Forum Moderators: skibum
I look after a small site for a niche sports personality. It's a high-cost sport and the site is designed to bring fans closer to the individual, and as a result raise cash from donations, shopping and sponsorships to go back into the sport.
I've recently built the shopping areas, paypal etc., and have begun promoting the site to test and refine it.
It's a new site and traffic is only up to a few hundred UV's per day, but so far no sales. i thought that last weeks traffic of 1,200 would be enough to get even a single sale, because out click-through rates are seemingly very high at 3-5.5% (although these are small numbers I suppose).
We did a targeted mail (1000 addresses) newsletter on saturday, and the click through rate is running at 16% for the site in general and 40% of that is for the shopping...but no sales.
What is the numbers game and how do I need to play it? Are we looking at 1000 click-thru's per sale or what, does anyone know??
Ultimately i'm a bit nervous of building the traffic without getting the site right first.
If anyone has any ideas or expertise to share, i'd be very grateful indeed.
Mike
I understand e-com sites that are doing well get a 1-2% conversion rate for general consumer type goods - one or two sales out of every hundred unique visitors. Anything over 2% is gravy.
Can't say I'm there yet. :(
Even when sales pretty much come with a given amount of traffic, you have dead times when not much sells, no matter what. (peaks and valleys)
Does your site give a good "trust factor" feeling? (secure ordering, professional look, etc)
I would be looking at the traffic patterns and paths on from your logfiles. Are you mostly getting one page hit-and-runs? (maybe the traffic isn't quite targeted enough?) Are the visitors making it to the purchase pages, but not making it through the shopping cart? (maybe there is a technical problem with the ordering process? or maybe it's not easy to understand?)
Try to get an idea of what visitors are doing when they get to your site, and that will probably provide some insight. It sounds like you are working with a small sample right now, but you should be able to learn something from the traffic patterns.
