Mature site relaunch, but sales falling rapidly...

[jeffposaka]

Kanjigirl,

Are people spending more time on the site now or before? How are your "depth of visit" stats looking?

[eltonx99]

kanjigirl, I reviewed your search and it looks very good. However, I'm not sure if this has to do with the site redesign, but I often advise sites to look closely at how they choose to use nav/categorization . I'm not sure about your sales per category, but I'd look at:

1) Your top categories are disportionate in offerings. Example your accessories cat only has 2 listings currently . Your specials have 11. Your chains only have 4. Yet your charms have over a 1000. I don't know the bulk of your sales, but maybe making hooks from the homepage into the charms section more prevalent may help. Maybe hooks into your best selling charms subcats may work well too. Also, maybe "chains" and "specials" and "bracelets" can be suggested add-ons on the product detail pages of the charms (ok, now I'm showing my ignorance about your product).

2) I'd make the charms picture on your front page a link into the charms category.

3) I'd look at the charms category which is very broad, most categories have dozens and dozens of offerings, some only have a few. Are all these necessary? Being a "dumb" user and confronted with all of this charm selection I'd appreciate a category with the Top 50 selling charms (dynamically generated). And, with this in mind maybe some "smart" filteration/sorts on your thumbnail sections rather than just alphabetically listed. For example, in the "pets" charm area the "puppy charm" may be your best seller, but the user has to sort through 3 page views before getting to this.

BTW, products look great.

[bjbtexas]

I do agree with the color comments earlier. The background teal/green should go.

I was looking to buy one for my daughter - the $15 dollar min stopped me.

Have you always had that?

Also, the secure order page looks nothing like the website itself - the shopping cart's graphics and colors are different. As a consumer I like it to look homogeneous.

My advice, take a look at your top 10 competitors and incorporate colors and themes from their sites. No copying! Let them spend the millions analyzing consumer buying behaviors.

[remccain]

Every other relaunch, nothing like this has happened, sales have been steady or increased.
[...]
Can anyone make any suggestions? I really don't know what to do here... Any suggestions greatly appreciated!!

As the old adage goes - if it ain't broke...

You know the old site worked and the new site has definate sales issues, so why not just keep the old look? It's not like it would be that dificult with dynamic pages.

Also, did you make sure redirects were in place? You might have loads of visitors coming in via links to missing pages and getting 404'ed

http://www.silverfantasy.com/charms_occupational.html
is broke
http://www.silverfantasy.com/charms_home.html
is broke

That's just 2 from Yahoo. Google only shows 2 pages indexed for your site. If it was my site, I'd make sure everything was properly redirected, all 404 pages had a link to the home page (and an apology), and then I would give some serious thought to changing the template from the white to the black.

Edward McCain
www.mccainmedia.com

[just-trying-to-help]

I haven't looked at the site in question but fail to read any replies on the natural answer to this question.

If a site is working then why change it.
What I mean for example is:
If you owned a brick and mortar jewelry store on 5th Avenue, would you tear it down and build a new one in its place if it was making sales or build a new one on 10th avenue with a different look.

The natural answer to this question (in my oppinion) is : Leave the old site alone.

Put the new site on a new domain. Add a link to it from the old sites index page and do a little link building. You would obviously keep the sales from the old site and now that you have a new "baby" work on making it work.

The question seems obvious. why would you take the chance of cutting your sales in half when you can double them with a new site (look).....

My two cents

EDIT: Oops, remccain beat me to the submit button.
"As the old adage goes - if it ain't broke..."

[DrTandem1]

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." If the drop in sales was as dramatic and coincided with the new site, then common sense would tell you to put back the old site.

This is especially true, if you had a lot of repeat business. The regular visitor will wonder if it's the same company and may decide to also make a change.

Grocery store chains make this mistake all the time. Usually, it's a new VP wanting to test out their new MBA. They have all of the chain's rearranged and remodeled. After all, they have the focus groups' findings and they think moving things will make shoppers explore. The result? Alienated regular customers. They like being able to find what they want were they usually find it. Their typical reaction is to go to another grocery store.

From the archive.org page, I really can't see the graphics, but the new page is really is not inviting. For an e-commerce site, I always recommend offering something for sale that they can buy from the Home page.

If it is possible, put the old site back on line and see whether sales go up again. They are already down, so this is a good time to test.

[Peter (IMC)]

DrTandem,.. 2 times the same post? It´s a real tandem now,. :)

[aaron2005]

Two things.

1.) Increased competition (look around at all the silver jewelry sites).

2.) What Peter said, "How is jewelry displayed in a store"? (super important overlooked idea there)

Site design is major, that current design is kind of tired looking, and also can you increase the size of the thumbnails a bit? Do not be afraid to make fonts AND images LARGE.

In the study of handwriting people who write large tend to be outward, friendly and honest. Small, tight and light might not be good for a jewelry site, a black background could look nice if you highlight some silver text in there, make the site in silver if that is what you are selling.

Great thread, I am debating with myself about migrating my products old .html to .php while at the same time retaining my rankings, a scary thing indeed.

[SportsFan]

The green/yellow color - I looked up the color meaning of dark yellows and greenish yellows and found...

Yellow-green can indicate sickness, cowardice, discord, and jealousy.

Dark Teal is a combination of Dark Blue and Dark Green. The meanings for those are...

Dark green is associated with ambition, greed, and jealousy.
Dark blue represents knowledge, power, integrity, and seriousness.

uh-oh -- my site colors are the same as kanjigirls. Are these colors really bad? Nobody ever mentioned this to me before, but I notice several others in this thread don't like these colors either.

see http://www.calendar-updates.com


Thanks...

[DrTandem1]

DrTandem,.. 2 times the same post? It´s a real tandem now,. :)

Yes, I wanted to change the first paragraph and I must have clicked "quote" rather than "edit." DOH!