Is there any trend to sales

This will dive me to an early grave

[Dave_Hawley]

Hi all

I have been selling software online for a few years now. One thing that I have just never managed to work out is any sort of buying/sales pattern. One week is a record week, the next the worst ever. Is there ANY logical pattern to selling online.

BTW I mostly sell Excel add-ins and business related software.

Dave

[jcoronella]

One of my clients sells durable goods online. They have an annual cycle, a weekly cycle, a weather dependant cycle, an economic outlook cycle, and an overlying "Bush has brought us to war" effect. They all add up to make for a very unstable sales chart.

To make it worse, the weather is never the same in any part of the country.

One thing we did notice is that sales went up every time they yelled at the sales force, and fired one of them.

Unfortunately that's not a sustainable model in the long term as you run out of qualified salespeople

[Essex_boy]

No I dont think there is any logic to it, on a daily basis we nothing from 6Am - 11Am GMT sell stuf from there till about 1pm then from 3pm 7pm GMT.

Pretty much how we do business, you can understand the late times as we sell outdoor hobby gear but why nothing in the morning or night?

Ive given up looking at the sales graphs and making predictions, if at then end of a year we made money then it was a great year.....

[Dave_Hawley]

It's crazy isn't it? I cannot even pick a cycle at all. This week started off great, then dived through the floor Tue, Wed and thu, Friday was about average (what ever that is).

I am based in Oz but sell mainly to the US market, are there any factors that would cause sales dips and spikes from the US? The last 2 months have been very slooooowwww.

I thought I was onto something when I looked at my "daily traffic range" chart on Alexa. I notice big spikes toward the 20,000 range about every 2 weeks. Thought I could line these up with sales spikes, but alas no :o(

I have now lost COMPLETE faith in Alexa and it's stupid "daily traffic range" stats. One site who's stats I know was ranking constantly between 10,000 and 5000 Yet the site gets no more than 100 hits per day....go figure!

Dave

[chiyo]

dave. yep alexa is useless for any analysis for other than the top 100 or maybe, to be kindly, 1,000 sites. It only measures hits from Alexa users, which makes up a very small, and highly unrepresentative sample.

Your slow sales for the last 2 months could quite easily be attributed to the Northern hemisphere summer time. In summer people get lazy, hazy and crazy, go on holidays, go outdoors a lot and doze off during working hours due to poor air-con.

To work out trends you really do need a largish sample, so if you are only selling say a few units a day, the random variance will obscure any significant trends.

[Essex_boy]

The only trend I have noticed is that if we have tons of traffic and no sales then the sales will come next month.

So it does appear that it takes around a month to convert.

Best I can say im afraid