Can anyone throw out some common issues with getting conversions?

We've just gone live for two months, and have been having trouble getting them - either registrations, or sales. This is a bit perplexing to both my coder and myself, as the site looks professional, and has solid products at competitive pricing. We've offered coupons, and are using PayPal, which is a secure payment method. Just moved servers to a dedicated VPS lately to increase security as well.

Have not put out significant outlay for Adsense, etc. yet, but we're still getting about 300 hits a month (after filtering out all self IPs, etc.). With a 1% conversion rate, I'd think we'd at least have gotten a few sales.

Since we're going to start advertising next month, I'd very much appreciate any advice regarding tweaking the conversion ability of sites.

Hey there!

Realistic conversions can be very frustrating when you're looking at your web stats. I think estimating at 1-2% conversions based on *visitors* is too optimistic. If you had a way to qualify leads, so people sent you a little contact information if they were seriously looking for hosting, then you could forecast a bit better.

Find a way to offer people something of value in exchange for giving you permission to contact them in the future. Otherwise they're just visitors who came to your site and left. Unless your branding is amazing, and will be recalled a month from now, those visits may as well have never happened.

I've found these books really helpful:

The Sales Bible
This book is crammed full of tips and it's a lot of fun to read. It also makes a great situational reference long after you read it.
http://www.amazon.com/Sales-Bible-Ultimate-Resource-New/dp/0061379409/

Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Tech Products to Mainstream Customers
This book gets into the psychology of selling team products to normal people. As a chronic innovator and early adopter, it changed the way I think about how *most* people in the real world make technology decisions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm

Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers
Seth Godin makes great points about spending your time talking to people who *want* to be contacted by you. Find a way to share your experience, build your credibility, and you won't have to struggle on sales as if it was a mathematical formula.
http://www.amazon.com/Permission-Marketing-Turning-Strangers-Customers/dp/0684856360

Once you've read those, or if you already have, I'd be happy to recommend more. Read, learn, practice; read, learn, practice. :)

Oh, just to clarify - we're selling a physical product (designer jewelry & fashion accessories), not service. The move to VPS was because our old host had some security concern from my coder.

I agree that list building is important, we're currently looking for a way to implement some kind of incentives. Technical perspective (creating a referral system, etc.) is challenging because my coder has limited time to dedicate to the project ATM.

Will drop by Borders and check out the books over the weekend. Off-hand - which is most important, and you would start with? I'm assuming the 2nd is less relevant due to my sector..

Can I assume you are selling webhosting(Although you mentioned moving to a dedicated vps, so I am not so sure)? Webhosting in general has a pretty low CR, why? Because there are a lot of webhosts and comparing them is very simple to do.

It might help if you provide more information on your products or give your URL.

Personally I have a 1-3% ctr(about every 40-50 unique visitors works out to a sale), but I attribute that to my product and at the same time I dont have thousands of visitors a day. Also sales range anywhere from about $20-$350 each which is a big diff. I don't attribute this to the quality of my site too much but more to what I offer.

Overall have some people review, give comments, etc. Maybe there is something you missed.


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Ok, seems you answered the question I had while I was posting this. Why not give your URL for comments. The other thing to at this time could just be the economy. If its higher end jewlery more people are looking to sell rather then buy at this time sadly.

I'm reluctant to put the name / URL up, because it is a new site and this much higher ranked site will compete against it for SERP.

Have PM'd both of you the address.

Got it, took a quick look, I actually like the site personally. Two questions though.

1. Are you planning to put any contact information up or info about your company? The only thing I could find address wise was under the return section. Most people would want to see that and if you use Paypal pro I THINK that is one item they want to see(I know they want return policy, privacy, and I think some company info, I forget what they checked for)

2. Do you have any type of tracking software like providesupport.com or livezilla provides that you can follow and see maybe where people are getting held up on.


3. I am assuming you are still working out the bugs on the cart:
comm:select * from customer where id=
error:You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '' at line 1
Server databse operation error!
Warning: mysql_num_fields(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/<<snipped>>/public_html/include/mysql_func.php on line 89

Warning: mysql_fetch_array(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/<<snipped>>/public_html/include/mysql_func.php on line 92

Warning: mysql_free_result(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/<<snipped>>/public_html/include/mysql_func.php on line 100



I will take more of a look later when I get some more free time, I have to run and go mail off todays orders then take care of a few other things

Hey! Yeah, if you aren't selling tech I'd say the middle book is a lot less relevant. Everybody understands that jewelry is about things like how it makes you feel about yourself. Tech has benefits that are a lot more nebulous.

Of those three, I'd say 'The Sales Bible' by Jeffrey Gitomer is the place to start. I find it hard to go a page without having an idea.

I have no problem looking over your website, but I'm sure I'm not your target customer. You'd get much better feedback by asking somebody who is. Clothes and accessories are probably tough to sell online in general because people can't see themselves wearing it first. I'm a typical guy and I still feel that way about buying jeans on Amazon.

Your site does look great. When I first hear 'online jewelry' I think of something like Cookie Lee. There are plenty of niches (subcultures/aesthetics; gothic, etc.) you could appeal to. You need to find a way to phrase it in a sentence so it comes across as "Not like Cookie Lee jewelry". There's probably a way to phrase it so I'm both intensely curious and already thinking about how I can show it off. The fact it came from an obscure online retailer is actually a good thing (an exclusive thing) if you can phrase it properly.

Though I'm starting to overstep my bounds and the words of 80 books are coming out of my mouth. I'm a programmer by trade. ;)

Oh, just to clarify - we're selling a physical product (designer jewelry & fashion accessories), not service. The move to VPS was because our old host had some security concern from my coder.

I agree that list building is important, we're currently looking for a way to implement some kind of incentives. Technical perspective (creating a referral system, etc.) is challenging because my coder has limited time to dedicate to the project ATM.

Will drop by Borders and check out the books over the weekend. Off-hand - which is most important, and you would start with? I'm assuming the 2nd is less relevant due to my sector..

Since you are in the States, get an amazon store, you then benefit from their traffic and their trust. The cut isn't too bad.

Also get an ebay store, and a yahoo store.

Sign up for google analytics and learn how to use it.

Finally, registration on ecommerce sites just does not happen. And if you make them register just to open a shopping cart, that will turn them off immediately. You also need to look at any factor that gives the shopper an excuse to move on. Anything at all.

A bientot, et bon chance! :D

To be honest, it's simply very hard to judge a conversion rate on just several hundreds of visitors. At least thousands would allow to tell more. Still, please, PM the URL to me if you're interested in more opinions. Good luck!

Thanks for a link. Overall, a very stylish, interesting website, while at a very start of promotion (PR = 0). I totally agree that you need to add some contact details and try to get more traffic, not only from AdWords, but other sources as well. It would be easier to make a judgment basing on much more visitors than you have now.

First of all, statistics says regular on-line stores have conversion rates about 1-2-3 % only. That sounds dangerous :-), however that is statistics.

If you could pm the link to your site that would be great.

Hesitant to list on eBay, Yahoo, Amazon stores due to branding issues. That, and my team has limited resources time-wise, and I'm not sure we'd be able to keep everything up to date if we were maintaining multiple databases. But mainly, mostly concerned with the long-term impact of associating a brand with eBay.

We have Google Analytics on the site, but I'm still learning the intricacies. Should work a bit better once I figure out how to have it measure conversions, but at this point, they're low enough that I can do it manually.

I'm going to be putting up the address and contact information under the Contact Us page, but don't think there's too much to add. We don't have dedicated phone support yet, so there's no # to list there. E-mail is definitely the best option, with an under 12 hour response time.

Besides AdWords, what good traffic drivers can we use? We're currently exploring the following:
1. Blog commenting / Blogs (Recently hired a company to put together the Wordpress theme, so will be launching the blog in 1-2 weeks)
2. Forum posting (Limited but gradual, since most forums in the segment have anti-advertising policies)
3. Social networking / bookmarking sites

Thank you for the link.

Actually, from customer's point of view, i would suggest the following adjustments (they are not major however they influence usability of the store):

1. If i were the customer, i would like to see larger font, especially on the pages describing shipping and other policies. This would allow to make information on the site more evident and clear.

2. Images - you need to have more product images, detailed ones and images with live models wearing the jewelry. Sometimes it is not possible to understand actual size of a product and how it will look like.

3. Also there is some information on the home page about your company, your goal, however it is not enough I am afraid. I would recommend you to create your own company motto and logo, clearly display your company's aim (something about beauty, etc).

So, the store should become more personalized, more friendly to the customers.

Also, listing on Amazon could be helpful, you could just advertise your products there, however customers will make payments on your site.

Temoin, keep us informed on the process please. I believe we all here are interested to find out the results.

Will create a new thread as we get more material results / changes, as this thread accidentally comes up listed in SERPs, and I would prefer to let it die. If anyone has any suggestions or responses, please PM to me directly.

As an object lesson though, it may be more productive and quicker to look at a site targeting a different sector. Accessories is in a slump ATM.