Forum Moderators: buckworks
The 26 products I added eleven days ago are a certain type of accessory for a widget. People find my site by searching for "Acme Widgets" or "CompanyX widgets" or by specific model names.
Over the last eleven days, these 26 products have been viewed 1850 times, but not one has sold. I'm thinking of reasons why they may not have sold, and here are some of my thoughts:
1. The pages are not yet indexed by Google. Thus, the people who are looking at these accessory pages are people who were searching for a certain model of widget; they weren't searching for the accessory, they just went to look at the accessory page after viewing the widget page.
2. These accessories are priced at $184.95. There are sites that sell them for less, but most sites sell them for more. But maybe products with price tags like that don't sell frequently.
3. My site looks like a content site, not a shopping site. Perhaps people aren't thinking about shopping when they visit the site.
4. The accessory pages have the photo and informaton, and then the price and checkout button are at the bottom. Perhaps this information should come first.
5. I'm using Google Checkout for now, as I don't want to invest in a shopping cart system until I can decide if this is going to work out. But, by not having an integrated shopping cart, customers may not think it's a serious business.
Those are my thoughts. Any other thoughts or suggestions are very much welcomed.
I like your idea of moving/duplicating the Price and Checkout Button "above the fold", i.e., placement where shoppers are not required to scroll in order to make a purchase.
We have Google Checkout running across two established ecommerce websites and Google Checkout currently provides a very, very small number of orders compared to the standard CC or Paypal methods.
Customers aren't savvy to GC yet, and I suspect that it will be a while longer before they are.
At the best of times you'll only get a small percentage of users who actually buy stuff, and the price point you mention is not exactly an impulse purchase so even if your users like the product they'll need time to think about it and plan for the expense.
Your stats are likely quite normal ... work at getting more traffic to that section of the site and don't get discouraged.
Revenue from my site comes from widget retail stores. They get a full-page ad about their stores on the site, and it's searchable by several means, including the brands of widgets they carry.
To bring traffic to the site, I created over 1,000 pages of individual models of widgets from major manufacturers. People searching for "Acme widgets" find my site in the top five or so results on the SE's, look at photos and information about the widgets, and then contact the retail stores to see if they have a particular model of widget in stock.
Since I've been successful at drawing in visitors to look at the models of widgets, I figured I could draw in people to look at the various widget accessories. They're looking, but they're not buying.
Earlier this year I put up a page for one inexpensive widget accessory that had limited appeal to the spectrum of visitors within my niche. Nevertheless, I sold about one of those a day. My profit was only $10 per unit.
Maybe it's the price of the new items I've added. Or maybe something else. I've now switched from Google Checkout to PayPal, so I'll see if that makes any difference.
There are many other sites that sell these widget accessories, and I know that people buy from these sites. So it's not a question of lack of demand.
I figured I could draw in people to look at the various widget accessories
Are they finding the widget accessory pages as the result of an active search for widget accessories? Or are they just finding them as a curiosity side trip while their goal is doing something else on the site, or before they've even bought the widget that they'd need the accessory for?
If yes to the latter questions, the problem might be "right user, wrong timing". That would push your conversion percentages down even if you're doing everything else right.
Are you running any kind of analytics on the site? That might give you some insights that would be helpful.
So, that means that the people who are viewing the accessories pages didn't start out looking for "Company X Widget Accessory Model Y." They searched for some brand and model of widget, found my site, and then meandered over to the widget accessories pages out of curiousity.
So, they're probably not motivated buyers.
In the past, when I've added new pages to the site, Google has been very quick in getting those pages ranked (my site has seniority). I'm hoping that will be the case this time around as well.
As for analytics, I don't have access to the software programs now (the company I SEO for dropped their subscription).
Thanks again for the interest in this.
So, they're probably not motivated buyers.
I wouldn't assume that to be the case.
I don't sell widgets, but get several hundred visitors a day that are searching for widgets "for sale".
About 40% of those visitors include "for sale" in their search string. The rest simply use a "some widget" style search.
I know about the 60% because I ran a survey a few years ago when I was trying to decide how to handle the purchase/price requests I was getting in my email. (Now I have a prominent link on nearly every page that goes to a list of "Widget Dealers" on another page.)
What do the referrers in your log files tell you? Are people coming to your site because they are looking to buy widgets and/or widget accessories?
Have you done a survey/poll etc asking your visitors why they visit your site?
[added]
As for analytics, I don't have access to the software programs now
I missed the above, could you put Google Analytics on the site?
30-40% of my visitors are repeat visitors, so they must find something useful on my site. And I have literally tens of thousands of links coming in from other sites, so those people must find it useful.
I have not done a survey, although I've had people tell me on internet forums that they found my site while searching for "_______."
I use Google Analytics. Now that I'm using PayPal, I'll have to see if I can set up Google Analytics to do a funnel report and see if there's a pattern.
Google now has me ranked on the first page for several variations of "Acme accessories."
I've had 4,629 people view the Acme accessories page so far this month, and have had 5 purchases. $100 to $225 items.
I'm using Google Analytics and Google Optimizer to try to figure out how to best make people trust me.
Perhaps I'm being impatient, but I can't help but wonder why my conversions are so low. .1% isn't anything to brag about.
