I Give Up!

[mdean]

I am beginning to really give up on this whole ecommerce thing. 800 visitors yesterday and not 1 sale. My site is seasonal, but a lot of the products are not. Overall, doing a good amount of sales for the year, but not feeling much profit. Next month we will be up 2 years. Just wondering if we should pack it in.

Does anyone have any thoughts to share? Shouldn't we be doing a lot better after 2 years?! I just feel that search engine listings are the most effective way to turn a sale. With the cost of pay per click...it doesn't seem worth it. Our pages are optimized to the max...

[Lord Majestic]

800 visitors (if they are genuine visitors and were not tricked to come to site via popups etc) should have generated 8 sales at fairly low 1% conversion ratio. Something is definately wrong and if I were you I'd dig deep to find out what: check where people drop off, particuarly in checkout process.

[Livenomadic]

This might be a really stupid question, and don't take this the wrong way, BUT have you ever tested your checkout process? Could it be broken?

[Liane]

as well as the above suggestions/questions ...

If your products are priced properly ...
If your site really is optimized to the max ...
If your site really is optimized to the max for the right keywords ...
If your products are displayed properly and there is sufficient product info ...
If your site is aimed at your target audience and is reaching them ...

and you are still not making a living ... you might need to consider that you may have the "wrong" kind of products for sale.

Two years is a very long time to see a meaningful return on your time and energy.

[mdean]

Yes, I check out the shopping cart periodically, and yes some of the traffic may be coming to the site without the intent to purchase. We have a lot of information on the site. We do well from April all the way through Dec. and I figure that the six weeks after Christmas...people are broke and waiting for income tax returns to come in. Nevertheless, I was expecting to make a decent living BY NOW!

Can anyone tell me what type of percentage they are able to pay themselves out of their gross profit. That might give us an idea if we are anywhere on the right track and just need to continally work on increasing gross sales for the year and pass that magic threshold..

[iJeep]

I think the thing that has helped me out the most is boosting my profit margin without changing the price much. If you are able to work out deals with your supplier(s) to get a better price then that might be the best way to make a profit.

For example, one of my popular products sells for about $350. Normal cost is around $260, I was able to negotiate a deal to buy 20-50 at a time (depending on if the manufacturer is overstocked) at just $200 each. I know that if you aren't moving a lot of product that is hard to do. (Those aren't the actual numbers, but they are a percentage of the actual numbers, so the percentages are still the same.) Other suppliers might want just one large order to drop you to a lower price level permenantly. I have even taken out a short term loan at a bank to do this. It will help you grow a reputation at the bank and in my case the interest was more than paid for in that one order by the extra profit. Taking a loan might be too risky if you aren't getting many orders for some popular product.

Finally, one thing that is possible, but difficult to do just right is that you can actually sell the same item at a higher price (not much higher) than the competition. You have to make your customer feel like you are a safer, more reputable, or just overall better place to buy from than anybody else. Of course, this is very hard to do, but it will actually make people think that the price is just a little bit higher because it costs you more to give better service or whatever it might be.

[CernyM]

Your conversion rates with 800 visitors a day will bounce all over the place. Its hard to read much of anything from that.

Long term, my conversion rate is relatively stable (actually increasing slightly, as one would expect). On a day to day basis though, it varies widely. Add in the variance caused by order sizes that can bounce all over the place, and its just not worth much to look at single day stats.

[incrediBILL]

You may want to analyze your market in general - perhaps the products aren't compelling, priced wrong, shipping too high, ordering too confusing, etc. If the products are compelling and your site was converting sales easily, then CPC advertising would pay for itself in a snap.

Assuming you have a reasonable ecommerce program and/or web stat program, you should check for the most common exit pages. A high number of exits from your cart page would definitely give you a clue it's abandoned carts. If this isn't the case, that they exit more from your product pages, that would either indicate the products miss the mark somehow or your traffic is coming there for the wrong reasons (bad SEO, wrong keywords). Check your web stats to see what query keywords are bringing your visitors, that will tell you a lot.

One way to find out the answer and not play guessing games wasting more time and money is simple - put an exit survey that pops up when visitors exit your site. Put these exit pop-ups on your cart and checkout process pages to ask why they didnt complete the purchase process and see if it's price, shipping, payment options or what.

[Essex_boy]

I fund products were teh quality can be subjective, i.e paintings, dont sell very well online unless you show several examples of completed work.

Sounds obvious I know but it wasnt to me. I was PAYING for around 400 a day to come to the site and received zero sales untill I I did place several photos of completed work on the site.

Anyhow Ive sticky mailed you for the URL of your site, Ill take a ook and report back.