Visits but no Sales? HELP!

[dfsfixings]

ok, so i took over the company website three months ago and have been tinkering away with layout, items, prices etc. but just recently I've been getting worried about our lack of sales. We must have had around 2500 visits during that times but haven't recieved a single sale during that time.

Basically i was hoping you lovely people could visit the website and let me know what you think the issue is? Or whether its too early or too few visits to expect sale?

The website is www.dfsfixings.com

Cheers,
Michael

[guccij]

At a quick glance, I'd say you're in a crowded online market.

More importantly for me, there was no way of knowing how much shipping was going to cost me until I was half way through the checkout.

For heavy and valuable items such as hammer drills, this could be a crucial advantage held by your competitors.

Please find a way to add a Shipping link somewhere on the home page.

Tell 'em early.

[Southwest Test]

Hi Michael,

I agree with Jules about the shipping issue... that took me by surprise too.

What were baseline sales like in the run-up period to when you took over? As a reference point?

Also, do you have any analytics or statistics to check whether or not you've slid down the Google rankings in recent weeks? Perhaps inadvertently, but as a result of your well-meaning tweeks and changes?

Lastly, the following extract taken from your terms and conditions (which prospective buyers must accept before they can order) doesn't inspire confidence:

Shipping And Handling < Insert information on your Shipping and Handling here >

[dfsfixings]

Maybe i phrased that badly. What i meant was before i took over it was barely a website, had no sales and no visits. I think it was averaging 100 visits a month or something silly.

I do like the idea about shipping though, i suppose free shipping over 100 quid should be shouted about a lot more than it is on the website.

Also yes i use google analytics daily to monitor the habits of our visitors

Cheers
Michael

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

I am not sure what the a typical conversion rate would be for your type of buisness but my site typically converts around 7% of each unique visitor per month into a sale so if 2500 visitis equates to around 1900 unique visitors I would be expecting over 130 slaes. The big difference is the avaerage value of a sale where mine is low so the conversion rate will be much lower but even at just 1% I would have expected atleast 15-20 sales in a month.

Where are most of your visitors coming from Google Adwords PPC, the organic search results or direct. If adwords it could be that you are getting too many low quality clickthroughs who arrive at your site only to realise you don't sell what they are looking for or were expecting something to what they found on the landing page.

Are you using a PSP for card processing as you appear to be collecting card details yourself which is generally not advised due to issues of achieving PCI-DSS compliance and may put some buyers off.

In general the site looks OK, although haven't checked your pricing to see if you are competitive. If your pricing is on the high side this will effect the conversion rate and for higher priced power tools many of your customers are going to have shopped around on other sites getting a few prices to compare, I know I did recently.

[Mike Hughes]

There are a few things that would put me off buying on your site:

1. When will items arrive? All I could see was a message about items being sent within 2 days. I would have thought most people buying a tool would want it quickly so 2 days to send it plus ? delivery time isn't a great start.

2. You make a big thing of paying with paypal. Is that really what trade people want to do or would they tend to use a credit card?

3. Why do the manufacturers logos across the top open in a new window? It drives me nuts to have lots of unnecessary tabs opening up.

4. Your prices may not be keen enough. On the ones I took a quick look at you were more expensive than amazon (on the consumer side) and Screwfix (on the trade side).

The question has to be why would anyone buy from you? Who is your target customer and what's your value proposition from them? Once you decided that you need to make sure it's clear on the website

Mike

[dfsfixings]

cheers for the advice guys. On the pricing front i've passed my concerns on to business management but obviously i have no rule on that myself. I was just looking for advice on design, problems, errors etc. but it seems like it is mainly just down to pricing.

Also on the pricing front we know we wont be competitive on power tools because we dont buy 200 tools at a time or whatever. The prices we consider competitive are hand tools fixings and workwear. Would you believe companes make less than a 10% margin on power tools nowadays

[Golf Tee Warehouse]

It might be worth analysing your google analytics to see what pages your 2500 visitors are landing on and what keywords are leading them to your site, the same with google adwords if you are using it.
If you are not competitive on power tools and 90% of your visitors are looking for power tools then price would be one of the main factors in your low conversion rate, but if most are searching for products that you are competitive on then it is likely to be other non-price related issues many of which have been discussed above.

[dfsfixings]

however, we offer worx power tools which very few other online website do. Also, our makita and bosch are relativly ok price-wise. They are really only on there because thats what people look for on a website like ours. They want to see it even if they dont want to buy it.

[NormanRouxel]

Another area of concern is that your home page is quite slow for those with low broadband speeds. Your home page is 2Mb in size - 1.2Mb of images and 500Kb of scripts. And a typical product page (Worx WU923) 1.5Mb of which 850Kb is images.

Page size would be dramatically reduced if you optimised images for web display.

[Hugh Gibson]

I'm also getting a 404 on http://www.dfsfixings.com/acatalog/deliverybanner.jpg which messes up pages like http://www.dfsfixings.com/acatalog/Bosch2.html.

[dfsfixings]

in regards to the 404 error on that delivery banner that was an upload that didnt happen properly and will be sorted asap. I have added a delivery page detailing prices etc. i have also added a banner at the top of every product page stating free delivery over 100 quid.

What is the best way to optimize the images without losing too much quality?

[Southwest Test]

There are lots of freeware image optimisers online which you can try out at no cost to yourself (just Google and you'll get dozens of relevant results)

However, my personal favourite and one I can thoroughly recommend is NXPowerLite. It's not free but there again it's not overly expensive either, and boy does it do a great job of squashing JPEG files without significant loss of quality.

As a bonus it will also compress PDF and Microsoft Office files too.

[dfsfixings]

yeh ended up using a program called kraken which seemed to do a very good job tbh. Only done basical optimization as theres over 25,000 images on the website so will need a lot of spare time to do it.

cheers

[fergusw]

yeh ended up using a program called kraken which seemed to do a very good job tbh. Only done basical optimization as theres over 25,000 images on the website so will need a lot of spare time to do it.

cheers

Batch Processing - the only way to do it! Most decent Graphics packages will have the ability to batch process folders of images. Worth a quick read-up to see if Kraken can do it too!