Oregon Elite Seeds

Oregon Elite Seeds claims to be the world’s premier seed bank. They run a distribution center out of Eugene Oregon that carries seeds from ninety-four different seed breeders! You have to be twenty-one or older to buy from them, but they ship worldwide. They sell a combination of autoflowering, feminized, and regular seeds. You can browse their website by breeder or by type of seed. Their most expensive seeds are from Thug Pug genetics, which is a seed breeder making big waves in the recreational market right now. They also have a points system and a series of auctions, though there were no auctions up at the time that we wrote this article. Their checkout system, like many seed banks, asks you to sign up for an account with their website that will allow you to track your order and store your personal information for future use. They take a variety of payment types including major and also lesser-known credit cards. They also take cash and money orders through the mail.

Right off the bat, Oregon Elite Seeds hits you with a giant pop up asking you to sign up for their newsletter. While the picture they use as a background is lovely, it actually makes it really hard to find the button to move past it without signing up. We ended up giving it a burner address to move into the site. While pop ups can be a useful tool for customer engagement, we resent this one. It’s especially irritating because there is no clear way to move past this screen without entering an email address, and even after you enter an address it sticks around on the screen for a while. Once you’re inside, the irritation continues if you’re not careful. OES is another site that changes really dramatically based on what browser width you view it in. Adjust the size of your window, and you can lose entire blocks of text. To make things even worse, the text blocks are presented in grey writing on a black background. Folks might think having a night mode website looks cool, but if users don’t have the option of switching out of this darker mode it can become an accessibility concern. This is especially an issue when your product is something that’s frequently used to treat conditions like glaucoma, that saddle sufferers with blurry and darkened vision. Another beef we have with this site is the pictures on its product pages. It seems as if they’re formatted so that folks can take a closer look at the photos, but most of them are just the logos of different breeders. We’d love this feature if they had photos worth looking at, and if we didn’t keep accidentally clicking on them while trying to scroll down. We really want to like this site, and we appreciate the way they make their selection accessible, but the design leaves something to be desired.