Forum Moderators: buckworks
Firstly I would like to say hi to everybody being new to this forum and secondly a question for you all!
We launched our site a few weeks back and to date have even had a few sales. The customer visits are growing and now we are getting upwards of 2000 a week. (We did have a holding page up for some time so we got spidered)> What puzzles me is - do web sales have any apparent pattern, we had a handful of sales almost instantly and then nothing. Our visits are now quadrupled and people are staying on the site for 10 + mins, some over an hour and looking at 50 + pages. I was rather confused as ideally I would like to see some kind of sales pattern emerging.
Do you guys and girls find that web sales are more of a weekend thing? or just completely random. Our products are Adult related, and really we have something for everyone.
your thoughts appreciated.
hmmmmmmmmm!
If you rely on repeat business, like most of us do, then your ratio obviously it'll go up if your traffic stays constant.
If you hit a 1% ratio, then it's actually very good - most direct marketing campaigns clock at a much lower rate.
Your is 0.3%, not bad actually.
To increase sales, you may want to change your sales pitch - what's holding your customer up? Since it's adult based, is it concern regarding privacy? Lack of "free first month" or an incentive like that? Maybe your checkout procedure is too cumbersome... people DO abandon their cart if the process is too hard.
Play around & let us know the result.
How are your prices? Are you delivery charges and timespans listed?
Sticky me and Ill place a mock order.
Don't pay too much attention to other peoples' percentages....acquisition rates vary wildly by industry, product type, avg. purchase size, target demographic, etc. But pay close attention to your return on advertising. If it's high, invest more, if it's negative, tweak your strategy.
One really wierd pattern I see on one of my sites is shopping cart abandonment. Abandoned carts and orders seem to come in clusters -- so I'll get 5 orders in a row, then a string of 20 consecutive abandoned carts, and so on. I've looked into software & server glitches, and the only other possibility I can think of is that my campaigns are sending traffic in spurts and the abandoned carts are coming from less productive adverts. It's puzzling.
The thing about all ecommerce sites is that there is no consistency or buying patterns on daily sales.
We run lots of e-commerce sites and from one day to the next you never know what your sales will be, so we calculate total sales over the month.
Just keep doing everything you can to increase traffic, and dont worry too much about your sales on a daily rate, as this can sometimes be extremely worrying for new businesses in their infancy.
Rogerg,
We too are in the adult business, this is the toughest business on the web with a lot of competition, you will need lots of traffic to succeed as the conversions can be low.
Bek.
Our traffic is steadily climbing from 200 uniques in Sept 03, to ~1000 uniques in Oct 04.
In terms of conversion rate, we aren't close to 1% yet. It varies from 0.5% to 0.8%.
Even after being around for quite some time and getting just under 1,000 uniques per day, we would still get days without a single sale. But then that is made up for during a few good days.
I think i already mentioned that!
Bek.
