Sale suddenly stopped!

[Evan_Miles]

Hello-

In may i began offering two eBooks for sale and right off the bat i was selling a book every two days. In June i averaged one sale per day and this continued until July 1st. Since July 1st iv'e only had two sales and no sales since July 9th.

Iv'e heard that July sales online do drop off noticably. I did a test purchase from my computer and everything worked fine.

I'm using SBI & clickbank.

Any thoughts?

Thanks-
Evan

[Sanenet]

How're your stats? Did you get banned from Yahoo or Google? Did your adwords campaign run out of money?

[Evan_Miles]

Oh, sorry, i forgot to mention that my stats are improving daily. I advertise with several PPC's and have been improving the % with those. My traffic from SE's are up daily as well. I have over 200 pages. All aspects have been improving daily, that's why i'm so baffled by the sudden stop in sales!

[Robino]

Test your site to make sure it's functioning properly.

Were PPC and SE the sources which were leading to your conversions?

Maybe some other site was linking to yours and stopped.

Did you make any usability changes to your site?

[Evan_Miles]

Iv'e tested every link related to a sale. I even purchased one of my books to make sure the sale showed up at clickbank. I did do some site improvements, related to content, that should have improved conversion, not stopped it completely!

I'm baffled!

[yowza]

Check that someone didn't post your ebook on their website and check for people selling it on ebay, etc.

I would take a sentence out of your book and look for an exact match in Google, just in case.

[Evan_Miles]

No illegal copies found on the web or ebay.

Here's a paranoid question-
How hard would it be for a hacker to intercept sales and still provide the ebook for download?
I'm using both a third party host (Site Build It) and credit card processor (ClickBank).

This so annoying!

Thanks for the brainstorming folks!

Evan

[Easy_Coder]

Iv'e tested every link related to a sale.

You shouldn't be testing your own stuff... find or hire someone to do the qa work for you. You'll be amazed at what another pair of eyes will find.

[paybacksa]

In case it helps, I am working for a client who showed me a site with the same behavior. The product is a downloaded video with DVD purchase option, plus adsense.

Sales were about .2 % per day, with weekends slightly higher. Went on for 3 months until last week when it stopped.

I have determined it is a slump in sales. Traffic is up, on par with sliding average for past several months. Click thru is lower but not by much. The problem is that the conversions have dropped to basically nill. Up until Friday night, the sales were actually ZERO for a solid week.

I would have hoped AdSense would give more clues, but that program is so ridiculously variable it's more annoying than helpful.

I suspect competing products and activities are responsible. I suspect someone may be selling it for a lower price starting last week, as this product has fairly high commercial exposure and has been pretty well price controlled in the past.

That's where competitive analysis shows its value - it can (will?) reveal where those sales have gone, and suggest strategies to get them back. In this case it is not worthwhile but inmany cases it is very much worthwhile.

[Evan_Miles]

Thanks for the tips.

My sales did pick up and are close to what they were prior. Iv'e heard that mid July is noted for being low to nill.

[decaff]

One thing to look for in your logs is how many people are bookmarking your site per day vs. your total unique visitors count..

I have one client who sees, on average, a 10% bookmark ratio...we know the traffic is very sound and comes from our main keywords phrases from the main engines ... but people simply have a tendency to bookmark while comparison shopping...we never really know when these bookmarks will bear fruit but it tends be anywhere from days to months..

just a thought.. and if your ebook covers a topic that is cyclical in nature...you may just be experiencing a natural down cycle...since you have only been up and running for a short time...you may or may not know what the actual purchase cycle is for your particular product on an annual basis....

there's nothing wrong with being paranoid...there are plenty of people who are clever enough to steal traffic and sales..

[alain_bonaf]

>My sales did pick up and are close to what they were prior. Iv'e heard that mid July is noted for being low to nill.

Maybe it's correlated with the Dow Jones :D

[prophet.net...]

It is well known that when market is down consumers spend less in general :)

[xcandyman]

Wow! I didn't think me trying to stop spending wildley would effect the internet like this :-)

Back on topic... Mid July sales are nearly always down every year in many areas of business. It's the time most people go on holiday and can't afford to splash out.

[Evan_Miles]

Thanks again for the feedback. I would like to track bookmarks, but i don't think i can using SBI's software.Is this a pretty standard feature in tracking software?

Sales are steady.

Evan