would upgrading to business increase sales

[Lingerie33]

Hi,

i have got actinic catalog, my website has been online for 1 year, im finding it very hard to increase my traffic through link building, so i thought i would try to increase my conversion rate, which at the moment is 0.5%, im getting about 1500 visits a week. Has anyone upgraded from catalog to business, with the coupon codes and customer accounts, and if so did having these things increase your conversion rate?

If anyone has any ideas of how i could increase my conversion rate, i would really appreciate them.

http://www.LingerieOfDesire.co.uk

Thankyou

[Paul Bulpit]

Has anyone upgraded from catalog to business, with the coupon codes and customer accounts, and if so did having these things increase your conversion rate?

I cannot answer your overall question, however I don't see that upgrading the software to the next Actinic level would make any difference whatsoever.

As a review I see your site as well presented but let down by (homepage) excessive wordiness & (testimonials) poor grammar.

[Steve G Griggs]

No, upgrading to Actinic Business will not affect your conversion rate in any way.
Your conversion rate is going to be down to factors like:
1) Are your page description meta tags accurate?
2) Are your page title tags accurate?
3) If you use ad words (if not, why not?) are your keywords describing accurately the products. Do they lead to the correct landing pages/products.
4) Usability of the website... ie how easy is it to navigate? How readable is the product description text (text size, letter spacing, line height (space between lines of text). Navigation seems easy and straightforward so nothing there.
5) That big block of text on the home page is difficult to read it needs breaking down into smaller paragraphs
6) Quality of your product illustration photographs is very good..no problem there.
7) Your products need some long descriptions, you really need to have a decent amount of good descriptive text about each product. There's nothing for the search engines to pick up on except your meta tags, and the keywords meta tag isn't used at all by Yahoo, Bing or Google anymore. You need good descriptive text in your pages to rank well in the search engines.
8) Are you doing a regular Google product feed?
9) Your page URL's aren't too bad, but underscores to separate words are not good, you need hyphens, otherwise google will turn

Briefs___Thongs__page1_.html

into

BriefsThongspage1_.html

whereas a page url like:
underwear-briefs-thongs-knickers-for-ladies.html would be seen by Google as
underwear briefs thongs knickers for ladies.html allowing all those words to be usable for search results.
You would find people searching for "thongs for ladies" which would work for you with the URL with hyphens, but you current URL will only work for you if someone types BriefsThongspage1 into Google, which I think isn't too likely.

I think you really need some help with your SEO beyond things like link building. Link building is good, but how many are incoming links to the site, and do they have good anchor text?
Looking at your page code there is really so little text in there it's not helping you at all. Your section pages need some text in there to describe what the products in each section are as well.

Your Google analytics should be telling you if there are any specific places you are losing sales.

Hope I may have given you a few useful pointers.

[Mike Hughes]

To increase conversions rates you really need to look at:

1. Things that will encourage a customer to consider buying (i.e. add to cart):

The best product descriptions, calls to action, value proposition, etc.

Look at competitors sites, see how they compare, how can you be better than them? Test and ramp it up.

2. Things that will stop them buying:

Delivery costs, returns policy, security issues, trustworthiness, etc

Minimise or remove as many potential barriers as you can. Again, look at other sites, see where you're worse than them, don't be worse and see if you can be better.

Wrap it all up in a fast, nice looking site with good navigation and Bob's your uncle.

In all of this, analytics are a good way to monitor and see the impact. You want to get more people adding things to the cart and a higher percentage then completing the checkout process.

Mike

[Lingerie33]

Hi
sorry for the delay in replying, thankyou for your replies and very helpful advice, i do have a question about -

" 9) Your page URL's aren't too bad, but underscores to separate words are not good, you need hyphens, otherwise google will turn
Quote:
Briefs___Thongs__page1_.html

into
Quote:
BriefsThongspage1_.html

whereas a page url like:
underwear-briefs-thongs-knickers-for-ladies.html would be seen by Google as
underwear briefs thongs knickers for ladies.html allowing all those words to be usable for search results."


Actinic automatically changes spaces in a title to underscores, i have changed the spaces in the title but when i check the url it doesnt change, other than manually changing every page url and then going into the code and changing the url there too, is there an alternative way?

Thankyou again for your help, i hope you can help me with this too,

From Michelle

[Steve G Griggs]

Hi Michelle.
You would have to change the URL's manually I'm sorry to say. However V11 does automatically convert spaces to hyphens (Only on new products you add, not existing ones).

[Donna Kempster]

Hi
sorry for the delay in replying, thankyou for your replies and very helpful advice, i do have a question about -

" 9) Your page URL's aren't too bad, but underscores to separate words are not good, you need hyphens, otherwise google will turn
Quote:
Briefs___Thongs__page1_.html

into
Quote:
BriefsThongspage1_.html

whereas a page url like:
underwear-briefs-thongs-knickers-for-ladies.html would be seen by Google as
underwear briefs thongs knickers for ladies.html allowing all those words to be usable for search results."


Actinic automatically changes spaces in a title to underscores, i have changed the spaces in the title but when i check the url it doesnt change, other than manually changing every page url and then going into the code and changing the url there too, is there an alternative way?

Thankyou again for your help, i hope you can help me with this too,

From Michelle

Don't forget Michelle every page you currently have indexed with google will loose that indexing if you change the page name.

I would have thought that you will always have an issue with conversion rate because of the product you sell and the proportion of non-buyers that will be accessing your (i.e. teenage boys!). The right traffic will surely be as much a key as conversion rate?

Donna

[TraceyHand]

because of the product you sell and the proportion of non-buyers that will be accessing your (i.e. teenage boys!).
Donna

This really cracked me up, Donna!

[leehack]

At 38 I'm by no means teenage, but it took me 5 mins to recall why on earth i was on the site, conversion rate is not just a teenage factor to be considered, i'd have thought anyone less than 60 with a pulse could get sidetracked.

Female conversion rate = 100%
Male conversion rate = 0.0000000000000000000000001%

TIP: using Javascript, ban anyone with a 19" screen, you'll mop up many male lurkers, also ban the iphone.

[pendragon]

Michelle,

Don't want to worry you and maybe the more experienced on here can advise but when I visited your site I got the following from my anti-virus software

VirusBarrier detected that the application "Firefox" is attempting to access a web page identified as a phishing risk. Phishing is a technique used by hackers to steal sensitive information such as credit card numbers or user account credentials.

Regards,

Dave

[Lingerie33]

Hi everyone,

Thankyou for all your replies, Thanks for telling me about loosing the pages in googles index, i wouldnt of thought of that.

Regarding the firefox thing, i did check the site a while ago in all the main browsers, it was fine then but im looking it to it now, what version do you use? (thankyou for telling me)

I really appreciate everyones comments and feedback,

kind wishes from Michelle x

ps.

"i'd have thought anyone less than 60 with a pulse could get sidetracked.

Female conversion rate = 100%
Male conversion rate = 0.0000000000000000000000001%" lol

[pendragon]

Hi Michelle,

I am running Firefox 9.0 on an iMac. The virus software "VirusBarrier X6" has been working fine for years and yours is the first website I have come across using the above configuration that has picked up a problem.

It obviously doesn't like something about it!

Regards,

Dave

[Lingerie33]

Hi

I have downloaded firefox 8 and accessed our site with no problems, was there a particular page you got the message on, and are you using an open dns setting?

Michelle

Michelle,

Don't want to worry you and maybe the more experienced on here can advise but when I visited your site I got the following from my anti-virus software

VirusBarrier detected that the application "Firefox" is attempting to access a web page identified as a phishing risk. Phishing is a technique used by hackers to steal sensitive information such as credit card numbers or user account credentials.

Regards,

Dave

[pendragon]

The message came up straight away after following the link to the homepage from your first post in this thread.

Not using any special open dns settings. Our ISP is BT


Dave

[Steve G Griggs]

Strange-not noticed any warnings using FF or any other browser. Re under 60 with a pulse...I thought that too ;-))