Forum Moderators: buckworks
The items we sell have a pretty high value (average purchase is about $3000) and are somewhat seasonal. For the month of January, our conversion rate is about 13%, but drops to 1.5% in the month of May (we expect 4% for the month of June and 5-6% for July). The funny thing is, our traffic is generally double in the May-July timeframe than it is the January-March timeframe. Each day we study the patterns of over 30k people.
Lately one of the major changes we've made is to tweak our check-out page providing no links back to the site and cutting the check-out process from two pages to one. With this simple change, we cut out shopping cart abandonment in half, but our abandonment rate is still about 70%. We know most people go to the shopping cart page just to see the final cost, but we also know a user will generally end up buying after checking the prices on multiple items. The 70% figure is overall -- Our abandonment rate is only 40% if we exclude users that eventually purchase from us (so while they may abandon the cart 3-10 times, in the end they purchase from us).
I'd like to hear from others that offer high-end items and what they've done to help increase purchases. I'd also be interested in hearing from those with seasonal items and if they notice a high traffic, but low conversion period of the year and what they've done to combat this. We alread do heavy discounting (we're running a special now providing 60% off certain products and it has had a huge success, but this special is ending soon).
One of the things we're considering is a "name your price" method of shopping. Our web visitors generally visit all of our competitors before making a decision and if they find a multiple very similiar products across all the competitors, they will generally purchase from the cheapest competitor. This time of year we have full time employees that do nothing but discount products. By allowing visitors to name their price, we believe we could cut down on the amount of time spent discounting and also give those users incentive that visit at 3am a chance to name a price instead of going off to a competitor and purchasing a similiar item for $100 less than our current price. Anyone have any experience with this type of thing?
I'm not sure how you are defining conversions, but if they are a percentage of overall users, it sounds like you're doing great. 30,000 daily x 15% convert = 4500 sales x $3000 average = $13.5M/day.
