How are your april figures? Over march? Over last year?

[blaze]

Seasonality for my product space (software) is down (20%) for the last month or so. It's down over last year same time about 10%.

How are you doing?

[Rachel]

If the month keeps going like it is, we'll be a couple thousand short of last year, and about $8000 short of last month. March was a good one for us, though, since I ran a big sale.

[blaze]

Hmm.. sales were a surprisingly low today. Possibly lowest in over a year.

Anyone see something similar? Or is my particular industry a statistical oddity?

[swones]

We are in niche clothing and April has been dire compared to Feb and March so far. It's picking up now towards the end of the month though but will still be well down.

Simon.

[centrifugal]

It's been ghastly this month for our retail site.... REALLY bad. On the other hand our other site is doing well.
Both sites rely on fewer sales and higher average transactions so we are more prone anomoly.It is bizarre though, because like I said in another topic, March was excellent for both our sites.

[sharbel]

Terrible month for us.. (nutrition suppliments etc)

[beautykat]

Beauty care products with no retail stores - March was a record month. Beginning of Apr was pretty slow but seem to be picking up a little now.

[imstillatwork]

March and april have been our best, but we're only on our 2nd year. march and april together was higher then our first 18 months!

[centrifugal]

imstillatwork: Have you noticed changes in number of visitors? Search rankings? Prices? Have you changed your site? Products? Fixed bugs?

I ask because the last couple of months for one of my sites has been similar and have seen changes in all of the above.

[HRoth]

April started out very slow compared to March, which broke records for me. Now it's picking up in terms of number of sales, but not in terms of number of visits. I think my sales would be down if I had not done some print advertising.

Last April was slower than last March for me also. People are going outside more because the weather is better, so they online as much.

[imstillatwork]

centrifugal:

A lot of repeat customers with LARGE orders. Lots of $200+ orders.

Most are $20-40-ish

Some new products, but they aren't the sellers.

Tweaks to the website, but all backend stuff.

Hits are increasing slowly, but purchasing is increasing faster. Lots of incoming links from MSN and Yahoo. Before it was nearly all only Google. There are still a few abandoned carts I want to recover though, but you can never get rid of all of those.

We've been PR4 on G since the first year.

One thing that I know I did that helped a ton is add content related to the products, review / article type pages about 100 words max and linked them back to the product that has helped the most.

[centrifugal]

Interesting. Ours are all new customers, $150ish ave.
I'm just praying it's not another fluke... ecommerce is prone to wierd, short lived trends. I've done everything except change prices, so I'm debating a price hike.
I think QC has been a big factor, as well as new products and new serps in Y, and probably a little luck.

[beautykat]

Coming to end of April. Sales has been slow over the weekend and no increase in sight. Not even with Mother's day promotional message.

[imstillatwork]

Wedding season will be here soon, and even in april, we've had a few large orders specificly for weddings. Hopefully that keeps on working to our advantage.

[mt_biker]

We saw a sales spike in Feb with March reverting to the usual slight upward trend in sales. April however will be a slightly down month unless the last four days are really good.

The owner of the business blames it on tax season and spring break.

[BroadLea]

While I am sad for us as a group, I am very glad to see that many others are having a surprisingly cool April - I thought it was just us! We're down about 30% from March and our average. Home decor.

[corbing]

So far in April we are 74% up over same MTD period April 2004. And we're up about 7.2% over same MTD period March 2005.

[Sunshyn]

We're doing about average for this time of year. That ends out being a great deal lower than last April, but we never pinpointed a reason for that odd surge. April has always been a fairly slow month for us except for last year. Of the orders this month, we've noticed a marked increase in returning customers, mostly placing largish orders.

[Habtom]

Our April figures has just turned up to be very successful. I was very busy busy and so were the team, that finally I thought of clothing down for the next few days. It is the easter holiday I guess that created this much impact, making me regret my involvement in this business for about an hour or so.

Things have settled and they seem to be normal now. The usual order numbers will be back in few days.

Habtom