Forum Moderators: buckworks
Last week our store went live ;-)) however, I am a little bit concerned because not much is happening. Is it normal?
Website is pretty young so google is not listing it yet in keyword search results, but we got adWords and Overture Ads. So far we had 49000 impressions on Google and 7 clicks and 400 impressions on Yahoo and 3 clicks. Is it o.k? or total failure?
I understand that I have to think of it as long run and we have to focus now on marketing, but please share with me some of your experiences. How long did you wait for first sale? It will give me some idea what to expect.
Thanks a lot,
Aleksandra
We went live July 1 2006. We had two orders our first day, both were friends. We had a total of 16 orders for July. Jumped to 38 orders in August, Kept climbing and we now are at 20 order per day. Much better than we had anticipated.
Your mileage may vary.
Last month we sold $293,000 online.
But we started in 1997, so maybe (just maybe...) a different situation :D
Those were the good old days when you could just spam Meta tags and win the AltaVista contest.
A week-old site is about the same as an hour-old site. All variables aside (marketing skills, competition level, etc.) all online ventures take time to build momentum - even with the most skilled professionals behind them.
Put in your due-diligence, avoid becoming discouraged, and you'll do fine.
And for crying out loud - stop worrying so early in the game ;)
I've spent more on adwords than I've made in profit though. I initially set my ads up just to get the most clicks to see what items would sell. I spent about $200 only to get two $25 orders. Now I've tweaked them to be profitable but I only get about 10 clicks a day so an order comes in every 2-3 days.
I'm going to work on incoming links next to see if I can get some boosts to my natural SERP results.
Our first week we sold zero items and got about 2 phone calls.
Of course our expenses were about nil. Ranking worse than the top 5 in a search engine was rare. Don't think we paid a cent for advertising until late 2000.
When we finally added a cart and more products in March 2000, we were off to the races from Day One and I was kicking myself for not taking web commerce more seriously several years earlier.
started in Aug 2004 and our first sale was sept 2004, 1 month later; at about 10 visitors a day
now we average 1000 - 2000 visits a day, 10 - 20 sales a day, offering over 4,000 UNIQUE gifts, AND over christmas (nov dec) we do 80-100 sales a day, average sale being $75 didnt happen "next month" or even "next year" and it didnt happen by being patient either... every situation is also different and you also need to look at what YOUR goal is. What we sell (unique gifts¦fine crafts) has a lot of curiosity but no urgency to buy, unless its christmas, but we have a super loyal customer base, interesting SERP exposure, and a powerhouse fulfillment system. all that took time, money, energy and creative intuition to make it work with no capital.
to this day, i dont know why i continued through the first year... Figured with due dilligance, i can learn perl, create a shopping cart, markiting functions, automating processes and the lot that my competition simply couldnt afford, thus making me the best in my micro or niche market.
Id say the success is within the creativity, energy and intuition YOU put into your venture, and, like starting a customer base, that does take time a lot of time and money. BUT if you just "wait" i guarantee you nothing will happen, like it is now.
have fun :)
When we finally added a cart and more products in March 2000, we were off to the races from Day One and I was kicking myself for not taking web commerce more seriously several years earlier
Our first "site" in 1996 or so was actually a free geocities type 5-6 page layout where people could call in orders, no shopping cart.
Heh.. same here. We finally got serious in late 1998 and got a Viaweb store (now Yahoo). At that time internet sales were just an aside to our B & M store, so we did not really get serious until 2000 or so. Now internet sales make up 90% of our revenue. But if we had known then what we know now, we could have done it a lot faster and a lot better.
But I don't think things have really changed that much. Yes, a lot more competition and stores and the internet is 1000 times bigger - but it still all comes down to the same thing - building a customer base and links, and expanding the product lines. And of course patience and enough money to keep going for the first year.
Thought this is easy so for some bizarre reason I shut the site.
