Sales very poor

[Phoenix164]

I have not done anything like this before and I was wondering if there was any particular reason why people visit the site but sales are quite low.

To date I have had about 165 orders on the site

traffic is about 100 unique visitors per day at the moment. Sales easter weekend for example were only 2.

The main products, i.e. the mounting brackets are very well priced so i dont think it is a case of being to expensive. I think it is a matter of people visiting and not feeling comfortable or impressed by the site in order to buy.

I changed the template before the weekend and realise this was probably a mistake as anyone viewing it at 1024x768 will not see the entire page, and I intend to change this in the morning.

I would appreciate it if you would give me your impressions of the site, i really dont mind the criticism, i just need to get some more movement

[RuralWeb]

Site would not load for me - have you removed it or your server down??

Your sales are roughly 1% of your visitors which is about right for a website, especially a very young site like yours. When I can see your site I may comment more.

[Mike Hughes]

Strange, me too. Although it loaded fine earlier today so maybe the owner is updating it.

In terms of number of sales. 100 visitors per day for 150 days (5 months) is 15,000 visitors. 165 sales / 15,000 visitors gives a conversion rate of about 1.1% which is probably in the right ballpark for your target market.

Yes, there are always plenty of things you can do to improve a websites sales, but I'd probably focus on getting more visitors. i.e. better search engine positions, adwords campaigns, affiliate marketing, etc.

Mike

[Phoenix164]

yes the site is down this morning, hosting problems.

I hope to have it sorted very soon

[RuralWeb]

That will be sales down to 0.9% then

[Mike Hughes]

By the way. Malcolm, did you edit your post to include the conversion rate sometime after the original post? I'm sure I didn't read that before making my post, but maybe I just missed it.

Mike

[pinbrook]

how do your prices compare to other online stores?

[RuralWeb]

did you edit your post to include the conversion rate sometime after the original post

Yes, I worked it out while going for the paper - should have put an edit note

[shabbie]

hi,
im sorry to hear your having a rough ride...
from a retailers point of view the entrance to your site doesnt look very interesting, can i suggest you place the Multi-room Wireless Home Cinema Systems on the first page?
also the colour scheme was a bit cold and clinical.
have a look at mine www.siam925.com
i know i have more colourful stock to start with but our site colours send psychological messages to our customers, in order to win in retail we have to play the psychologist a bit

[RuralWeb]

Colour scheme is OK I think. Your sales conversions are about right so to improve sales you need to get more people to the site. You site is not very well optimised for the search engines - this is an area that has been discussed at length, if you do a search you will discover all.

Immediate things you can do are:

Change your title tags as they are all very similar which is why google is placing some of your pages in the supplimentary cache ie not available.

Your pages have very little content which means that the search engines can see nothing on which to base their searches - all your content is in the ext info boxes which cannot be seen.

Add a site map

[Bun]

Your pages have very little content which means that the search engines can see nothing on which to base their searches - all your content is in the ext info boxes which cannot be seen.

Add a site map

Malcolm, just been pondering on the above as I'm having a bit of trouble getting decent rankings at the moment......I've put it down to changing server and using Catalog as my main cart.....swapped over from another cart and server 2 months ago.

I'm getting Google visiting my site and indexing my main page.....but it doesn't seem to be going any deeper that that. I know there are issues with the way that Catalog uses the navigation and links through to products but I'm now getting twitchy and thinking that it my be due to the lack of text on my front page.

In your opinion would the lack of text on the main page discourage a bot from looking any further?

Thanks for your time

Anyone shed any light?

[jont]

The front page is very graphic heavy in text - not real text - the "hello and welcome" is an image and not HTML text for example.

You have some organic text links but these are right at the bottom of the page. As all the main navigation is via the cgi-bin I would recommend getting more text links in there and not as part of the image

[RuralWeb]

Agree with all that jont says. I am seeing 368 pages listed in google?

Some improvements:

Your home page has no text of worth on it at all. Pages need 100-300 words for google to show any interest your home page has none really that google can see so it will pass you by.

Change all the image text to real text.

Remove the majority of images to increase download times.

Make your keywords in the text html links.

put a site map link on your homepage at the top or left nav -not the bottom.

The main product pages seem to have lots of content you could change the title tags to remove your business name which is diluting the weighof the keywords.

Deep link from the hompage ie a few html links to the deepest parts of your site

get some reciprocal links going.

[Bun]

Agree with all that jont says. I am seeing 368 pages listed in google?

Pages need 100-300 words for google to show any interest your home page has none really that google can see so it will pass you by.

Cheers fellas......I thought this would be the case but just needed telling again

Now.....how to get text in there without it looking drab

Thanks for your time

[RuralWeb]

Optimise your homepage for your primary keyword - if you dont know what it is you need to find out before you start!