Japanese Knives New Website Launching Today

We are in the process of launching a new website for Japanese Knife Imports today... at some point today, our current website will go down for a bit, and the new website will officially launch. Please bear with us through any hiccups that may occur. We hope you enjoy the much easier to use new website when it is ready later today.

You can test your shipping functions out on my address - I'll send back any really cool knives you accidentally send my way by accident - eventually lol.

good luck, looking forward to the new website (my wallet isn't).

The new website is up and running... hope you guys enjoy it
http://www.japaneseknifeimports.com/

(if its not working for you, try clearing your cache and reloading)

Yeah, it is working ! Congrats, Jon.

A lot of tea, for a knife shop.

haha... its really good tea though

For what its worth, international customers can order directly on our website now with significantly discounted DHL rates Give the rate quote calculator a shot (on the cart page)

by the way, let me know if any of you have trouble with anything on the site... there may be a few kinks to work out, but i think we've done a lot of testing this time. Reviews should be up on the site early next week... it took a bit longer to integrate that part than we expected.

Meh, Kochi still shows as sold out


:biggrin:

Haha... Soon though

The site looks good, much improved browsing experience on mobile devices. Odd question what is the shelf life on the tea? Not so much when it goes bad, but more of when it would be past its peak potential... You know how they list coffee as 1 year, but really it's best within two weeks of roasting.

They are vacuum sealed, so they last a very long time. Obviously fresher is better, and once opened, you want to consume as quickly as you can. I will ask them for more specifics though. The brown sugar one is crazy good... Not sweet at all oddly.

FYI, link to new site does not work for me. Tried with Firefox & IE.

Cleared DNS Cache via ipconfig/flushdns & received correct system msg

Also ran CCleaner

then restarted pc & tried again site still won't come up

Open Internet Explorer.
IE 8: From the Tools menu choose Internet Options.
IE 9: In the upper right corner, click the small gear icon (to the right of the star icon) and choose Internet Options
On the General tab, under Browsing history, click Delete.
Un-check the Preserve Favorites website data box.
Check the Temporary Internet files, Cookies, and History boxes.
The Form data, Passwords, and inPrivate Filtering data boxes may be left un-checked. You can check them to delete this data if you so choose.
Click Delete.
When finished, click OK to return to your Internet Explorer window.
Close the Internet Explorer window and reopen.

DSChief said:

FYI, link to new site does not work for me. Tried with Firefox & IE.

Cleared DNS Cache via ipconfig/flushdns & received correct system msg

Also ran CCleaner

then restarted pc & tried again site still won't come up

Click to expand...

it will take a little time for DNS to fully propagate... by tomorrow, everyone should be seeing the site easily

I just put together a blog post on many of the new features and improvements we've added with this new website... check out the post here:
http://www.japaneseknifeimports.com/blogs/news/69573317-welcome-to-our-new-website

Damn nice work Jon! Really love the new browsing experience and how much smoother things animate and respond. I've always felt that your site didn't do your product enough justice (quality high end knives sold on an outmoded and awkward platform), so the change is a tremendous upgrade.

Two things struck me as off though, or at least a little weird for the new design:

1. The giant red bar at the header for announcements is barbaric. Like, 1995 AngelFire "Site Under Construction" barbaric. It immediately throws a red flag into the user experience: even if the content is something benign, the initial impact of a jarring red flag on a black background is "something went wrong." You don't want your customers first impression of your site to be "something went wrong." If you're dead set on keeping it as is, consider throwing a "close" link into the frame so we can hide the warning announcement after reading it.

2. Shortly after scrolling past the red bar of impending doom, a popup implored me to sign up for a newsletter. You effectively jammed something annoying between me and my view of your product, right as I started looking at it. That's the website equivalent of jumping between a walk-in customer and a display case the minute they enter the store, and asking for their email address. It's awkward to think about IRL, and just as awkward in a web platform. Let your users explore before giving them warnings and trying to get their email.

Just my two nitpicky cents though, and despite those little quibbles the site is both aesthetically and functionally awesome.

thanks

because we often use the header bar for notifications we need people to really pay attention to, we decided to make it red. We announce holiday closures and other important things there. People often miss it, but the red seems to attract more attention than other colors. I'll look into an option to close it after viewing though... or maybe changing the color when its not something serious (like a holiday closure)

On the newsletter thing, i'm not sure why its popping up... i have it set to off in the settings, but i guess i'll just have to wait until my web developer is back from vacation on monday... in the meantime, i set the time for re-notification after closing it to 1 year, so it shouldnt bug you again for a long time. Anyways, we're working on getting it disabled as soon as we can.

Thanks again for the feedback.

-jon

@sousvideloca what do you think of the header color now?

JBroida said:

@sousvideloca what do you think of the header color now?

Click to expand...

Perfect! It's distinct and different enough to draw attention, without sending off our innate "red light means stop" alarm. And like you said, being able to change it for really important announcements is always an option.

yeah... i think it looks better too... thanks for the recommendation

Since it is now possible to shop from your webstore internationally I have just registered and tested the shopping cart and shipping calculator - everything works as it should. Just could not find that discounted DHL shipping prices

A few comments:
- when I was checking out the sharpening supplies (via the main menu) I was not able to get all sharpening supplies listed at once, but had to go through the categories (coarse stones, medium stones, etc). Did I miss something obvious or it is not possible to list them all at once? It was possible with the old webpage. The same is true for knives.
- To get those drop-down menus on knife type, steel type, etc. one must got to the page of the of the knives. I think this selections should be acccesible from the main drop-down menu where the "by brand" and "by type" are located

haha... seriously though, the DHL prices are like 1/2 of what they were a week ago. From the quotes i see, they are on par with USPS Priority International. Its crazy... i'm pretty pissed that i didnt figure out how to do this earlier.

On sharpening supplies, we have it set up to take you to a page that offers options for aratoishi, nakatoishi, etc. I made an option for "all sharpening supplies" now, but i think this way is better organized.. I also just added a section for stone sets and combo stones. For kitchen knives, if you click "by brand" or "by type" it will show a grid with various options. But if you just click "kitchen knives" it will show all items.

I thought about including the display filters on the main navigation menu, but it made it too cluttered. Sorry.

Yeah, I misstook DHL for USPS, though I am not sure what effect will that have on international shipping as at leat in my experiencce (Germany) the most delays come from customs. But I am eager to test them soon

The new page is definitely much improved and much more pleasant to use, good work! If I should mention something that I don't like, it would be the fact that you cannot see prices of items that are currently out of stock; you are solely able to see in which price category the parcitular product is (for instance 100-250 dollar, which doesn't say much). Consequently, the "Notify me when this product is back in stock" function doesn't make as much sense, at least for people that have a limited budget and have to plan their purchases accurately...OK, there is of course the option to write you an email, etc., but its an unneccesary time waste for both sites..For me its no problem, because I still can remember all the prices of my "wish" items from the hundreds of visits:biggrin:...but I believed that its worth mentioning anyway...

This is what the bottom of your home page looks like on my tablet (android) in both vertical and horizontal view. Not sure if that's ok or not, but just thought I'd share. Outside of that I'm looking the new site. Great work Jon.

Jon it looks good on my iPad running iOS 9. I couldn't really use the site on mobile before and the functionality is much improved. Thanks for the update!

I will test on my Galaxy S4 mini later today.

Krakorak said:

The new page is definitely much improved and much more pleasant to use, good work! If I should mention something that I don't like, it would be the fact that you cannot see prices of items that are currently out of stock; you are solely able to see in which price category the parcitular product is (for instance 100-250 dollar, which doesn't say much). Consequently, the "Notify me when this product is back in stock" function doesn't make as much sense, at least for people that have a limited budget and have to plan their purchases accurately...OK, there is of course the option to write you an email, etc., but its an unneccesary time waste for both sites..For me its no problem, because I still can remember all the prices of my "wish" items from the hundreds of visits:biggrin:...but I believed that its worth mentioning anyway...

Click to expand...

This makes a lot of sense... i will see what i can do about this (as there is no easy setting available right now to change that feature). When my web designer is back on monday, i will ask him about how we can implement that change.

marc4pt0 said:

This is what the bottom of your home page looks like on my tablet (android) in both vertical and horizontal view. Not sure if that's ok or not, but just thought I'd share. Outside of that I'm looking the new site. Great work Jon.

Click to expand...

nope... something is wrong there... that is just our instagram feed, but that doesnt look good. We will look into it.

One thing I noticed and one thing I wish the site had....

I notice that if I filter for in stock in Gyutos and then sort by price (highest to lowest), it doesn't show the three highest priced gyutos. Not sure why that is but it seems like it ought to show those for someone looking for the higher end items.

The thing I wish the site showed is the lead time and price if I wanted one of the out of stock knives. If you can get an out of stock item in a reasonable amount of time I might be inclined to order and wait....otherwise if they are unicorns with shigefusa type wait times then I'm not sure I really even want to see it, or maybe have another section of "Cool knives I've sold in the past but you'll never see one in this lifetime"....sort of a museum I guess.

Otherwise, much improved.

thats odd for the filtering... i will look into why that is the case.

On the out of stock items, we will try to get the price showing as soon as we can. But lead times arent so easy. Nothing is so clear from the makers in japan. Some things are weeks away, others months, and some even years. And the ETA's are constantly changing for a variety of reasons. Because of this, i've been inclined to stop telling people when things will come back in... the timeframe i give (which was given to me by the craftsmen) is rarely correct.

On the "unicorn" knives, i think we can create a section for that probably, but i will have to consider how we might do that and how it would work. Generally, people dont like seeing things they cant order.