Typical trends in a new shop

Looking at what happens to a new ecommerce shop

[markbaa]

Hi All

So I launched my baby a few days ago - an ecommerce site. Went live on Saturday. Got a pretty healthy lot of traffic almost immediately due to a combination of (in order) google adwords, posts to relevant niche forums, and friends/family/word of mouth. Monitoring sessions on the site, there's a very healthy flow of people browsing the site, so no shortage of interested visitors.

However, what we don't have is a lot of orders. Out of several hundred visitors, only got 4 orders (including 2 from friends/family). Now, I'm not *too* worried as I expect a ramp up/familiarisation/brand building phase.

But I want to know, what are other peoples experiences? Did they see high traffic/low sales initially? Did it trend up over time? How long did it take? What do you see as a visitors/buyers ratio? Do most people wait till a 2nd, 3rd, .... visit before buying?

FYI: the store is in a consumable retail category, appealing brand name products, attractive/professional looking site design and prices which are genuinely well below average. Customer feedback is positive.

[ecommerceprofit]

It takes lots and lots of time - sometimes there are exceptions but most businesses are built one day at a time over several years before you earn a decent living. Persistance is the key...

[markbaa]

Sure, I understand it will take time. Just wondering what trends to expect. I don't expect 1,000 orders on day 1! My guess is we will have a solid regular sales in about 6 - 12 months, although still growing. But that's the question - what should I expect in the early days?

[Raymond]

You should expect big fluctuations on sales. Some days you would get 1% conversion and MOST days you would get 0. I remember when my first dot com was started, my monthly overall conversion was just about 0.25%. This will change as you keep your site running with more updates and upgrades.

Don't take positive feedbacks too seriously. You should value BAD feedbacks 100 times more valuable than positive feedbacks. Good feedbacks can often be false. Bad feedbacks are RARE, and they are usually real and can tell you things that most customers would not tell because of such a nice person they are.

As the previous poster said, it took me over 1 year to make a living, and took me another year to make a pretty good living. There were times that I got so frustrated with my sites I almost went to look for a job instead. Persistance is really the key.

[budgie]

Initially you might find that a lot of those visitors are just curious because you've told them about something new. Monitor where they're all coming from, what they're searching for in search engines etc to make sure any ads are properly targeted, or you may get lots of visitors looking for something you don't actually have.

It normally takes at least a few months to start seeing some results, and a lot longer before you start feeling happy with the results!

[Essex_boy]

If your getting one sale per 100 vistors your not doing to badly

[vincevincevince]

Interestingly, I run a number of affiliate sites, and manage to drive about 5% through, of which about 25% convert. Overall this ties in quite well with the 1% overall, although I'd like to know how the target stores would convert my traffic if they had it directly (have I managed to pre-qualify traffic rather efficiently, or are they getting around 25% conversion anyway?).

[FalseDawn]

The purpose of an affiliate site is to pre-qualify traffic, surely? You might be getting a fair amount of not particularly well targetted traffic - depending where it's coming from. If so, a lot of this traffic would be of little value to the store itself.

Conversion rates depend on lots of things - but it's not really this that matters. At the end of the day, the only thing that counts is your profit. :-)

[jecasc]

First of all you should do a little research on how many people are looking for the goods you offer.

I always use the Overture Search Suggestion Tool for my niche. (Also retail of consumable products.) You can find it here. [inventory.de.overture.com]

However keep in mind that Overture/Yahoo only has a small percentage of the search market.

Search for the brand names and other keywords. This will help you to find out how to optimize your shop and how many sales you can expect.

For example if you type in a brand name you might find out that only 30 searches have been made for that specific brand name in the last month in the overture network.

If you are the only one selling this brand this would result in about 6-10 sales a month according to my experience.

If others sell this brand too, the number could well go to zero.

I once had a product line where this was the case. So I had to adopt my marketing stragegy.

I looked up what ingredients these products where containing and found out that while nobody was looking for the specific brand, thousands where looking for products that were containing this special ingredient. So I set up some pages describing this ingredient and the products, created a few adwords and sales where soon going up.

[blueskym]

Mark
Very early days but your getting 2% conversion which I hope you already know is pretty healthy.
I have been at it 5 years and manage about 3% which having talked to other owners over the years is pretty average it seems .
my prevuious experience was catalogue mail order which had a pretty similiar conversion rate ..IE 1000 brochures out ...30 orders ..please take that as general goods though if your selling $3000 diamond rings I dont t\reckon the conversion rate would be err kinda lower! ..so ......
you can simply see what you need to do .increase visitors numbers as simple as that .....however thats a lot easier said than done

best of luck

paul