Merging two businesses

[The Baby Studio]

Hi

We are about to acquire another business. (Same field) We use SD 2014, but virtually no traffic and no orders for months. The business we are buying has a website, which they say has good traffic (Although I have not seen the details yet) However they don't have a cart.

After take-over we will trade as the new business name. Their web support company say they have a cart option coming.

So wondering if I should rename our current SD 2014 website to their web address and continue to use SellerDeck. Or just point our web address to their site and add their cart option.

I don't know what their web software is and the vendor of the business is not technical, so doesn't know or care.

Their web support company offers response to support issues within 24 hours, which includes a visit if necessary. They will also do some online tweaking included in the £50 p/month support fee (Which sounds too good to be true) I think SD support is a similar fee, but they wont come out and look at your problem for that!

The only thing I am not so comfortable with, is listing products in a browser, I have got used to the desktop environment and quite like it.

Any thoughts vary much appreciated.

[Duncan Rounding]

Could you perhaps upload the SD modified site to the new domain and integrate it into the existing site through links. That could give you the best of both worlds.
When comparing carts don't forget to consider all aspects of them, including the SD integration features for orders, payments, merchandising etc.

[The Baby Studio]

Thanks Duncan,

Good point I do like all the integration of SD with payments. Over the years I have seen other have problems with payments if they are not using the whole SD package.

[chris ashdown]

You say the other website has visitors but no e-commerce

Have you considered using the purchase money with adwords and maybe social sites to build up your own sales

What makes you think these existing customers will buy from the combined sites and who will upkeep the other persons input, presumably they must be doing something to keep getting visitors

With no sales on your present site is that telling you something and have you checked out all the reasons why. I can understand your logic in the new plan but if your site does not work full stop then why will it work with a few more visitors and are the visitors looking to but or just interested in what the other sites content is all about

I suggest you look into why your site is not selling first

[chickenhouseman]

How about running both websites side by side with e-commerce added to the new one?
It really depends on why you aren't getting sales - so many possibilities that if you replicate the problem you aren't going to go forward.
Google page speed says that your site could have some improvements - whether this is a ranking factor or not, if Google says your page is slow then it's worthwhile fixing. https://developers.google.com/speed/...%2F&tab=mobile

semrush.com and searchmetrics.com both suggest that you have near enough no traffic

it does look like you did something in April/may 2012 that killed the traffic to your site.
https://www.semrush.com/uk/info/theb...uk+(by+organic)
Do you know what you did?

[The Baby Studio]

I believe our main problem is product related rather than the site itself. We are hosted by SellerDeck so speed should be good. Content is minimal and images small, page loading should be great, I'll check it.

We are a tiny business acquiring a much larger business with decades of history. This will give us a broader product range of leading major brands to sell online.

I will talk it over with their website people and see what they say.

Thanks for the responses.

D

[chickenhouseman]

even with sellerdeck hosting (i use it) things like caching and compression need to be added to your ht.access to make them work

[The Baby Studio]

Hi Chris,

Yes we looked at our site, even hired some experts of many years experience from the community. We seem to be doing things right. (I know you can always do more)

The seller of the other business says they get good traffic, which brings people into their store. I may just add a basket to their site and ditch Sellerdeck, as their web people will continue to do the site work, which will free me up.

Customers visit their site, the name isn't changing so no reason why it should suddenly drop when we take over.

It may just be easier as much as I have an affection for SD.

[The Baby Studio]

Thanks, I actually ran a page speed checker and it scored fast! Pages loading in 2-3ms Interesting Google says slow. I had better investigate.

I used to do it a simple way, by loading up someone like John Lewis and then loading our site on a friends PC. (So no cached pages) We were always a lot quicker. I felt if we were quicker then John Lewis it was good enough. :-)

[KarenBM]

I believe our main problem is product related rather than the site itself. We are hosted by SellerDeck so speed should be good. Content is minimal and images small, page loading should be great, I'll check it.

We are a tiny business acquiring a much larger business with decades of history. This will give us a broader product range of leading major brands to sell online.

I will talk it over with their website people and see what they say.

Thanks for the responses.

D

Hi,
I agree that it is probably content related. Here is my take on it (for what it's worth). Your page names are too generic for a start, try naming them more precisely, such as "Baby and Toddler Clothes (not just "clothing")/Baby and Toddler Girls Clothes/Baby and Toddler boy Clothes/ Baby Bedding etc etc. Get important keywords in there, they are in precious short supply. Also include product descriptions. A fragment at the top of each main section page with a description is a good idea, plus product details against each of the products. Selling a baby girl romper suit then put "Baby girl romper suit" both in the product title and the description and elaborate in the description. At the moment you largely just have names of the brand and not much else. For example, instead of "Joules Baby Winn Set" put Baby & Toddler Clothes: Joules Baby Winn Pyjamas Set" and add a detailed description. Make those simple changes and you should see a massive difference.
Your homepage needs to be more interesting also to invite your visitors into your shop. Put some colour on it - pink/blue/green/yellow maybe, and more links to your products.
A good idea also is to add a help section too. Perhaps how to choose the right cot or pram, and general help for new mums and dads. That sort of thing. That would make people come just for the advise then hopefully stay and do a little shopping

All my humble opinion of course

[The Baby Studio]

Thanks for the tips Karen. Currently our site is neglected, as we have been busy negotiating the business acquisition. I had temporally given up on our website knowing I needed to do something major soon once we have both websites.

I do put the product details in the metadata and page names but not sure that is used anymore. Once we have 40 different prams instead of 4 we should be able to make presentation a bit more captivating for visitors.

I like the help page idea, we have had something similar in the version before SD2014, but I ditched the whole site when I upgraded as I was worried the original site had errors in it from our early days of experimenting with SEO. I will bring back the help page because we can add lost of video from the new manufacturers.

I still need to decide if I switch to a regular website of keep with the SD desktop solution.

Thank again :-)

D