Let me preface this article by saying: Dane Cook you are the man! I have listened to your CD’s and performances so many times I have practically memorized them. Now that I won’t feel so bad ripping your site apart I will get down to business.

Dane Cook literally blogged his way into stardom. His fan base was garnered almost entirely through the Internet and it is that tremendous following that launched him into super stardom. Knowing that, one would assume that his website would match his presence. Eh, not so much. The store is powered by musictoday, which is a great way to confuse customers and lose business.

The site doesn’t seem to contain even a midget of Dane’s giant personality, which is strange considering that his personality is the basis of his entire career. The product pages are very plain, containing little to no text. Excluding his tour T’s, all the shirts are based on one of Dane’s jokes. Why not add some context to the t-shirt? How about an excerpt of the routine?

There is no checkout without account, but the site does support parallel checkout and member sign-up so at least I didn’t have to interrupt my checkout process (But I will later). I entered a mismatched city and zip code, but there was no error message. I entered a mismatched state and zip and still no error.

It was not until I clicked purchase that I was met with an error page and I had to start all over again. Ah, there is the interruption of the checkout process we have come to expect from CelebriteCommerce sites. Though I do not know for sure, I suspect this site has a tremendous cart abandonment rate. At least it didn’t accept my fake credit card like Emeril’s site (from which I am still awaiting an error message or my set of knives).

Shipping options are clear and there is a good variety. Another feature of note, Dane’s shopping cart supports gift cards which are very good for business in that people are paying you to expose your site to another person.

In addition to “Dane-izing” the site design, the eCommerce solution could use some fine tuning work. The reason we are such big fans of custom solutions is that no two businesses are the same. Dane Cook may be selling CD’s and tour shirts, but his brand is much different than the local emo band and this should be reflected in his store. Pasting a logo and a picture in the header do not accomplish this and never will.