Who's been affected by the financial turmoil?

[dickbaker]

This is my first year of doing ecommerce on my site. I had the summer doldrums that are typical for retail in my niche. In September I started to see sales really pick up, which got me excited.

For the last couple of weeks, though, sales are really off. I've been doing AdWords all year for some of the more profitable items, but setting a daily budget that almost always was consumed by about 10 pm. Now I find that there are so few clicks on the ads that I'm only consuming half of my budget. That's ok, though, since none of the clicks are converting.

I don't have any idea what to do, so I guess the solution is just to cut prices to the extent possible and wait things out. Given that I'm already one of the lowest-priced retailers for the limited number of products I sell, there's not much left to cut in price.

I know I'm not alone in this. What steps, if any, are you taking to address the problem?

[Webmeister]

The Dow got slammed again today. Arrggghhh!

[derekwong28]

US consumer confidence sinks to an all-time low to 38.0 in October from an upwardly revised 61.4 in September.

[reuters.com...]

This should point to an extremely interesting Christmas shopping season.

[pbradish]

One more Stimulus here we come...

[derekwong28]

I think it has gone too far gone now for a stimulus to really work. It would be better to have a deep "V" shape recession rather than a shallow "U" shape recession whereby you get into the Japanese situation of never-ending woe. Note that a few days ago, their stockmarket achieved a 26 year low.

[Shaddows]

It would be better to let companies and/or banks go to the wall (that would be a V shape). Capitalism works like evolution- you try new things, the good things stick around, the bad things... well, they get eliminated in the wash

If there was actually a risk of death for these organisations, perhaps they would be incentivised to make sure they remained 'liquid'

Of course, V-shapes cause acute pain to a few, rather than chronic (but possibly managable) pain to the many

[pbradish]

I think it has gone too far gone now for a stimulus to really work.

I agree with you, but still think that the US Government will issue one :)