e-commerce my advice

[martynb]

You have an e-commerce website you have been running it for 12 months. Your thinking of giving up because you thought it would have gone through the roof within 5 months. You have sold 5 items.

Not wanting to sound negative but you need to look at your web stats for an e-commerce website to work well i feel you need to be pushing at least 300 - 320 unique a day. In 2007 i worked along side some companies who had a 40% increase in sales once they hit the 300 unique a day.. Some of them where spending £350 in Ad sense per day and others spending £1200.

Some people might say this is rubbish but after working with eight different e-commerce companies in December sales took a new turn once they reached the 300 - 320 mark in unique..

So my advice would be to push the 300 mark.. might sound a little rushed this post because it is.

300 - 320 Unique per day = Good Sales... Not every unique buys..

But that's what i feel and know as with all new e-commerce sites build I explain this fact as i like to call it.

[backtap]

Some of them where spending £350 in Ad sense per day and others spending £1200.

That's a lot of money martynb! Surely this beyond the budget of a lot of small companies - are you suggesting that you need to through that type of money in until you get that many uniques? - I appreciate that this is oversimplifying matters but that type of ad sense spend (this is the same as adwords yes?) scares me.

Do you really think that's the type of money you need to be spending on ad sense/adwords to make it actually work?

[sysops]

Some people might say this is rubbish but after working with eight different e-commerce companies in December sales took a new turn once they reached the 300 - 320 mark in unique..


Your post makes no sense whatsoever. You appear to be suggesting that there is some kind of a threshold of 300 visitors a day, which once reached results in increased sales. It doesn't work like that - the number of visitors has no effect on the conversion rate.

If you have a 2% conversion rate, 100 visitors will result in 2 sales. 300 visitors will result in 6 sales. The additional visitors don't influence your conversion rate (although lots of other things do).

The increase in sales you saw at the end of the year is natural - conversion rate usually increases significantly in Nov and Dec for b2c sites. One some of our sites you can see conversion rate triple or quadruple during that period.

[quikshop]

You are right, eCommerce is a numbers game but its also about providing hooks to encourage visitors to spend with you rather than your competitors.

Better to have a 5% conversion rate on 100 visitors than 0.5% on 300. There are several tried and trusted ways to convert eCommerce shop visitors to customers (http://www.internetretailer.biz/partner/converting_ecommerce_shop_visitors_into_customers. aspx?qsaid=199) which our shop owners have used successfully.

[jofstar]

We found that a more useful approach was to focus down on converting traffic to sold product at whatever level.

Our conversion rate has improved significantly over the past 2 months because:

1) We focussed on getting the right traffic. This meant choosing partners more wisely and selecting the right search terms.

2) We also significantly improved the process through which our customers "buy" our product

3) Finally we spent a lot of time looking at our pricing to make sure that the price point was right

It doesn't matter if a million people come to your front door if no one wants what your selling!

[IridiumCorp]

2) We also significantly improved the process through which our customers "buy" our product


It always amazes me how some online merchants have a great product line, loads of traffic and low conversion rate. I have seen it so many time where this is because the purchase process is long winded, confusing, or just does not work as it should.

I should put another guide together about the common mistakes merchants make about the buy process.

I am sure everyone one on this forum has at some stage been on some website and quite an order because the process was #$%#ing you off.

[ChrisFresh]

I must say that I completely disagree with the original poster and that absolutely there is no magic number where you will see sales start to appear.

It is also worth pointing out the obvious: the more you spend on marketing, the more pressure you put on your business to generate sales.

The beauty of Google Adwords is that it is completely scalable and can work just as well for the small or start up business as it can for the global enterprise.

The important aspect is not how much traffic you purchase, but where you send that traffic once you have purchased it.

Conversion ratios are key. The better you convert your traffic into sales, the higher your ROI and the more you can justify spending on traffic. It can be a positive Catch 22.

The more specifically you target your audience, the more likely they are to purchase from you as it is more likely that your Adwords advert (which originally inspired them to click) truly represented the content/product/sale they were looking for.

If you get your conversions ratios high enough by ensuring good targeting, a user friendly interface, competitive pricing, product information and consumer confidence then regardless of the size of your business, you can make a good return on your investment using Google Adwords.

Like every aspect in business, there is no black and white magical solution. Every business is unique.

If anyone here wants more information on how to increase your Adwords ROI, please feel free to message me.

[martynb]

That's a lot of money martynb! Surely this beyond the budget of a lot of small companies - are you suggesting that you need to through that type of money in until you get that many uniques? - I appreciate that this is oversimplifying matters but that type of ad sense spend (this is the same as adwords yes?) scares me.

Do you really think that's the type of money you need to be spending on ad sense/adwords to make it actually work?

I'm not saying that everybody needs to spend £££ amount, but with nearly all websites i have worked on and other which friends have worked on. All clients notice things once they hit the 300 unique mark..

[sirearl]

Whoa It seems you have missed one of the most important elements

The value of the good/service being sold.

We have a site that does about 50 uniques a day ,but as the value of a sale is so high it outperformes sites with 1000,s of visitors profit wise.

there's no golden rule traffic wise as it equates to profit margin.

Earl

[backtap]

I'd be keen to know what type of Click Through Rate people are experiencing here. I've heard a few people saying that they are experiencing a drop in their CTR from 3-4% a few years ago to less than 1% now.

Is this a trend as more people access the web and this type of advertising?

Personally I only ever see CTRs of less than 1% but then that may be because I've got an aweful lot to learn!

backtap

[ChrisFresh]

Backtap, you can increase your CTR by increasing the average position of your advert. You can do this without increasing the bid price and simply by making the advert content more relevant to its landing page. I would send you a link on this but I cannot post links until I make 15 posts here - I only registered a few days ago.

Search in Google for "Adwords Learning Centre" and you will find an article on content relevancy.

If you need assistance with managing Adwords, please feel free to get in touch :)

[KevPrice]

300 uniques being a magic number?
I think by telling people that it gets them to focus on the wrong thing even if its true.
If people are looking at traffic and uniques then they are distracted from conversions, relevance, expectation management, funnels - basically everything that is not traffic.

The benefit of more traffic, especially early on, is you get a larger sample size over which to test your site and improve your results.
However, if you focus on ad,landing page and funnel optimisation then you can make money with even a small amount of traffic. You have the results to back up your site and can use the information to optimise every aspect of the site.
At which point you can scale up to whatever level of relevant traffic you wish in order to serve more people and grow your business.

Unique hits is a metric I put way down the list, it is unfortunately difficult to get clients to see it the same way ;)

[Trainer Bubble]

I like to think of it as a real shop. If you had 300 customers come in through the front door would it guarantee you sales? Of course not. You would need to provide the right environment, product and USP all wrapped up in a company that people want to buy from.

Visitors has very little to do with conversions. The only thing I concede is that of course with more visitors you have more opportunities to get the rest right...that's where the likn ends for me.

[SillyJokes]

The thing about hitting a certain level of orders or traffic is that you start to tip things like recommendations, repeat orders and instances of tell a friend more in your favour.

So I think there is a bit of a tipping point although i couldn't say where it is.

Having a target of 300 visitors a day is not a bad idea, then you at least have something to work with to improve all the other issues like conversion.

We have quite a pitiful amount of traffic through My Favourite Animals. It converts these people well but there simply aren't enough of them. give me 300 a day and man, we'd be cooking!

If you think about it 40% of 6 orders is only 2.4 more orders per day

[sirearl]

The thing about hitting a certain level of orders or traffic is that you start to tip things like recommendations, repeat orders and instances of tell a friend more in your favour.

So I think there is a bit of a tipping point although i couldn't say where it is.

Having a target of 300 visitors a day is not a bad idea, then you at least have something to work with to improve all the other issues like conversion.

We have quite a pitiful amount of traffic through My Favourite Animals. It converts these people well but there simply aren't enough of them. give me 300 a day and man, we'd be cooking!

Why don't you get an SEO on the job.?

Earl

[SillyJokes]

Earl, it's on my to do list, but I've just come back to work having surgery so give me a chance.

By the way, you've never told me how you know how much business your competitors do to back up your claims of how well you are doing in comparison ;)