Topdrawer Online is a Cape Town-based company offering personalised and corporate gifts. Customers are invited to simply select the gift, wrapping paper, greeting card and message, and Topdrawer takes care of the rest.
The company also offers a business card attachment service, where if you supply the firm with your business cards, it sends them out with every gift you order. Granted, it requires a little more involvement on your side than a traditional online transaction; one wonders why there isn`t an option to merely upload an electronic business card from the site itself, instead of having to rely on snail mail/couriers to get hard copies of the cards through to Cape Town.
Appearance
Apart from the rather insipid background colour, the site is a pleasure to work with. Its content relies naturally on lots of graphics, which are commendably fast to load. It`s only when you`re completing a transaction through M-Web`s secure Shopzone SafeShop server that the process slows down.
Functionality
The site is informative, with a good help section featuring well fleshed-out FAQs. However, it fuels a pet hate of mine - that pertinent info such as delivery costs and the site`s privacy policy isn`t prominently displayed on the front page.
Topdrawer also offers a generic reminder service and an impressive gift recommendation facility, cross-referencing type of gift with recipient and occasion.
Navigation
Terribly easy thanks to tons of hyperlinks within sections, and a top-anchored navigation bar that never ever disappears.
Content quality
In addition to clean images of the products on offer, the site also offers the ability to view the six types of gift-wrap and the various greeting cards from which customers can choose. The gift-wrap designs range from the casually whimsical to the elegantly ethnic, ensuring that you`ll generally find something appropriate to the spirit in which the gift is being given. However, the cards are rather more informal, and indeed, I could find nothing that I would attach to a corporate gift.
Litmus test
One of the site`s shortcomings is the lack of an option to view enlarged pics of the products. Click on an image to enlarge it, and you instead get routed immediately to an incredibly frustrating purchase process. Once you`re in it, there`s no way to add multiple products to your basket at one go - very bad news for the bulk gift-giver, or overenthusiastic PR.
The site needs a little more tweaking, but is still very functional.
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