How long did it take......????

[mythandmagic]

This ones for all you out there with older shops....

How long did it take for visits to start picking up and sales to come in??

Im asking this as i have a shop thats been up for a month and have between 15-20 people a day visiting, which clearly isnt enough.

What im trying to do is get an average time frame people waited for this to pick up.

BTW - I have roughly 430 links to my site. mainly yahoo and msn.

Thanks

[pinbrook]

on average the conversion rate of visitor to shopper is 2-4%, so on your figures you could expect one or two sales per week

[pnagames]

on average the conversion rate of visitor to shopper is 2-4%, so on your figures you could expect one or two sales per week

jo from his figures he should take off the robots...

in my store i have 630 visits to date (this month only) and only 2 sales. (but it is still not in an ideal state and my area is an extremelly competitve market)

it always depends on your products.

[RuralWeb]

conversion rate of visitor to shopper is 2-4%

I would suggest 1% as a more realistic conversion rate for a new site.

Your link popularity at 430 is very low you need to be looking at improving this as a link popularity of 10,000 is considered low!

You need to find out if your current visitors are arriving because of your products ie they are looking to buy or if they are finding the site because of unrelated keyword combinations etc. Once you know this you can begin the process of SEO.

[RuralWeb]

How long did it take for visits to start picking up and sales to come in

It depends on so many factors that a general time cannot really be given. I have sites were orders wre very slow to begin with and others where they were happening almost immediately.

This is a very common question by prospective website owners and one I am carefull to answer truthfully - a website is a tool NOT a marketing plan, you can in the real world build a B&M shop but unless you market it you will get very few shoppers and sales. A website is the same - building it is the easy bit, getting traffic and sales is harder.

[jont]

As Malcolm says about 1% conversion is going to be good - any higher fantastic - so you need to up the visitor count dramatically to create any chance of making sales. Do you have an adwords campaign in operation to up the footfall?

I have 3 live shops and took orders from 2 within 3 days of going live ... the third which is more trade orientated took about 2 months and still only takes a 10th of the orders compared to each of the others proving for me it is very product dependent.

There was one forum member who took 3 months for the first sale! An "average" site should - all things being equal - generally see a first sale within 6 - 10 weeks in my experience. Of course there is no such thing as an "average site" and there are many many apsects that go into converting a browser into a buyer

[Jan]

I got my first sale in 3 days but I reckon that a lead time of up to 6 months is not unusual, the key to repeat orders seems to be making your site sticky, ie giving people a reason to come back.

Regards,

[RuralWeb]

If you post your url you may get some marketing tips etc

[mythandmagic]

The website i run is www.bosslighting.co.uk

All constuctive advise and criticism welcome...

I want this to work so much its soo frustrating

Thanks

Kez

[RuralWeb]

The thing that stands out is the lack of text on your pages - you have much of your content in the extended info popup. SEs need text to feed on, I would move all my text into the main product description.

Also consider single product per page design - discussed in depth if you do a search.