OK, People are visiting my site, yet no-one is buying!

Please help

[budbiss]

Although we have got alot of visits to the site (which I can see from Adwords reports and by looking at the access logs), no one has purchased anything yet. I'm not sure if we need to still give it more time, if its our prices (which I doubt since we've done extensive market research on prices), maybe the site is confusing or a turn off in some way. If you have any ideas, I'd greatly appreciate your comments. Thanks!

[edited by: engine at 5:29 pm (utc) on Dec. 12, 2003]
[edit reason] No specifcs. See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[peterdaly]

How many visitors have you had? Or more specifically if you know, how many visits where a product page was viewed?

[budbiss]

I would say we've gotten about 200 vistors so far...although I'm not sure out of that how many were repeat visitors.

[Miop]

We are getting shedloads of visitors and many fewer buyers than lately now - we are also getting a lot mail asking if they are still in time for christmas, so I would guess it's getting a bit close. If you are not selling christmas oriented widgets, then perhaps people are too busy buying those to worry about other things!

[Chndru]

budbiss, sent a sticky to you.

[peterdaly]

So if the next visitor were to purchase 2 items, you would still have a 1% conversion rate. That's not horrible, especially for a new site starting out. Not good by any means, but it doesn't mean the site is not able to convert at all. Whether or not with AdWords you are able to have positive ROI with that rate is something you have to figure out.

Will you ever sell anything from the site? I have not a clue, but I hope the 1% conversion thing helps put things in perspective.

[budbiss]

Well, everything we sell is for Business use only, so I don't think Christmas would have a huge effect on our sales. Guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens.

[peterdaly]

I'm still going on my 1% conversion assumption...

Business customers are different from consumers. I don't have much experience with this, but I would guess a lower conversion rate would be the norm when compared to B2C. Still, at 1% your rate seems reasonable.

I would start experimenting with different page designs, etc. when conversion rate gets below 0.4% or so depending on your margins.

This is my thinking, other people may have other opinions, and I'd love to hear what they are.

--start edit--
All that being said, whether you have a problem is dependent on your:
1. Cost per potential customer aquision (cost per visitor)
2. Profit per product sold.
3. Potential market size and competition. (Potential Traffic)

[Essex_boy]

Hmm yes I went through a stage like this with a site or using paypal only? Ive increased my sales 40% just by using a creedit card processor. Are your shipping fees to the bone? Or are you padding out your profits?

Sticky me and Ill be a pretend customer.

[andy_boyd]

I had a problem like yours too, and the secret is to keep your faith in the project. With my first store it took several months and many hundreds of visitors before we got a sale, but now the site is doing quite well and taking sales daily.

Have you been spidered by Google / AltaVista / Fast / Inktomi yet? One of the best things you could do is to go through your log files and see where the chain snaps, where do people leave and why? I found that on one of my sites the "About Us" page was the second highest point of exit on the site, obviously it didn't convince people and they left. A couple of days really tight work and it dropped while sales steadied off and grew.

[whothought]

Hello all

i have the same prob i see visitors but no body signing up.

results for a two word search

in a google search Results 1 - 100 of about 4,230,000 im #3.

and in yahoo TOP 20 WEB RESULTS out of about 4,430,000
im #6

and to top that its an employment site ie monster.com
i have the same question, is it my site thats no good its not a great layout but like the old saying goes dont make it to complicated. or just hurry up and wait

Michael

[CernyM]

200 visitors is a tiny sample size.

If you haven't closed any in the first 1000 I'd start to get worried. If you haven't closed any in the first 5000, I'd know something was definitely wrong and try to figure out what it was.

If you sticky me your website, I'll be happy to take a look and see if anything pops out at me.

--Mike

[figment88]

Also for lots of items B2B sales are bad in December. People spend time looking around at things to buy at work while they worry about their personal lives.

[mansterfred]

We have 1200-2000 visits per day. Remember AOL messes those numbers up pretty bad. One user could easily have 10 proxes (visits) or more. We make the same general assumption that at least 50% are dup's. So if we end up with 1-2% conversions on the assumed visits we are pretty happy. On rare ocassion we have got over 3% conversion.

[Essex_boy]

Well Ive had a look and your cart runs on OScommerce oddly enouugh I had the same problem with OS. Great products no one buying Until..... in the product title I added 'click on image for further details' did the trick, although conversion wasnt that great.

For some reason people have to be told how to work the cart and get the information that they need. Your images also took an age to load to reducing the size.

Your product range also seems a little limited if your dealing in phones id expect to hundreds if not thousands, you don t have that many.

How do your prices compare? Forget market research people say the silliest things if your cheaper than rest, by how much? To cheap and no one will buy.

[superscript]

It takes a while to fine tune a commerce site. Get some friends around to try it out.

Is it clear and easy to use? Does it have a professional and businesslike feel? What about your 'About us' pages - do they inspire confidence? Are your customers clear about what will happen if their goods are faulty (this gets me thinking - perhaps my own returns policy could be highlighted more!)

People want to buy from a site that looks, and feels successful.

I hope this advice isn't teaching graany to suck eggs ;)

edit: or granny for that matter

[derekwong28]

I really don't think there is anything wrong with your site. As mentioned previously, 200 visitors is a small sample size. The stuff you are selling are quite expensive and you should not expect a high conversion rate as it is unlikely you will get impulse buys. Customers may visit several times before they buy. It is quite possible that you are getting very non-targetted visitors from Google Adwords and other search engines. I would not worry too much at this stage and just wait and see.