500 Unique Visitors - No Sales Yet

[greenhat]

I recently converted my affiliate/adsense site to an ecommerce site.

For the last 4 months I have been successfully getting about 300 unique visitors per day (all from SEO)

I just opened the store a little over a day ago and there has not been one sale yet (apart from my test sale).

I'm using bigcommerce for the platform.

I've tried to make as many changes as possible to make the site more appealing from what I've read about conversions over the years for ecommerce.

I have a little banner right under my navigation telling people that they get free shipping for any order over $139 and all other orders are only $5.95 for shipping.

I know 500 unique visitors isn't enough to get sold conversion stats but I think it's safe to say that it's definitely not around the average 1 or 2%.

I will say that I'm not able to offer the most popular name brands at this time but the two brands I do offer are sold on Amazon. For some of my prices I'm better than Amazon and some I'm not.

I was really hoping to have at least a couple sales by now.

Obviously I'd rather not reveal my site at this time.

One thing I have noticed that might be detrimental is the what bigcommerce does when some clicks the add to cart button.

First a window pops up showing what you've added and below shows some other related products.

When the customer clicks on the "proceed to checkout" button they get taken to a page that gives them the option checkout as a guest, register an account or login to a previously created account. That page does not have my sidebar on it and it does not show the product that they placed in their cart. Seems some of those things could be responsible for shopping cart abandonment.

I just installed google analytics this morning.

Any input anyone has would be greatly appreciated.

[GeoffreyYu7]

Well as you mentioned the problem is not traffic, but conversion. Since you're not showing your site, I can only speculate, but the problem can be a number of things. Insufficient variety of product, overly complicated or confusing site (too many steps to get to the shopping cart), unprofessional appearance, overly expensive products. Your problem can be any of these or none of these, I can't tell without looking at the actual site. However, if your problem is cost, I would suggest creating a temporary promotion just to get people to start buying from you. If you can do a good job with that, you should be able to retain a proportion of those customers. Hope that helps.

[greenhat]

Thank you for responding. well I was gonna send you the site by pm but now I see I can't send pm's till I have 10 posts.

If you're up for having a look I could email it to you, or skype or soemthing

Well as you mentioned the problem is not traffic, but conversion. Since you're not showing your site, I can only speculate, but the problem can be a number of things. Insufficient variety of product, overly complicated or confusing site (too many steps to get to the shopping cart), unprofessional appearance, overly expensive products. Your problem can be any of these or none of these, I can't tell without looking at the actual site. However, if your problem is cost, I would suggest creating a temporary promotion just to get people to start buying from you. If you can do a good job with that, you should be able to retain a proportion of those customers. Hope that helps.

[keyon]

I think GeoffreyYu7 pretty much covered all the possible reasons for no sales -- however, there are a lot of e-commerce sites out there that fail all of the above and still squeak out at least one or two sales from 500 visitors. Sure, I'd try a few things to see if there's a major problem somewhere....but I wouldn't spend too much time on it. If you don't see significant results from the changes you make, you might be better off to find another product/niche.

[cbosleeds]

Could also be that what you sell has seasonal blips, or that people finding the site arent looking to shop (you should get an idea of that from Analytics). however, just a couple of days worth of data is not enough to tell and without seeing the website we're really just speculating.

[claybutler]

I recently converted my affiliate/adsense site to an ecommerce site.

I just opened the store a little over a day ago and there has not been one sale yet (apart from my test sale).

Whoa, slow down there partner. One day is not enough time to judge anything. Especially since you've indicated that you don't have a lot of major brands and one can assume probably not operating in unique niche space either.

BigCommerce is a good platform so I don't think that is the issue either unless you modified their template structure in an odd way.

Also it's normal not to show someone what's in the cart once they choose "proceed to checkout". The first step is almost always just "guest or login" options. Then near the end there is a review screen where you can double check the cart.

[SnerdeyWebs]

Interesting.. how does the user with one post become a featured thread in the newsletter? As Spock would say "it does not compute" as we're basically having some issues trying to offer advice without the use of PM's and no signature etc...

Willing to assist but is the "Q" involved here

[feiman]

Being successful with ecommerce is about much more than building a website, doing some SEO and driving traffic. There are so many factors at play that it doesn't make sense to even hazard a guess without seeing the site and the analytics. Is the traffic relevant? Are they tire kickers at the top of the funnel, or are they further along in the decision making process? What is your bounce rate? Where are they entering/exiting the site? And the list goes on and on.

Then there's the intangible issues to consider. How are you building trust with your customers? Why should they buy from you instead of any number of other websites (as pretty much every product is now a commodity)?

Ecommerce success happens when you are able to Attract, Engage, Retain, Learn and Relate with your customers. It sounds like you're attracting visits, but you need to speak to the other four points as well.

[erima]

Hi Greenhat,

I'm curious why you didn't include your site url in the post - it makes it hard to give any valid advise without actually seeing the site.
Most sites that do not perform fall into three categories:

1. Competitiveness - The products that are for sale on the site are readily available and can be found elsewhere for a cheaper price or have very limited demand with established providers.

2. Call to Action - The site talks about the product but there is no clear call to action - "Buy it Now" or "Click for Free Shipping" are all ways that sites guide the potential customer from just looking to buying. Make sure that your site makes you WANT to buy the product.

3. Structure - If your site has poor navigation, irrelevant content, or a clumsy check out. Make sure that you are using Google Analytics. You want to focus on what % of people come to your site for each key words or search phrases ... and of those visitors, how many click through to products?? (%)... how many click through to checkout page?(%) and finally how many sales are completed. The goal is to understand where your traffic is coming from (top searches) and when they get to the site, what do they do? (do the top pages you viewed correspond to the search terms?).

You need to understand where you are losing the same - if it is the:

1. Landing page - then revise your content
2. Product page - then improve your call to action
3. Checkout - then streamline your checkout, check your shipping modules, coupon modules, anything that could cause a customer to change their mind.

So if I was diagramming the traffic this is what I would be looking for ->

Search Term:
[keyword A] #a -> Landing page [lpa=% of a] -> Product page [ppa% of lpa]
[keyword B] #b -> Landing page [lpb=% of b] -> Product page [ppb% of lpb]
[keyword C] #c -> Landing page [lpc=% of a] -> Product page [ppa% of lpc]

[started checkout] % of users who went to checkout page
[completed checkout] % of users who successfully ordered
[abandoned carts] % of users starting checkout who did not complete order.

I have never used big commerce

Do they provide statistics for abandoned carts?
Do they allow you to use analytics within the cart?

Good luck.
Eric

[zeo]

greenhat, sounds like you do know what you are doing and GeoffreyYu7 and others gave you very good suggestions. Just two more cents here.

Did you cover your "trustability"? Can you customers learn about you and your company on the website and trust that you are a reliable vendor? Make sure you have "trust-building" elements on your site like a company story, physical address if possible, and contact information prominent on your site, so your customers can contact you at any point of their visit. Testimonials from customers are very important for online businesses, make sure to have a page of those once you actually have them. Other "trustability" elements: professional look and feel, memberships and affiliations, your guarantee and technical details like installed, working and up-to-date SSL certificate for ecommerce site.

Also, once you have your analytics data, analyze how your visitors found you. Do your search queries look like they are bringing qualified traffic?

Hope this helps and good luck!

BTW I agree with claybutler "it's normal not to show someone what's in the cart once they choose "proceed to checkout", I don't think it's a problem.