Can the small guy still start a new site and see success?

If your site just "came together" a few weeks ago, perhaps you need to wait for Google to crawl your new content and re-rank you in the SERPs?

Just some quick thoughts:

1) are there any bad reviews of the site floating around in online forums?

2) what kind of traffic are we talking about? If it's the same as before and the site is still getting 1-2 sales per week that doesn't really tell us much. Are they staying longer? Is the purchase process clear? If we're talking small traffic, I'd say 1-2 sales per week is a good start.

3) are you just waiting for organic traffic? if you sunk in 20k into design fees, are you spending any for traffic? I'd suggest budgeting some funds for online marketing and I don't mean just clicks... Perhaps sponsoring some blogger, YouTube personality, or women's organization would be a good idea?

4) regarding Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, I personally don't see any importance in making lots of noise in an empty room so I wouldn't put much effort into those channels of communication.

Instead, start pulling in email inquiries... put a link next to every product description for anyone to ask a question about a particular product. Engaging visitors in at least a dialog can help legitimize the business and give them a longer lasting impression of your site.

That's all I have off the top of my head. I'm sure other more seasoned eCommerce peeps can chime in with better info. :)

Good luck.

c

1) are there any bad reviews of the site floating around in online forums?

...

3) are you just waiting for organic traffic?

Bad reviews hang around for a long time. A company that I deal with had a bad patch about five years ago. They brought in new management and turned the quality of service right round but if you search on them the old bad reviews from that time still come on page 1 in the SERPS. (Of course the tinyest glitch that occurs, or an issue that is outside of their control and somebody adds a comment to those old reviews keeping them fresh!)

With regard to marketing, don't get into a mindset that views the web site as the product. You are selling womens clothes, the site is just the current location of your shop.

almost $20k in coder/designer fees

Given the type of site, you must asked for quite a lot of features or some stunning dynamic design or both to get to that cost level. You didn't spend that purchasing some complicated/bloated stock cart did you?

My competitor's websites look like trash

Many small-size business prefer a basic site layout because of the costs involved and gradually invest into more exotic stuff depending how their business goes. Prices and Products should be your primary focus along with marketing those. Make sure if you search for your product titles your site comes up in SERPs, otherwise figure out what's wrong with that.

I don't know whether this post is a rant/bitch/plea for help?

Not sure either, someone who's uncertain of his site performance usually puts his site on his profile.

@Clifford

If your site just "came together" a few weeks ago, perhaps you need to wait for Google to crawl your new content and re-rank you in the SERPs?

Well...kind of. This is our 3rd redesign. It went live end of 2011, we just got finished taking care of all the on site SEO issues (nothing major, just "common sense" stuff).

1) are there any bad reviews of the site floating around in online forums?

Yes, the previous owner did not do good customer service, so there are a few "scam" reports out there. However, our main competitor also did not do good customer service, and have as many bad reviews.....yet they are ranking #1 for a keyword that drives 1million searches a month.

I tried to negate this by signing up for the BBB, which wiped out the old "D-" rating and installed a "A" rating for me. I also had one of my first customers go on Yelp or one of those places and gave me a glowing review.....all because the Post Office lost her order and I felt so bad I refunded her entire order and let her keep the items for free. I wasn't trying to butter her up, I just felt sorry for her and wanted to make it right.

what kind of traffic are we talking about? If it's the same as before and the site is still getting 1-2 sales per week that doesn't really tell us much. Are they staying longer? Is the purchase process clear? If we're talking small traffic, I'd say 1-2 sales per week is a good start.

The "old site" was on one of the worst (and oldest) eCommerce platforms out there. I'm not naming names, but "they haven't updated it since the late 1990's". So we had trouble getting the site moved from the old place to Zen Cart where it resides now.

As far as people staying longer...my bounce rate is about 2% since Oct. of last year. On average, 22 pages per visit. I don't have eyes on the old analytics. We just got on the map on page 9 for our desired keyword (that drives 1 million visitors per month) whereas with the old site, it wasn't ranking at all.

So yes, "progress" as such....is being made. I know SEO like the back of my hand, but here's the kicker: It's honestly been 6? 7? years since I had to "start all over" with essentially a brand new site. So I'm not sure if the signs that I'm seeing are good indicators of progress? Being that SEO has changed drastically in those 7 years, I'm honestly lost.

I don't link build that much...few directory submissions, few blog comments (and the blog comments are intended to get people to come to my site, I don't use optimal anchor text. Just "click here").

are you just waiting for organic traffic? if you sunk in 20k into design fees, are you spending any for traffic? I'd suggest budgeting some funds for online marketing and I don't mean just clicks... Perhaps sponsoring some blogger, YouTube personality, or women's organization would be a good idea?

Yeah, the reason I spent $20k to be totally honest with you guys....is that I was a piss-poor manager of my coders and designers. I take full blame. Needless to say, I have switched over to a new coder, but essentially they're all cut from the same cloth in my opinion. About $5k of that $20k was inventory buy.

I tried Google Adwords....it was a complete joke. I watched $100 get flushed down the toilet in about 15 minutes. I got ~100 visitors to my site (for the "holy grail" keyword). 90 or so came to the home page, and probably hit the back button. 10% clicked through to 3-4 pages.

However, the few bloggers in my niche that I have reached out to....the visitors they send me browse anywhere from 15-20 minutes, and view about 30 or so pages on average.

Yes, I guess I am waiting for organic traffic...the recent Google changes have given me pause to enter into a huge link building campaign (as I would with one of my other throwaway affiliate sites). I do the occasional press release and that's pretty much it. I was kind of hoping that the site would rest on the laurels of it being 8 years old, being in the DMOZ directory, and a few "high end" links that it has naturally picked up over the years.

I guess I thought that since I would redesign the site from an SEO (and user-friendly) perspective (compared to what it was before), Google would reward me handsomely, of which they have not.....yet.

@Enigma1

Given the type of site, you must asked for quite a lot of features or some stunning dynamic design or both to get to that cost level. You didn't spend that purchasing some complicated/bloated stock cart did you?

Zen Cart....all I can say is that my experience so far has most decidedly NOT been "zen". I'm not trying to knock the software.....but EVERY SINGLE THING needs to be customized by a coder. I'm not talking about crazy features...I'm talking something as simple as tax rates or shipping rates (the stock "modules" didn't work too well). Other stuff like making minor design changes added up in coder costs.

We had the canonical URL issue from hell....Google was ignoring the "Disallow Robots to browse from a logged in session" set to "True", as such for the past 6 months, Webmaster Tools has been reporting upwards of 50k URL's that are 404'ing out. We could not figure out the proper solution, so we just "/disallow zenid=?" in the robots.txt and that seemed to fix it. Stuff like that.

Make sure if you search for your product titles your site comes up in SERPs, otherwise figure out what's wrong with that.

Yes, about 50% of the time, title searches for my products....and I'm listed #1-#3.


So I guess what I'm trying to say here guys....is based on what I have told you so far....am I on the right track? If I keep it up ("honest" white hat SEO, social media, outreach to my community, etc).....in 6-12 months, will I most likely be able to live off this income? (with regards to volume of sales). My profit margins are pretty good...I buy a dress for $10 and sell it for $20.

regarding Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, I personally don't see any importance in making lots of noise in an empty room so I wouldn't put much effort into those channels of communication.

Yeah...we trying to build up our "likes" and "pluses" and "tweets" and engage others in our industry. The main reason I'm doing it is basically to give my site some credibility, to make it look more trustworthy. (not that it doesn't already).

put a link next to every product description for anyone to ask a question about a particular product.

Yes, we are doing that.

I don't know what your other costs are involved with these dresses but if you can sell them for $14-15 for the next month or two to gain some convinced customers, who will hopefully share their experience, then that might be a good move.

Also, have you checked eBay to see if other people are already dumping these products on the market? That could be a major problem.

Basic strategy, dump volume product at cheap prices, drive out competitors, raise prices once competitors are gone.

Like I said, I don't know your business or comfort threshold but maybe it needs to be a volume game where you're making $4 off 20 dresses sold vs $10 off 2-3 dresses.

I've been thinking about doing a volume-oriented project recently so I am more comfortable with working off a smaller margin. Additionally, I've moved to China / Hong Kong to lower my living costs and be closer to widgets in general.

Hi Cliff,

My manufacturers and their attorneys browse EBay regularly and go after those who sell on there.

Yes, I have a new MFG I met who mfg's in China and has a warehouse here in California.

Going to be chatting with him this week to work out a biz dev deal which will hopefully cut out my competitors. Going to start asking for exclusive distribution rights over the internet, and then work my way down from there.

Apparently, they are new to America and I'm going to do my best to ingratiate myself with them and hopefully earn their trust and respect.

If you are buying for $10 and selling for $20 ..your margins are not good enough*..you need to be buying for $5-$7 and selling at $20 or above ( IMO and IME with "textiles/clothing" from China you should be selling at between 4 and 5 times purchase price, at the very minimum 3 times purchase price ) ..otherwise when you take out all your overheads and taxes etc , you will be making half of what you'd make flipping burgers at mickeyD's..

*unless you are moving hundreds or more of each SKU per month..

Perhaps you're spending too much for coding. You should keep the features you really need and as your sales improve you can invest more, be more conservative since you're at the beginning with just few sales.

And check your GWT for errors and your site's functionality with all major browsers.

Hi Enigma,

GWT is reporting upwards of 30k 404's. However, this is due to them crawling the site from a logged in session.

eg: www.MySite.com/black-shoes.html/zenid=?123456

Then the next time Google crawls my site, they got a new session id such as:

www.MySite.com/black-shoes.html/zenid=?abcdef

For some strange reason....Google is also telling me that the old URL's from the old version of the site (that we took down back in August of 2011) are still 404'ing out. We 301 redirected the good links, and the rest, we just let 404 out. I don't understand why GWMT is still reporting these 6 month old dead links not being able to be found, recently.

So that took its toll.....after we resolved the issue (and complained on deaf ears over at the ZenCart forums) things have slowly been getting better.

Other than that, GWMT is looking good.


Do you think I can get away without having to linkbuild heavily, and just rely upon the links that naturally occurred over the past 8 years (even though the link profile is not that strong)?

That was my original idea.....since Google is cracking down on SEO's.....and since Google is putting more and more emphasis on on-site SEO....I just figured if I re-built the site from a common-sense perspective (using most "best practices" out there, nothing even close to "questionable"), the traffic would come naturally.

Or do I need to strap on my link building hat and get to work?



p.s. I'm done spending money on coders for at least a year. I got someone to help me install the code for the new affiliate program I'm setting up with one of the bigger affiliate companies out there, and that's that. God help the site.

I went through osCommerce, ZenCart, XCart, CandyPress and probably a couple more over the last 5 years. I finally realized that no matter how good a coder I am (or the people I hired) I was better off hiring ecommerce services and stop worrying about managing it myself. You can purchase complete hosting packages that will do all you want to do for a reasonable monthly rate. Spend money on products, service, and marketing. It will pay off much better.

Maybe you should start with making better decisions also. By taking one or two bad experiences with coders and determining that they are all a waste is just simply poor management skills on your behalf. Spend time getting a better one, don't dismiss them completely.

If you had a mechanic who screwed up a car repair one time, would you swear off mechanics forever and just leave a broken car to stay broken (and break down further)?

You need to get rid of the errors. These are links the bot somehow follows and point to 404 pages. And you you don't want bots to get sessions. If you deployed 301 redirects make sure they point to pages that return 200 OK. Not to 404s and don't do mixed redirects (301 to 302 etc).

Also not all errors are reported in GWT and I can only guess the suggestion section in GWT would report another 30K?

As of the zc forums these are public forums, where the developers would concentrate on core bugs not customizations.

Lots of talk about SEO and code, but... What do you know about women's apparel? Maybe it's not the site. There's only so much you can do with a site itself. I think you have to know your customer on some level.

How many unique visits do you get per day?
We're currently in the $30K - $50K per month range and we get 1200 - 1500 unique visits per day.
Our average sale is $40

We aggressively market bloggers and youtube.

Lots of talk about SEO and code, but... What do you know about women's apparel? Maybe it's not the site. There's only so much you can do with a site itself. I think you have to know your customer on some level.

I would consider myself a "man's type of man" and as such cars and guns and ultimate fighting all appeal to me.

When trying to describe women's apparel....it's so hard. If I were instead trying to describe a camshaft that would make your 2012 Mercedes Benz E63 run faster, then I would be able to do a masterpiece of a writeup.

The only reason I bought this site was that the price was right.....and I used to sell on Ebay 8 years ago. We would go to the local Goodwill where they clearanced out everything for $1. We would buy brand name used clothing for $1 each, then come back and make a $30-$40 profit. At that point in time, I was broke as a joke, and my ultimate dream was to start an ecommerce website that sold clothing.....because well....it was cheap and easy to ship, I guess.

How many unique visits do you get per day?
We're currently in the $30K - $50K per month range and we get 1200 - 1500 unique visits per day.
Our average sale is $40

We aggressively market bloggers and youtube.

On average, I get about 50 visitors a day. Mostly searching for off versions of our brand name. One or two search for our "holy grail" keywords, and they browse upwards of 10 pages each.

When you say you "aggressively market bloggers and youtube".....does this mean you pay them to review you? Or do you just ask them for you to do a writeup article in exchange for a link back?


Also, can I ask you where the majority of your traffic comes from? Youtube and Bloggers? Are you ranking really well for your "holy grail" keyword (that pertains to your industry)?

In my opinion you need to get the unique visitor count up much higher than what it currently is.

We send them free products to review. Sometimes we allow them to give away a free product to one of their followers. I have a part time employee and one intern dedicated to this.

The majority of our traffic is coming from bloggers and youtube.

I have been working on our holy grail keywords and trying to get them in the top 10 for the major search engines.

Some of them are in the top 10 gooole, yahoo, and bing but i'm not getting as much traffic as I would have thought.

Thanks Jrock...

Yeah, I had the same opinion with regards to unique visitor count.

Can I ask you if you sell a unique product (your own brand) or are you reselling other's products?

Hrmm....maybe I will give the blogger thing a try, I can think of several niches of women bloggers that would be interested in giveaways and reviews.

Open an account and upload some photos of your stuff to pinterest ?

jrockfl, glad to see you chime in on this thread. Good idea with the aggressive marketing via bloggers and youtube personalities.

BaseballGuy, I used to sell clothes on eBay back in 1999 and I know what you mean about having a great turnaround of product but the game you're in now with this eCommerce site and the eBay/Goodwill game you used to play is MUCH different.

With your costs now 10x higher and your sales price nearly HALF of what your eBay sales used to be, it's clear you're going to have to work on lowering your costs or building more perceived value so you can ask for more money for each dress.

If you need sourcing help, let me know. I'm out here in China already and have some contacts who currently export to Japan.

One more idea for organic traffic... check around and see if you can buy any old competitors' url... I just picked up one of my competitors' url and 301'd it to mine. Can't wait for the SERPS to eat it up. :)

Thanks Cliff.

If I can get the sales up to an acceptable level, will shoot you a PM. The original owner of the site is a Taiwanese citizen (who left America to go back to Taiwan to live), so I plan on coming out that way to meet and greet and ingratiate myself for future biz dev deals.

We sell a unique brand, but some of our products are very similar to our competitors.

Last month we sent out 44 orders to bloggers/youtube personalities.

I would consider myself a "man's type of man" and as such cars and guns and ultimate fighting all appeal to me.

When trying to describe women's apparel....it's so hard. If I were instead trying to describe a camshaft that would make your 2012 Mercedes Benz E63 run faster, then I would be able to do a masterpiece of a writeup.

Maybe your money/effort could be better spent getting a female involved somehow... Maybe a girl who has a fashion background, who could do some articles and other things. Maybe figure out a way to draw in people through something other than just... 'Here's our item ___ for $___'. Preferably somebody attractive, but in a girl friendly kind of way... You don't want somebody too 'sexy' attractive when dealing with women.

Maybe your money/effort could be better spent getting a female involved somehow... Maybe a girl who has a fashion background, who could do some articles and other things. Maybe figure out a way to draw in people through something other than just... 'Here's our item ___ for $___'. Preferably somebody attractive, but in a girl friendly kind of way... You don't want somebody too 'sexy' attractive when dealing with women.

Yes, an ex girlfriend of mine would fit this description nicely.... : )

Best of all, she works for cheap: all she wants is for me to buy her a bottle of local wine and pay for her gas money to come up to where I live lol.

Open an account and upload some photos of your stuff to pinterest ?

theres actually some pictures of womens lingerie on the front page of pinterest at the moment (not that i was looking, of course, i just saw it by accident)... looks like another clothing company had the same idea

Lots of talk about SEO and code, but... What do you know about women's apparel? Maybe it's not the site. There's only so much you can do with a site itself. I think you have to know your customer on some level.

lol exactly my reaction when I seen a guy with the name "baseball guy" discussing women's apparel.
=

lol exactly my reaction when I seen a guy with the name "baseball guy" discussing women's apparel.

Yeah...but I'm confident I can figure this out. I have installed a turbo charger system (after market) on a car with my own two hands....kinda sorta forgot to drill out the oil return hole in the oil pan....but small mistakes aside, women's clothing cannot be that complicated.

Besides....this is only a stepping stone for me. I want to get off the internet, out of SEO and into mfg in China and reselling here in America.

This eCommerce site is my ticket out of this SEO hell-hole, no offense guys. Back in the day I was making a lot of money doing affiliate marketing in 2004-2006. Google pissed me off royally as they stupid algo changes. I ran an honest and legitimate affiliate marketing website (no pills, no #*$!, no viagra, nothing shady) and I got screwed big time by both Google AND shady webmasters who did some pretty unscrupulous things to get ahead....and I couldn't follow suit with my white-hat website.

So basically, I'm back to square one. It's very humbling....and somewhat scary after seeing Matt Cutts yelling and screaming about teh SEO's are teh evil!11 etc.

/enough is enough

In my experience, there's no shortcuts. The only tried and true road to success is good products, good service, and good communication. If you have all those, you can forget about most of the other stuff, and sometimes even forget a little bit about prices. I spend virtually zero time worrying about SEO. I looked at my site through Google on a fresh machine the other day and was surprised at how many times I ranked top for certain items. Surprised, since I made no effort to rank top. I think that kind of just happens by itself if you really have something to offer. And you are right... I manufacture most of my stuff, and you automatically distance yourself from 80% of the other guys out there by doing that. As long as you can come up with good products. But I would not do the China thing. That ship has sailed in my opinion. I believe there will be a "Made in the US" resurgence, and the evidence is already there that it's happening. Why sell 500 poor quality things when you can sell 100 good ones for a better price and make the same money? But they do have to be better quality.

I am with dpd1 in terms of the ship has sailed re cheap Chinese junk. Look at what people are blogging about and complaining about. Look at the new consumer movements for local and small. Example: Yesterday I helped a friend with no knowledge of or interest in local or small get some new dishes online, and he specifically asked for stuff NOT from China because he was concerned about quality. He wasn't buying Versace, either. He just wanted some decent, safe dishes. I myself make a point of not buying anything from China if I can help it. Local and small is the wave of the future.

I do think there are different ways to sell, and the race to the bottom price-wise, which has to involve Chinese junk, is one way to do it. But to me, this is way too much like work. If I were you, I would be selling camshafts. Or better yet, put up a content site about camshafts.

Yeah...but I'm confident I can figure this out. I have installed a turbo charger system (after market) on a car with my own two hands....kinda sorta forgot to drill out the oil return hole in the oil pan....but small mistakes aside, women's clothing cannot be that complicated.

I have no doubt a male can thrive even in this arena. On Canada's version of Dragons' Den, one of the original dragons was Laurence Lewin who founded La Senza...anything is possible!