What is good growth?

What percentage per month

[ssgumby]

I was just wondering what would be considered good growth for a new ecommerce site. Not in regards to hits or visitors, but with regards to number of sales.

Our site started July 1 and we had :

July = 20 orders
August = 38 orders
September = 82 (so far)

As you can see we are basically doubling. Our average sale is $42. Our advertising is via links and ppc.

Our traffic is not huge, we are averaging 350 visitors per day and I am not sure how many of them are spiders.

Anyway, what have others seen for the rate of growth.

Thanks

[philbish]

My store's data since 2003 shows it about doubles every year

2003: 2.5 orders per day
2004: 4.1 orders per day
2005: 8.0 orders per day
2006: 13 orders per day

[Oliver Henniges]

I'd basically support philbish, but a growth rate of almost 100% per year is no automatism; I guess his growth is due to constant improvement of website design. Usability issues and customer satisfatcion (recommendations) in the first place.

A conversion rate of 1% makes me somewhat sceptical, if most of your traffic comes from ppc-advertising. Make sure you calculate that in detail.

All these figures, however, are far below statistical significance. Maybe quite a lot of visitors have had a first look in July and came back in September for ordering, so of course this won't grow any further unless your number of visitors grows as well.

Where do you expect further growth to come from? Are you doing anything to improve your organic ranking? Will you intensify your ppc campaigns targetting at more keywords/products?

[philbish]

I haven't done and PPC advertising. Soley word of mouth, and sponsorship of related web forums. Oh, and of course organic links from good SEO.

Now that I've finished a full home grown store, accounting, and inventory system, I will spend all my effort adding and designing new products. Expanding the range of products. That is where I think growth will come from.

[justinpfister]

For growth I've seen 100% growth for at least from you first start. Of course that can't go forever and it will slow down over time.. But that's not unheard of.

I've seen conversion rates about 5% for the past 3 months on my site. I here that's pretty good. 1%, although it's low value, isn't out of range for a site. I've read articles that would say that 1% is in range. It depends on what you're selling and how qualified you traffic is.