Forum Moderators: buckworks
The two succesful ones were both hand written in html, one only took paypal (so there!) the other a full credit card payment system.
So spurred on by my two successful sites I spent a mint building a third site - hired a parttime coder and watched it flop - Big time no orders or anything really.
So how many successful sites do/did you have over failures?
I've posted my problems on another thread so hopefully someone will find out what's wrong and advise me onto the right path.
It's my only site and I don't want my record to be 0% success.
btw, what were you selling on the "un"successful site?
This worked like a dream! the only time it has.
People pay more here than if they bought at my site. people are strange.
Whatdo you sell?
Good move. Selling art in general is largely about trust.
>> People pay more here than if they bought at my site
Exactly. People trust ebay, so sales are easier to achieve. When they land on your own site, before you can make ANY sale, you HAVE to establish a level of trust that will encourage them to take out their credit card
I've found that selling the artist, rather than the painting can work well, if you know what I mean
DaveN
Im glad its not just me
One of our websites takes £8,000 - 10,000 per month in sales has 700 visitors per day and is only web based.
Bek
Things changed in January when our orders jumped to 4 a day after we successfully optimized it for Google. In July, the orders jumper to 20 a day when started using PPC heavily and the order rate had stayed there. To have 2 such large leaps within the same year is very exciting.
We found that customers who bought through eBay actually trusts you less then those who bought through our site. Anyway, we no longer sell on eBay because we don't have time.
Hi PCInk, I wonder what were your large investments in the first place? Were they for a physical storage facility or were they spent on advertising? In our case, our start up costs were less than $1000 and in we did not lose any money in any month.
The first month I took £500, I am now averaging around £30,000 per month.
Traffic is still quite limited, I get around 200 uniques a day but I am pushing for more.
Development costs have been zero, just a few “how to do books” from PC World.
The only money that gets thrown at it is via Adwords, I spend around £150.00 per month.
It takes a lot of time, but if you know your market you’ll get there in the end.
The products I sell are products I have been selling from a traditional business for around 15 years.
Karl
What were the books you bought?
What were the books you bought?
How to build dynamic websites using PHP/Dreamweaver type of book :)
Karl
I suspect that Karl's products are high-priced specialized products which attract a lot of repeat customers. Otherwise, I can't see how 200 unique visitors a day could generate many sales.
I suspect that Karl's products are high-priced specialized products which attract a lot of repeat customers. Otherwise, I can't see how 200 unique visitors a day could generate many sales
They are, average sale is from £100 to £500, and a lot are repeat customers.
I am in the north of England where things are nowhere near as expensive as down south, thats where we score on the high value products.
A £500 item in my kneck of the woods would sell down south for a good 25% more.
Most of the others are from remote British locations where the products I sell are not readily available.
Karl
By ech its grim up north.... unless you own a profitable web site!
With the high grossing sites are these customers new to you or are they old customers buying in a diffrent manner?
With the high grossing sites are these customers new to you or are they old customers buying in a diffrent manner?
New customers and repeat business.
Existing local customers have accounts or pay c.o.d ,they receive products via our own transport, but we keep the two sides of the business completely separate.
It's actually slighty more expensive to buy over the counter or by van delivery than it is on our website.
Karl
Karl, is that site relying on something like PayPal or did you go full-scale with a merchant account and stuff?
We have a merchant account, I use Barclays EPDQ for payment processing.
It's just that getting a merchant account in the UK, unless you have a long track record and lots of accounts to show
It can be difficult but Paypal isn't the way to go, not if you are serious about it.
Have you looked at EPDQ lite?
[epdq.co.uk...]
I think it is designed for the smaller business, but I'm not 100%, maybe someone here may be able to point you to a suitable payment processor.
Karl
I would have used 2Co but with their recent problems - forget for the time being, just have to wait and see.
Been going about two months now and I'm promoting mainly though PPC. Get around 100+ visitors a day and average around 3 orders a day. The average order value is around £25 making about £8 profit after all expenses...
Anyone got any suggestions as to the next step to bump up the number of visitors? I've registered with all the search engines and have started showing up in searches, but I'm still not getting much traffic other than through PPC.
Didnt work for Google though... Dont know why.
Seriously, I found web position gold to be a great help in as much as it showed me how to optimise my site and yes my visitor number doubled tripling sales.
i guess i'm seeing something akin to writer's block in that i can't decide what to go for and then what content to put with it...
then again, i'm not "right brained" (artistic) but more "left brained" (technical, logical)... i can't write a story but can write a technical reference manual or even a step by step how to manual... my background comes from being selftaught about computers since i was about 14 or so and digging into their design, make up, and programming...
so where would someone like myself turn? ideas, please...
ideas, please...
Write a list off all the things that interest you, and all the things you like.
Do a search on google for all of them, and find one that isn't represented well.........that should be the answer.
Selling something you no nothing about, or have no interest in is a waste of time, you have to feel passionate about what you sell. :)
Karl
Do you have a fav genre of films? Gangster - Romance etc sell items books T-shirts related to that.
Its simple really my problem is not having enough timeto DO all the things I want to do on the web.
Its no problem really.
Its simple really my problem is not having enough timeto DO all the things I want to do on the web.
Tell me about it, there aint enough hours in the day, days in the week, weeks in the year.........I'm sure you get the picture.
Karl :)
Spent 3 months of my life and a ton of money launching a site a few years back. Got plenty of orders - unfortunately, I had so much trouble getting the merchandise from the manufacturer(s), so many order headaches, etc. - that we killed it off (by this point we were cancelling 2/3 of the orders anyway, and it was sucking massive amounts of time from my profitable businesses).
I still think it's the best site I ever built. It was also the dumbest mistake I ever made.
Point being this: technology is great, but it can only take you so far. Don't put the 'cart before the horse'. Make sure you've got your suppliers/manufacturers lined out and you can actually GET the product.
Don't ASSUME
Ours sells fetish clothing, adult lingerie and more, we have no problems using barclays merchant services, even for our more stronger sites.
We started off web building and out turnover from 3 sites is nearly £15,000 per month and our average sale is about £30.00. The secret is to look after your customers like gold, dont be too greedy, make a small profit for a start and keep going even when you feel things are not happening.
The web has a funny way of doing nothing then suddenly whoosh you dont know where you are, just make sure you can handle the sales when this happens because it will, and also live and breathe your business, think successfull and you will be.
Bek
