Chico_Loco - 5:42 pm on Apr 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

I had an ecommerce site and it sold plenty to AOL users, and on the whole they just buy the product and we never hear from them again, unless they place another order.

Sure, they might email and ask a few question before they buy, but that was generally all.

That very site dropped greatly in Google, traffic dropped from Google by about 80% (all others remained the same) - but you know what - sales didn't drop proportionately - not even close.

After researching the trend on a few other sites that I am influence over, AOL & MSN provided a very significant portion of sales, where as Google traffic was much greater, yet sales referenced to traffic were not in proportion to those other engines. These results were relatively consistent across about 10 sites selling completely unrelated items.

Deductive logic: AOL's & MSN's users are more interested in buying things than just surfing. Thus, AOL users, on average, are more profitable to have. We're saving more on bandwidth because we don't have the Google surfers, and being dropped wasn't nearly as catastophic as initially presumed.

In summary: Users from AOL convert better and therefore should warrant more time and money in terms of advertising! MSN converts even better than AOL though.

Also, I did say that they were not as informed as webmasters, so if you were trying to work with them on website design then I can see your point - but that's not really what we're talking about here. If you needed to explain to your users how to identify hyperlinks and other such stuff when you are only trying to sell to them online, then obviously your website(s) were not very usable to non-techie people, and given that the vast majority of internet users are non-techie, then that was almost certainly your downfall.

If you can't make the process of buying simple, then you miss about 75% of your potential consumers. That was likely your problem.

To this day, I see an AOL email address coming from my contact forms, instant delete.

Any other successful etailers out there have such an ignorant practice?