Driving sales and traffic...need a vehicle, not automotive.

bigdoor · #1 (**permalink**) 07-26-2004, 01:30 PM

Granted our online gallery and website has only been up and running for a month and a half, we would like to see more sales. We tried Adwords and recieved improved traffic but that was it. Did a direct mailer to potential buyers and still waiting for results. Art can be a hard sell but they're must be people interested out there somewhere? on the www. Are we doing something wrong or missing a step? We're averaging over 1200 visits a month when we were using Adwords and 600-800 when we aren't. Any suggestions? or are we just being impatient?

flood6 · #2 (**permalink**) 07-26-2004, 01:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bigdoor

Granted our online gallery and website has only been up and running for a month and a half...We're averaging over 1200 visits a month when we were using Adwords and 600-800 when we aren't.

Whatever method you are using to calculate those numbers based on a site 1.5 months old can't be trusted too much.

Give it some time. Keep learning about organic SEO. Learn more about the PPC game. Work on getting more inbound links. Keep refining and improving your site.

You definitely have to give it some more time. I wouldn't base any decisions on what you are seeing right now.

mtheory · #3 (**permalink**) 07-27-2004, 08:43 AM

The traditional venue for selling this type of work is a walkin gallery. You've missed the boat at recreating that experience on the web.

Display images need to be much larger. I wouldn't expect someone to decide on an original piece of art based on an image not much larger than a thumbnail(250 pixels). Utilize your full canvas. The artwork should be the center of attention.

http://imageselect.us
http://imageselect.us/demo

bigdoor · #4 (**permalink**) 07-27-2004, 01:38 PM

Thank you for your comments. Especially this one...

The traditional venue for selling this type of work is a walkin gallery. You've missed the boat at recreating that experience on the web.

Isn't that the beauty of the web, new experiences, new idea's, offering something different? If we recreated the experience, what would make us unique? from walking into a gallery. We might as well have opened one.The name of the game is to stand out from your competitors, not blend in. Don't you think? Just my opinion.

View the larger images of artwork by clicking throught the thumbnail gallery. That's there just to give you a quick view of the range of artwork we feature.

Thanks again for your comments.

brandall · #5 (**permalink**) 07-27-2004, 10:08 PM

bigdoor,

I think you missed computermark's point. Your site looks great, and the experience is fantistic. The issue is that even when you click through the thumbnail images in the galary, the larger image on the product page is still not very large. You should have a 3rd version of the image that the user can click through from the product page which is 450x450 pixels - 600x600 pixels.

I sell handbags online, and 90+% of our customers view the enlarged image before buying. I imagine anyone would expect to be able to do the same before they will buy a piece of art.

Good luck.

wavedancing · #6 (**permalink**) 07-27-2004, 10:18 PM

In my opinion, the the big pictures on your site is too small. And you might need to show more than one pictures for each piece.

I also have an art gallery site, I have an average of 1000 unique visitors every day. And I am not selling well at all. I think art is hard to sell. I don't know if everyone here will agree.

bigdoor · #7 (**permalink**) 07-28-2004, 01:02 AM

The problem I face with larger images is people right clicking them and printing their own version. They are not going to be high end of course...but I've seen worse. This incorporates a whole other problem when it comes to copy rights etc. Art is a hard thing to sell, very subjective and you only buy it if you need it and like it.

I appreciate the comments....keep them coming. You are sparking many ideas that will improve the our website experience and that's what we are all looking for...

This forum is great! Thanks everyone.

wavedancing · #8 (**permalink**) 07-29-2004, 12:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bigdoor

The problem I face with larger images is people right clicking them and printing their own version. They are not going to be high end of course...but I've seen worse. This incorporates a whole other problem when it comes to copy rights etc. Art is a hard thing to sell, very subjective and you only buy it if you need it and like it.

If people can not see clearly, they definitely will not buy. I actually have quite a few people ask for copy rights before they use the pictures. I think we should assume that the prints is not as good as the original ones. And people know that prints worth much less than the original. So I think you don't need to worry so much about the copy rights. You may just need to put a note saying that copy rights are reserved.

And to give people a better view of the art works, you don't have to take a big picture of the who piece. You can take big pictures of partials of the original works. And if you want to prevent illegal copies, you can leave a small part of the original uncovered by the pictures. In that way, people can not stick the prints together to get a big picture of the whole piece. I hope this helps.

itman_dk · #9 (**permalink**) 07-30-2004, 05:29 PM

What I get out of this is, the issue is getting hits, not the experiance once people have come to the site. When working with flash pages, One loses many advantages such as ALT tags, and keyword density. I would think adding html verbich and some image links with relevant syntax and along with META TAG optimization would improve rankings and hits. Hence sales. I believe the visual apeal is not nearly as important as ranking for moving product.

Eugene
webmaster@sinclairit.com
www.werloans.com
www.sinclairit.com