Competition wories me until I see their Alexa results

If you can't be found on the web, offering the lowest prices won't help

[lgn1]

Well its that time of year again. Time to set prices.

As ussual, I check out my competition to see what they are doing.

Im shooting for a 80% markup, and most of my competitors are pretty well following in line. Every once in a while, I find some competition offering at a 50% markup. This woried me until I see their alexa results, which is ussally in the millions.

A lot of people on the web impulse buy. Many people do not know who to search properly, and are just happy to find your product.

These discounters, are selling at such a low markup, they can't afford advertising, and hence they are never seen and never found. I find them, because I know how to search, and Im activly trying to seek them out.

After 6 years on the web, I found that it is your website design, ease of navigation, crisp and fast loading images, that draw sales, not by offering the lowest price. As long as the customer can buy the item cheaper than retail after factoring in shipping, that is all that matters. And if they find your site first, then that gives the competitive edge.

[derekwong28]

Although sometimes I look at Alexa results when I compare websites, you should not take it so seriously. Alexa will not discount clicks from those coming from owners of their websites.

Just by simply installing an Alexa toolbar on our browsers, one of our sites achieved a ranking of below 50,000. The reason is that we have to log into our cart everyday.

This is why I would recommend everyone with a online store to install an alexa toolbar on their browser. It will push up the rankings of their website and may convert some customers.

[lgn1]

You can artificially inflate results, but you cannot
artificially deflate results. So if the website alexa ranking is bad, then you know the site is not getting much traffic.

[jsinger]

I have the Alexa toolbar on my main machine, often search for our site via Alexa and I never got anything as low as 50,000. The only sites in that range are truly successful ones, well ranked in most SEs and have plenty of inbound links. Mostly they've been on the web for years.

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My experience too is that new sites with ultra low prices or astronomical ad budgets don't last long.

Also, in the long run a small commerce company might be smarter to have fewer employees, a smaller office and keep prices somewhat high, while working to retain existing customers. No way to know what the future of the web will be.

[onlineleben]

>>You can artificially inflate results, but you cannot
artificially deflate results. So if the website alexa ranking is bad, then you know the site is not getting much traffic. <<

This also could translate into honest/dishonest webmaster, but I want to rephrase it a little:
Depending on geography, Alexa either tells you something about your traffic or not. Here in Europe Alexa is a non-issue and I don't pay much attention to its traffic rankings. What i watch out for is the Linking part to see who is linking to my competition.
Also keep in mind there are different types of sitevisitors. Tech savy and weboriented users like you find them around this board have the alexa toolbar installed more often than the average Joe or Jane.

What really matters (IMHO) is how much traffic you get, where it comes from and how good it converts into sales, especially repeat sales.

[lgn1]

Regardless of how good you are at SEO, you reach a point where you basically plateau in traffic, or you reach the point where you do a lot of work to get a little increase in traffic. This is where you need PPC and other forms of advertising to get name brand recognition. And you need cash flow to do that, so that means making a nice profit so you can put money back into making the company grow.

I don't know about you, but I like to make as much money as possible, by doing as little work as possible.

I rather make a $1000 profit by filling 25 orders at a decent margin, rather than by filling 250 orders at a narrow margin.

[Macro]

This also could translate into honest/dishonest webmaster, but I want to rephrase it a little:
Depending on geography, Alexa either tells you something about your traffic or not. Here in Europe Alexa is a non-issue and I don't pay much attention to its traffic rankings.

I don't see it as a clear issue of honesty. An honest webmaster may have the Alexa toolbar installed for genuine reasons - as the original poster has - but the fact that he always visits his own site skews the result.

I do think that it's an excellent point that you can artifically only *inflate* results, not deflate them.

The geography/location of site or visitors in not an issue. I don't see how Europe is any different from the rest of the world as far as Alexa is concerned. I will agree that Alexa is close to a non-issue, but that applies whereever on Earth you are. Take it's traffic rankings together with lots of other information including metricsmarket.com, trafficrankings.com etc to form a "rough" idea of how well a site is doing with "volume of traffic". None of them will give you an indication as to the quality of traffic and/or the conversion rates ;-)

[gr8appeal]

From my experience (managed an affiliate program for 6 years), two sites, selling the same item will get the same click through to a buyer ratio if they're within 20% of each others price... Low prices most of the time turned customers away... would you buy windowsXP from a website that sells it for $20 or for $200? When it comes to Alexa, their ratings count what YOU allow them to count. If you don't want to be seen by Alexa (and I don't want my competitors to see me), pasword protect your index page. :) send everyone to a secondary page.

[M2D_Media]

The only problem I have with Alexa is that it is Spyware. I use Ad-Aware and it nails Alexa. (even M.S.'s use of Alexa to track internet activity). If I visit your site it won't even register with Alexa. Many other people use anti-spyware as well. So you might not be getting as accurate a reading as you think.

[Macro]

M2D Media, any toolbar will be picked up by programs like "hijack this" as possible spyware, including the Google toolbar.

The whole point of installing the Alexa toolbar is to provide Alexa with information on the sites you visit in exchange for them providing you with some estimates on how popular particular sites are with other alexa users. Nobody expects an accurate reading because Alexa's ranks are extrapolated from data Alexa does collect. Your visit to the site does not need to register with Alexa.