you know, they have a really easy job in putting their products out there, and merchandizing them compared to most, brands that are doing e-commerce today.

And they got a little donate, widget that shows up on their site a lot and then down in the footer. So at the top there's this dark blue color that's going on. There's another, you know, lighter blue. And that lighter blue just dominates in the footer. And my guess is because it's a campaign, they have to put a bunch of text in the footer.

This one you know it says paid for by the Harris Victory Fund I hope. You know, it's like eight lines of text in the footer. And it's on every single page. It just seems like a lot. Their footer is this huge blue thing with some text in there, but it's just dominating. Where I would want it to be.

Not so dominating. You know, I, I actually like a colored footer most of the time, but most footers aren't this tall. This one is so tall as you're scrolling on a page. And remember our product pages when we get to them, they're light on content. So you quickly get down to the footer and it just dominates. And actually it makes it confusing for your eye to focus on what you should be looking at.

We should be looking at the products, but this footer is just taken over the screen. So let's go back up to the top on on the nav menu and there's there's a link. The first link is taking you back to the campaign website. Remember this is the merchandise website. There's a main campaign website. And then they've got a menu which is a dropdown.

It just says and it just says literally the word menu. And it drops down and it's the shopping link. So at the very least that should say shop not menu. And then it's got a mega menu with four, you know, big buckets, that it puts the, the merchandise in. One is shop, all the next is apparel, the next is collections and then accessories.

And you know the apparel. One is these understand you know, the subcategories under that or T sweatshirts, hats, things like that. Accessories. You know, that's an easy one to understand. Things like lanyards, mugs, buttons and the collections is their their attempt at merchandizing. All right. So they've got a coach's collection, which is actually kind of cute, right.

Because Tim Walls is a coach or was a coach. So they got things that look,

athletic in that collection. So that's kind of cute. But some of them, where was the one I saw? Second gentleman. This collection only has one product in it. And, you know, it's a product of dug from years ago.

Looks like Laguna Beach, on his t shirt because I think it's Southern Californian.

some of these collections are kind of stretching. It is my point. And really not that valuable. Now, one of the collections they have that I really, really like is digital downloads. Right? And the reason I like this is I thought how they were going to use it was pretty slick, but they don't use it the way I thought they would.

So you get the digital downloads collection and there's seven products there that you can digitally download. Fabulous. And they're free, more fabulous. So I would have thought what they would have done here is allowed you to download these for free, but make them make you put in your email address, right? I do this sometimes using the digital download app.

From Shopify, which is a free app. And if you have, you know, digital download products like an e-book or whatever it happens to be, you can make it a product in your Shopify store for free and have to go through the checkout process. So not only do you get their email, but you also get their address information, which I would have thought for a campaign would have been super, super valuable information.

Like, all these people are in a swing state. Let's really, you know, work, you know, work on merchandizing to them or marketing to them about the campaign, not about the products. Or you could at least have an email sign up. So you have to put an email address to get these free products. Now I click on one of these digital products and what happens is click here to download these yard sign.

It's a yard sign you can print out. And I click there to download. And it literally just drops the file in my, you know, downloads folder, which is fine. So now I have that document. But I think they missed an opportunity to collect some email addresses here so that they could merchandise them more about the campaign than about the products that they're selling.

So I would have done that one differently. Now that said, you know, if I was setting up their their campaign, not that I'm a campaign expert, I would have these things maybe available for free to download on the campaign website, where maybe people are looking for, hey, I want to print out a yard sign for for my front yard.

You don't want to get in the way of that, but here on an e-commerce site, I would have made those products that they had to check out with even if they were free to collect that, that information about them. Of course, I don't know how much information campaigns already have. They might know everything about everyone already. Who knows?

So I did I did like the fact that they had digital downloads on the website that you could get for free. I like the idea of the free products. Now let's go into, one of the categories is going to a peril. Now, here in the nav, I can't click on the word apparel I want so you can hear me clicking it.

I have to scroll down one and see all apparel to click on the all apparel. And so here on the collection page it says apparel. And I see my products. They're listed out. But there's zero filters on this page. They're not doing anything to help me understand more about these products or decide which of these products is right for me.

Like there's no filter here for t shirts, there's no filter for color and those kind of things. And there's not a ton of products. There's probably 30 max, 40, probably 30 on there. So you can scroll through it. Easy enough. So it's not that big of a deal, but there's no merchandizing happening, on the collection pages to help you.

And on their collection page, they have a tan background, which is just, you know, a affects the contrast a little bit. I don't I don't see a need for a tan background here. Or if you wanted that for the branding effect, I would have put that in the header instead of in the body of the page, because then what they had to do is they made all of their, images have a background color that matches that tan, and you're probably not going to be able to see it if you're watching the video that I'm doing of this, along with the audio.

But what I can see on my screen is the tan of the image, the background is slightly off from the tan of the background of the page, and they made their image as PNG files, which meant they could have just made those transparent backgrounds did not have this problem. So just a little detail like that about the fit and finish.

I was surprised to see that level of sloppiness in there.

if you can see it right here. This image and that image, you can see there's a darker band between them, which is the background. It's supposed to match, but it doesn't. Because they got their, their, hex codes off on their tan between the images and the background color of the website.

So let's, dive into a product. I'll just pick this long sleeved t shirt here. And this is a Vera Wang. So they're putting a name behind it, you know, a designer. So that's nice trying to, you know, you know, build some prestige behind it. Now, I can see here I have a size chart, so that's nice.

I was actually I'm actually surprised they had a size chart. This is a preorder. So the expected release date is October 1st, 2024. I'm recording this on September 15th. Let's see what happens when I click on preorder. So. Oh that's interesting. I get this pop up okay. You have one item in your cart. What's next? And it shows me the product, the photo and then the description or the, the product title.

Vera Wang heart crewneck long sleeve checkout view card. It doesn't say go to checkout or, you know, proceed to check. It's just check out and the cart. So because the opening line was okay, you have one item in your cart, what's next? I would have thought I would have two options. One proceed to cart, two take me back to buy some more products, and the take me back to buy some more products isn't one of these options.

It's either cart or checkout. And as a store owner, you probably understand the difference between a cart and a checkout. I assume that most average e-commerce customers do not understand the differences between those. So I never, I always when I build a store, I make the cart full page. When you add to cart from the product page, it takes you to the cart page and then on the cart pages or checkout button that takes you into the checkout.

I think that the whole concept of cart and checkout can be confusing for people, so I try to make it as linear and simple as possible. I would never put side by side a view cart and checkout button and I said that never. Maybe I would. I can't think of a scenario where I've ever done that in the past.

It's just, you know, if I'm if I'm moving forward like that, give me, give me one of those options, I'm gonna be two. That will be the same place. So I would have thought the two options would have been shop more and, proceed to cart or proceed to checkout. But let's click on the the View Cart button.

So it says nice. It actually says in the the cart expected release date is October 1st, 2024. So the the reminding me that I'm buying this now, but it's not going to be released for a couple of weeks. So I think they're doing a really good job at that. We can also change, the size and style of the product.

So that's nice. That's probably a built in BigCommerce functionality that they're doing there. And then, so I'm on the cart and I've added one product. They've also got this weird font going on that's like an impact font or something, and it probably is meant to match the the Harris font from their logo, but they, they're using it in the your cart one item and it actually becomes hard to, to, to make it out because it's so tall and impact that and the brackets are really wide that it's hard to differentiate.

There's this, you know, brackets with the word one item in it or the numeral one in item. And it's hard to make it out because the brackets just, it just it's just a bad font. Right. It's not readable as a font. Let's try to communicate. So it's probably a fine font for a logo, but it should not be used in text information like that.

What I like to do when a brand has a really stylized font in their logo is we might use it once in a while as a banner, but we don't use it in the heading. What we'll try to do is find a font that's similar, but a little more readable so that you get that brand consistency, but you also get that, you know, drop dead simple readability that is so important on things.

Now, I mentioned before, they have this tan background going on and most of their text is is a really dark black or maybe really, really dark blue, I'm not sure which. Let's actually look at the color code. The color code is not zero zero black and 0B1836. So it's slightly off, but really, really dark. So the contrast of that and the tan isn't so bad.

Although as I said before, I still would not have the tan background. But now we've got these links on this page for estimated shipping. Add a coupon code, add a gift certificate and that's got a lighter blue. And then when I hover over that lighter blue, the hover effect is even lighter blue. And now I'm starting to have slight contrast issues.

Not huge, but slight contrast issues between the tan background and the lighter blue hover link color that they have. The point being, you know, too many brands and in this case, the campaign is like throwing up color for the sake of branding. And it actually makes the usability and drop dead sinfulness of the site a little less simple.

So, you know, just it's another reason why we should have a white background and not a tan background in the body. And here's a good example. We're talking before about that dominating blue color. I got this dominating blue at the top. This really light bright blue your car at one item. And you know it's you know on my desktop a quarter of the height of the page.

But then the, the footer is 7/8 the height of the page. And that you just want to look at that way more than you want to look at the middle part, which is the content of, your cart, because it's just so bright and dominant. So toning down that footer to not be so dominant, you know, with a gray color or something like that is something I'd recommend because it's just so large and dominating.

Now that was a preorder product. So let's go back and look at another product and throw it in our cart and see what we see there. Let's actually go to one of their, accessories. Let's go to lanyards. There's only one lanyard to choose from that makes the choice easy. Now here it says in the product description American made Union printed order ship within ten days.

That seems like a really long time to process in order. Purchases Donation Nation to Harris Victory Fund. That's all. Fine. Now, I would have had the American made in union print. Should be like graphical icons. Also, just to reinforce that value prop. And then on this product page, it also says donate to elect Kamala Harris, Tim Walz and support Democrats nationwide so you can add a donation to your order.

But here's the thing. This is a a binary on this page. I can just add the product to the cart, or I can add a donation to my cart and, it would have been nice if they did both at the same time, because right now I'm just going to click on the $5 donation and see what it does.

Oh, that just adds it's your cart and it keeps you on the product page. That's not as bad as I thought it was going to be. Thought it's going to take me off of this page. So I'm still on on that product page. It's not as bad. It would have been nice if it was like an option right in the product so that, you know, do you want to add a donation to your order and you select a $15 donation and then you add to cart and it's both actions at the same time.

But it isn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. So I'm not going to critique them too much there. But here I've got this dark blue add to cart button, and when I hover, it's got that lighter blue. We start having that contrast issue again with the tan background. And then also the other thing is I like to make my add to cart buttons a really bright color, usually red unless we're using red in our brand.

Right. And the only thing that gets that color is the add to cart button. So it's drop dead simple on a page. What is the item or what's the action we want you to be taking? If you want to move forward and buy this product and you got your product page, you know the number one action you want to take on that page is to add it to your cart, to try to make that as easy as possible.

What they're using here is the brand dark blue color, which shows up all over the page. So the add to cart button does not stand out on this page. Now the the donate to campaign buttons are red and they do stand out. So they did it there. They just should have done it to the add to cart.

Also. But we're going to add this product to our cart. We get that same pop up that is as useless as the last one was. Now, if I just close it, let's see what happens. It keeps you on the product page. I'm not a fan of that. And now I notice what just happened, I think.

Right, so I'm still on the product page. Remember, I've added two products to my cart, and I see my cart icon in the header and it says zero. It said two a second row. Now it says three. So there's just some technical issue with that, that thing not working properly, but it does show three items because we did add the donation.

So that's the third item. So now we can see the three items in our cart. Now remember on the homepage we saw a promotion for $150 free shipping. I have not seen that promotion since then. And that's not, you know, necessarily a bad thing. You know what I tell stores a lot is we no longer put countdowns on our page on our site saying, oh, you've got $60 in your cart, you know, free shipping at, 150, 90 more dollars and you get free shipping that's been shown to not be effective and actually make people leave.

So let's see what happens if I, add another, you know, a couple products to my cart and get it over that 150 threshold. So this one here will get it over the 150 threshold. So now I'm over $150. I'm going to refresh the page just to make sure there's no. Yeah. So here there's no notification in the cart.

My cart value is 195. So I get free shipping. There's no notification in the cart that I now have free shipping. So like I said, I don't like to count down to say add more to get free shipping. But I do like reaffirming for the customer that they get free shipping when they've reached that threshold that you put in place for that.

So that's another thing you're missing out on. And on this cart page. This is where I would expect to see some more merchandizing, like, hey, you've already added these products to your cart, how about these other products? Or make them the really cheap products like stickers that are that are, you know, more for like if you have $5 stickers or your free digital downloads of that kind of stuff, get people to stay engaged.

So instead of having that pop up that says, what do you want to do next? And you're given the choice of cart and checkout. You could put merchandizing on that, or you could just take them straight to the cart instead, get rid of that pop up, take them straight to the cart, and then in the cart. Merchandise. Your catalogs are more, say, hey, you know, here's some popular stickers that people love, or here's a free download and give them more opportunities to keep participating in your campaign by buying more on this page.

But they're not doing that. So what we're going to do then is we're going to go to the checkout, see what that looks like. So at the top of that is join it. So they get the donate button again. Now in this case I've already donated.

So they don't acknowledge that and they're asking for more. So that could be worded better okay.

Thanks for your donation. Do you want to increase? It would be nice. But they might not have control over that in the, Well, they, they probably do on a BigCommerce checkout, but I'm not sure. I'm not a big commerce expert. Or not show it at all. If they can see that you already have the the donation product in your cart.

And that's all we're going to do for the checkout. I'm not going to go through that because their checkout and I guessing this is done by BigCommerce. And it's, you know, like in Shopify is, you know, a Shopify store owners that you don't get a lot of control over your checkout experience. I'm assuming the same is true in BigCommerce.

I don't know that for sure. But it's really weird because the first thing they want is to give an email address, and then you got to click the continue button, to go and then, you know, see the shipping information, the billing information. So, you know, I like the one page set up of the Shopify checkout now.

Remember, you know, a while ago, and you can still set it in Shopify to be three pages. But then you had to go, you know, put in your information first to see what the shipping was. And now in Shopify, they show that to you all in one page. It's a richer experience because right now, I don't know how much shipping is going to cost me, and I'm not going to put in my email address right now to find that out.

So, it's kind of a kludgy checkout experience there. Which could be done a little more smoothly. Now I'm going to go back out to their website, and I'm just gonna go down to their footer because all they have for links in their footer is about us. So I click on that and it says almost absolutely nothing.

It's got a link to the FAQ, something about shipping returns, and then contact us a couple lines of text about the printer. So the about us is really poorly done. Like if they want to talk about the fact and they do, they say bright blue ink is a union print shop based in Austin, Texas. Show some photos.

You know, if I'm supporting this union shop and the campaign at the same time, you know, double down on that and show it to me kind of thing. Kind of interesting that, the Democrats would pick Texas as the place they print their products, but I don't know. And then the other link in the footer is the FAQ.

Their FAQ has three questions, so not that rich. And that's kind of hard to read the way it's laid out. And interesting. No, they don't have links to a privacy policy. Terms of use. We saw the shipping or shipping returns. Once I click on the FAQ page, I can see links to shipping returns. The policies are really light, so the they're probably not advertising on Google, which surprises me.

I would have not thought that they'd be advertising these products, or promoting them through ads. But to do that, you have to have a privacy policy in terms of use, and they don't have those on this website. And I didn't see it in the, checkout either. So, I wonder how they're getting away with that.

That's interesting. I just clicked on checkout button and I got a pop up. Would you like to add the Harris Walls yard sign to your cart? Click here to add to cart for $20. I like that promo. It's nice. Now I click that and it doesn't show up in my cart. So I had a pop up there going to 20 more dollars for me.

I said yes, and it's not showing up. We refresh the page and make sure it's still not showing up, and it is still not showing up. So it's it's not there. What I wanted to see though, we're going to check out and we wanted to see if.

yeah, there's no terms of use or, privacy policy in the checkout either. I don't know how they get away with not having those on their site. All right, that's enough for Harris walls. Let's move on to the Trump campaign. Which is the official MAGA gear, website here.

So one of things they do is on the homepage of the e-commerce site, right. They got a banner, official merchandise, all products made in the USA. I like that, right? They're saying, hey, this is the official merchandise and our products are made in the USA, just like the the Harris campaign was doing the made in USA thing also.

And normally I wouldn't like it, but in this case I do on all of the collection pages. It has the same banner, so it's super simple, right? And it's consistent. So no matter how you enter the site, if you land on one of these collection pages that they have, like they have this, coalition of women for Trump.

Right? So if out there there's a link to the Buy some Women for Trump, merch takes you to the website, you get that same banner, official merchandise, all products made in the USA. So again, like I said, normally the commerce store, I would not like that for this situation. I think it's really well done. Now I'm on that women for Trump page and I scroll down.

Their footer is unbelievably large. It literally takes over a page and it's all legalese. Now, maybe they're required to have all this legalese. And my guess is, and this is where I got confused, because this thing is powered by wind read whatever that that is that some organization. And I'm not going to go research and but that that wind read platform that they're on, they probably have a set of rules for legalese.

And the campaign probably has a set of rules is my guess. You know, all about, you know, federal campaign finance laws or whatever. But the legal ease on this page is unreal. So it's just really confusing and really distracting. And it's on every single page on the website. So if it's required, it's required, but it's really freaking annoying.

So let's click on one of our women for Trump t shirt products and look at what that product looks like. Really short product description made in USA

100% cotton. Pre shrunk unisex fit. Now it doesn't say in the USA on this page. So I think they're missing out there. They could do that. Have a little icon for it.

Now here we have this bright red button that says select size. And it's got a little arrow indicating that you can, you know, take action on it. But that arrow the contrast between that blue and red is unbelievably bad. It just they look horrible together. Horrible. And it's also got a select quantity button, which is not the normal way that people select quantity.

And by button I mean it's a pull down menu. That is not the normal way that people do quantity. Right. There's plus minus buttons or a text box kind of thing. So by having a different paradigm by which you do something that is going to confuse people. So let's start off with the and then there's an add to cart button which has a plus to it next to it, which is not also a convention.

Right. The convention is like a lock if you're going to have an icon there, but I don't think I've ever seen a plus button in an add to cart button before. Or if I have, I've never noticed it, and it just it doesn't look right to me looking at it right. Normally that's done on like a quick buy or something on a product page.

It doesn't look right now the select size. Remember I said it was in red. Select quantities in blue. Add to cart is a white background and a really really thin line around it. So the add to cart doesn't show up predominantly and I can't click on it right now. So if I try to select quantity, I can't click on that either.

What I have to do first is I have to select my size. So I click on that red button and then I can see my size options small medium large, extra large two XL. What I like to do instead having a dropdown menu for things like size, I can show them. All right. So that way you know, hey, they have extra small without clicking on that button or they have three.

So if that's what you're looking for without clicking on that button. But now I have to click on the button just to see my size options are where you could display them all at the same time if you wanted to. Now, I like the fact that didn't have one selected by default. But I would rather show them all.

So let's just click on medium. And now my medium. My size button shows the word medium instead of size. And the select quantity button is now turned to red. So now I have a red medium button and a red select quantity button. Confusing again. But now now I see what they're doing is red means you can take action on this.

Blue is coming up next. But that was not intuitive at all. I only noticed that after the fact. Now I select quantity. Now once again I have to select quantity from a pull down menu, not the normal way we do it. Let's just select one. And in this case I would defaulted to one by default. But now they're making me select a quantity, which is an extra step in my purchase process.

And now my add to cart button changes from the white background to a light green background. So my red buttons I have two of them, one for size and one for quantity, are way more bright and obvious than my add to cart and my add to cart. When I hover, it gets less obvious. It gives a lighter green, which has a really bad contrast with the words add to cart.

So the usability of this is absolute crap. But it works, right? So it's just the the understanding intuitiveness of it is crap. The actual it actually works, but it's way more steps and clicks in less than two time than it needs to be. But that said, we finally selected our size. We got our quantity. Let's add it to our cart.

So now I get an added to cart thing at the top and it takes me to the continue shopping page. I like that. So they're assuming, hey, people are going to want to buy more than one thing. So they didn't ask me like the Harris one did. Hey, do you want to, you know, what's the next step?

You want to check? Go to cart or checkout here. They're like, oh, you want to keep shopping? Let's go keep shopping kind of thing. But now that I've added something to my cart, it's not just a cart icon at the top that says, you know, one on it, which it does, but it's also got a whole row on my page underneath the header that shows what's in the cart.

That's really well done, actually. And I can view that card I can proceed to check out. I can I can't change my sizes there. But let's move on to another product. Let's go on to this, MAGA 45 camo hat and dude, oh, here's a message on this page. I don't know what was on the other one or not.

Due to high demand, shipping could be delayed. That is a really bad message. Now, I like the fact of the saying, hey, things might be slow, but it's really, imprecise. Shipping could be delayed. It doesn't say it's going to be delayed, but it could be. And it doesn't set an expectation of timeframe of what that means. So in other words, if I buy this, it might ship tomorrow or it might ship, I don't know, 2025 I don't know.

So if you're going to notify people of something causing them concern, I'd want you to like make it more definite. Is it going to be delayed or not? And if so, what does that mean? Like on the Harris one? Remember I made the comment. It said it will ship in ten days, which I was like, that's a really long time to ship.

But at least they're telling you that here they're saying, oh, we're going to suck at shipping and we're going to suck so bad. I can tell you how bad we're going to suck. So I think that's not the best of things. And when we on this one here have the same thing, we have to select our quantity. So there's no size for the hat.

I guess it's one size fits all. But I have to select a quantity. So I have to click a button to drop down the menu. And I have to click the quantity I want. And then I can add to cart. So there's two extra clicks in there which were unnecessary. So now oh interesting. I've got that same promo at the top of my my page underneath the header.

Show me I have two products in my cart and it shows you that I just added the hat. It doesn't show you the, shirt anymore, but it's showing that there is two in the cart. So let's click on that cart page shows both the products. I can remove them. I can't change sizes, I can change quantities. And then from there I can check out and it shows me my shipping at this level, which is nice.

I don't know how it's figuring that out. Must be doing it. Look up to see my my address. And now I go to the proceed to checkout. And this is a weird looking page. So now I'm in the checkout experience right. Remember this is on that win red platform which is probably not an e-commerce expert company. It's my guess, right?

It's not like a Shopify or BigCommerce. So I'm on this, checkout page and I see the two products. I can remove them. And one thing I do in my computer, if you're looking on on the video of this, you'll see that some of this text is is italic, which doesn't make sense. And what I do on my computer is I've set my default text to be italic, and I do that for testing purposes for things like this.

Right. So somewhere they've made a mistake. They either didn't specify a font for this page or they made a mistake. So we're going to see what it is here. So I'm looking at the font settings. I go into inspect code on my Chrome browser and up there it is right there. So they're trying to use the Helvetica new font and that's Helvetica Space new.

And they need to put that in quote marks. It needs to be quote Helvetica space new end quote. And they forgot the quote mark. So therefore we have an error on the font family. And the browser then defaults to the default font at the system level. And that's my italicized thing.

So if I uncheck that setting in my my browser here, what you'll see is the font will show up the way they wanted it to. So it's just, you know, an easy way for me to see that they just made a typo. Or a syntax error in their HTML file. Not a big deal, but it's just, you know, something to notice.

And, you know, not a big deal unless you're running for president of the United States and having millions of dollars go through this platform. But, on this checkout page, they're also doing the upsell for donations, and that's all I can do. So this page looks like it's an interstitial for the campaign contribution. So now I'm going to click on it click on that.

Now I don't know why this is I saw the same thing in the Harris campaign. I didn't mention it. There's on this upsell for the campaigns. Right. It's $5, $10, $20 and 24. Oh, it's 2024. It didn't even make sense to me what that was for. Now I get it. Oh, and now I get the Kamala Harris one.

It was 47 for the 47th president. So they both got these cute little things, which I didn't understand how they were being cute. And so I really thought about it. So it just it's one of those things where. And maybe there's an inside joke thing or an insider's knowledge thing, but anything you do that's going to make people scrunch their head and go, whoa, what is that?

I don't like doing those kind of things. Because it's just confusing and it distracts people from the action you want them to take right now. You want them to contribute to your campaign. And so I'm looking at going to $20 and 24. Why are they doing that? And that's distracting me from thinking about do I want to give $10 or $50 kind of thing?

Now, maybe it's a win where when people, you know, finally gets a light bulb, like I found it at oh 2024, maybe they click on that then kind of thing, but I'm just not a fan of adding anything into the situation. That's going to be confusing to people. You know, it's really hard to do like a sense of humor or be cute.

In on the web, especially in e-commerce, unless you're really, really good at it, avoid it. And then I so I added my $20.24, contribution and they take me to the next page, which, you know, it's actually asking for my, you know, shipping information. And it also is requiring my employer information and it says campaign finance law requires us to collect your employment information.

That's. I didn't realize that. That's interesting. Now I'm wondering, is that true? Because I didn't see the same thing in the, Kamala Harris one. And so take a step back again. I just don't trust this win red thing. Right. Because now what I'm thinking is maybe when red is required to collect this stuff because there's some other kind of entity, they're not actually the campaign, they're a pack or whatever those things are called.

And I just don't trust this website because, you know, it started off with the domain being under secure dot when red.com and some other stuff like this showing up, I'm like, I'm not feeling good about this. I'm, I'm really not sure that this is the Trump website. If I really want to support the Trump campaign, even the fear of icons, if you look up in the browser here, right, the fave icon for this store is different than the Fiat icon for the Trump campaign, where the Harris store and the Harris campaign websites had the same fave icon.

Just those little details give me more confidence about it, right? So that's enough of that checkout process. We're going to go back to the campaign website for Trump here for the e-commerce side of things and show you another thing about trust that I did and was not liking before. So I went down to the footer and you look at the footer links and like I said, there's this big long line of legalese, but there's a terms of Use privacy policy.

Remember I said those are required for advertising. They have them on this site. They don't have them on on the Harris site, but they do have them here. If I click on like there's an about our ads, I'll link. So I click on that and now it takes me to win. Read.com about our ads. And now the the logo says win read.

So now I've changed websites. I was in the footer of the Trump campaign one. And I click on a link in the footer about their policies. And it takes me to another, brand, for lack of a better word, organization campaign, whatever it is. And that's why I just don't trust that website. Now, it probably is totally the legit, Trump campaign website as it's, you know, done under the RNC or something like that.

But it just it just feels weird. So, you know, I would have made the Trump campaign website, its own website, its own domain, and not associated with these other things. But, you know, there might be other reasons why they're doing that. Now, we talked about the product pages here. We didn't talk about the collection in the Nav on the Trump campaign.

So let's do that. Now some of they do a little bit better or a lot a bit better than the Harris campaign. So remember I said the Harris campaign had the menu which said menu. And then all their shopping lists were under that. Right. And the other menu items they had were FAQ search Sign in and Kamala harris.com I'm a big fan in an ecommerce store, flattening out your navigation and all your top level nav links should be shopping links.

And the Trump campaign is doing that. There's all the apparel, accessories, official Trump Vans 2024 Never Surrender and coalitions. So their links are all shopping links. And if I, I have to click on them, there's no hover effect on them. But if I click on apparel I see apparel and t shirt. These are just drop down menus.

There's no mega menu. It is, you know, not sexy at all. But as we talked about before, these these websites are very functional and transactional by the nature of them being campaigns. That's probably okay. But they have, you know, they've given me more choices, more apparent at the top level in the Nav, unlike what they did on the product page, where, you know, I had hit the drop down menus to be able to put in a quantity.

I see more here, and I and I like that. But on their, their pages, you know, they have the same challenge that the Harris campaign does. There's no merchandizing on there. There's no filters, there's no tools are not helping me decide on which products are best. And the Trump campaign has probably two times as many products as the Harris campaign, which means that for them, having some filters would be more useful than even on the Harris campaign.

But their Nav is really simple and straightforward. You know, you get apparel by apparel type accessories, different categories. And then the coalition is just like in the Harris campaign. I think they called it, collections. Yeah, they called it collections in the Trump Pancake campaign. They called coalitions. And I think this is really nice merchandizing. Right.

The coalition are veterans for Trump, students for Trump, women for Trump, gun on for Trump. And, you know, a bunch more of those. So you can find, you know, which group you identify with and, you know, see what's available for you. Like there's a Jewish voices for Trump. So this is everything for Jewish people who are supporting Trump.

All the different swag they get to, you know, have to to show their support. So that's nicely done. And it also makes for probably nice landing pages for people to drive to. So that I think is about it for both of these stores. Both stores are not good e-commerce stores, right. There's a lot of laws in them.

But that's like I said, probably, okay, because of the very transactional nature of what they're trying to do, they're not trying to build an e-commerce brand. Right. They're just trying to get people to buy some swag to support the campaign. And they both had, you know, a lot of the same problems of, you know, not doing a lot of enriching the decision making process, not having a lot of photography once again, that's probably totally okay.

I think the biggest concern I have in both of these stores was on the Trump store. The I'm really not sure this is the official campaign store. I think that is such a huge flaw in the way that it is executed that I feel. So question of, is this the right place to be? That if I was, you know, to judge which store was better, I'd say the Harris store, because it doesn't give me that lack of trust that the Trump store does because of this win red thing that they've got it running on kind of thing.

So that's it for my summary of, Harris versus Trump. Thanks for listening.