e-commerce website - is it easy to navigate?

I was a little bit confused about this site at first because I wasn't sure exactly what it was offering. "Test Country: Making Life Easier" is very vague. After looking around at the products a bit I'm starting to understand more.

The design of the site is very nice. I like the clean, bright look. It fits well with the topic of the site.

I am finding the site very easy to navigate. The left menu is very thorough and you don't have to dig around for products at all. At first I thought the third level drop-down was unnecessary, but it's nice if you want to compare different types of products. The text on that menu is a tad bit hard to read. I would either make the text one size bigger or darken it a bit. You don't want to give people eye strain

The same is true for a few bits of other text on the site. The top menu is very small and closed in - if there was more space between the gradient and the words it might be easier to read. On the Pregnancy Tests page there's a box with a blue header with black text on it - black on blue is almost impossible to read. On that page there is also a header graphic with a lot of text that is a little fuzzy and hard to read - you want to get that into HTML so that not only people but search engines can read it too. That's good juicy SE text. And CSS can make it look just like the graphic.

Now that I browse around some more, I see that all sections have those intro graphic boxes. They look nice, but search engines can't read that text there.

I notice that when I use the top navbar the left navigation changes from page-to-page. This is confusing at first, but I like this navigation a lot better. It is good to provide alternate ways of navigating the site.

The shopping process is a little more confusing. When I clicked add to cart it didn't seem like anything was happening at first, until I noticed that bit in the sidebar. There needs to be better feedback here so the user knows for sure that something happened. It's kind of neat the way it is, but I feel that a more traditional model would be more appropriate. THat scrolling of that box is weird to me too.

I'll checkout now and see how that goes. When I click checkout from the sidebar box, I get a page that only asks me to updte my order. There is no checkout button here! Oh, I better find out how much this is going to cost me to ship. So I go to the shipping information. Oh, there it is in the fine print "No international orders". Gee, thanks for telling me that! (sorry, that's a pet peeve of mine). This is something I used to encounter a lot but I haven't had this problem for years. Some sites do have outrageous shipping costs but most US sites will at least ship to Canada.

Anyway, back to my pretend order - I'm sort of stuck on this checkout page now. The only checkout button is the one I already clicked to get to this page, but I guess I could try that again. Nope, I'm stuck. Can't check out.

So, that's it. Good overall design and navigation, bad checkout process

Edit: Forgot that you asked about the back button - I used it quite a bit and it seemed to work fine for me. The lack of noticeable feedback was more of a problem for me with the AJAX.

It easy to look at your website. Your webdesign is nice and I like it.
About usability. I think tha your site has good usability. But I think that it would be better make javascript meny it the top line menu. But maybe it ids enough.

double
Sorry

I didn't see a proceed to checkout button at all. I'm using Opera 9 on Win XP right now (was on Ubuntu on the weekend when I first tested it).

The add to cart button isn't working on some items (but not all items) today either. It worked for me on Saturday. I just checked a few at random - fertility check stuff didn't work, water tester did.

Actually, I'm testing in IE 6 right now too and it won't add things to the cart either. (tested Mold Testing Kit and Carbon Monoxide Testing Kit). I can't find any items that work in IE6.

In IE 7 everything seems to be okay. I see the checkout button - everything under the update cart bar does not show up at all in Opera.

Honestly, I'm not really all that keen on all this ajaxy stuff. It's kind of annoying even when it works. A conventional shopping cart is much more reliable and easy to use IMO. If you're trying to sell something you can't afford to exclude even a small percentage of your visitors.

Now that I can see the checkout page, this looks a little overly verbose to me. I didn't see the headings in the blue area at first, so it was hard to figure out what those two columns of text meant. MOst people will probably ship to the same address as their billing address, so it would be best to have these in separate sections with a box to check to ship to the same address.

Something should be there to clarify that if you don't have an existing account you should fill out the form below. I don't know what M.I. stands for. (middle initial?)