Baffled by drop in conversion rate

Same product and traffic - fewer sales

[Andymac]

I recently produced a new site which I had hoped would respond to customers requests for more detailed information on individual products. This inevitably resulted in an extra step between arrival at the site and puchasing. Could this be the reason for less sales?
Presumably there is a correlation between price of product and the amount of info (larger images, different views etc)that customers need before making a decision. I have either got the balance wrong and prospective customers have lost the will to live before purchasing or just persuaded myself (wrongly)that my new site is better than the old one.

(most traffic from adwords etc. so I don't think traffic quality has changed a lot in the last two weeks since I changed over)

Any wisdom from the experts much appreciated

[Receptional]

It may be that the answer is much simpler.

You say you have the same traffic, but what stats are you checking? Check the number of failed page requests before and after...

Have you changed all your old page names so that everyone is finding inner pages that don't exist?

If so - you need to learn about error 404 and error 301 messages very quickly.

[Andymac]

Thanks Receptional

I am getting around 7% 404 errors - is this too high?

(it is a completely new site - no pages the same)

[MonkeyBoyUK]

Perhaps you might benefit from setting up a few redirect pages using the old names you are getting 404 errors for.
That way people using old/out of date bookmarks will get redirected to the new pages.

[Receptional]

Well - it may not be the whole solution, but I'd work on it. 404 means Document not found. So - that explains 7% of your visitors going awol...

Check that you have updated all your Adwords links of course... it may be that you have some adwords links going to pages that no longer exist.

Apart from that, I think you should check your stats to see whether people are stumbling at the point you suspect. Some things to check are:

Are a bigger percentage now leaving after only seeing the home page than before? If so, the site design is not so compelling to your viewers.

Has the percentage of people that finsih filling in the form(s) over the people that start filling in the forms gone up or down (You should be able to see how many time each page is loaded in your stats).

[Andymac]

Thanks for the advice

The % 404 errors has gone up from 3 to 7% but I just put that down to an increased number of pages.

With reference to another thread about registration and the number of pages customers have to visit before final ordering - I am beginning to wonder wether the perfect web shopper is one who is prepared to commit only if they don't get too much time to reconsider and that too much choice and detail is self defeating.

But I digress and shall check the stats more closely and set up some re-directs as advised.

[Sunshyn]

Would you be able to make the new, detailed information optional instead of an extra, required step before the sale? Maybe easy order pages from which one could either purchase directly or follow links to the additional information (where they can also start the order process). We do something of the sort, trying to make it easy for both the customers who don't want to bother with details as well as those who insist on them.

[Andymac]

Thanks - I will give this a try

[watercrazed]

definitely, use detailed pages as a followup, We use a summary page some heavily optimized text lead in 1/2 dz to 2 doz releated products, pictures, pricing, maybe a senctence or two with buy now buttons, links to more details. These are my highest ranked and visited pages. I don't have all the tracking setup but about 1/3 intiate the order from the summary page, some traveling to several detail pages, then buying several products (need more of that ;-)) from the summary page.

[pbreit]

Clearly your new site is simply less effective than your old site. Seeing both side-by-side, I'm sure a number of the readers here could spot the problem instantly.

[francesca]

I think that your competitors' sites could also make a big difference.

Have they lowered their prices?
Have they launched a new promo?
Were big improvements made on their site?