Advice need to boost internet sales. help please

[2012]

Hi All,
I hope someone can help, we have recently relaunched our furniture website, sales have been very poor, Im not sure of what spot we are on web search but using the local search terms we come up on top of the 2nd page some cases 3rd page,

we we have not added our site to google shopping due to the distance we cover, would it be a good idea to use it ?
we are not on google places, should we try this

facebook and twitter are not much help.

any other ideas ?

 

[TotallySport]

what were sales like on the old site?

 

[2012]

what were sales like on the old site?

it was slow on the old site, but not this bad, one or 2 sales a week which was good considering we did no seo and only delivered in upto 20 miles away at the time.

 

[TotallySport]

become a paid member and get a site review

put your instock items for sale on sites like ebay and amazon

look at doing an PPC campaign

then look at long term plans like SEO, and other sales drives

 

[2012]

become a paid member and get a site review

put your instock items for sale on sites like ebay and amazon

look at doing an PPC campaign

then look at long term plans like SEO, and other sales drives

Im not sure about ebay due to the larger issue like account suspensions account limitations only being able too use paypal and issue like that, then you need to consider the fees. I would consider amazon but last i searched about it, i heard a lot about amazon suspending or blocking your account.


on top of the above due to only being a small company we can only deliver up to a set distance, we deliver to keep costs down or charge more for delivery.

 

[TotallySport]

are you offering a different range to what can be bought nationally form other suppliers?

People don't get suspended on amazon ebay or paypal for no reason, the sums need to be done but both should be ways to expand your companies exposure. Know the rules and make it work.

You seem to be finding alot of reasons why not to do something and not many to do it, should be the other way round IMO.

 

[2012]

are you offering a different range to what can be bought nationally form other suppliers?

some items yet, we do a lot of bespoke size items,
we will start off with amazon then,

any other ideas ?

 

[JonathanSEO]

I agree with TotallySport, sign up and get a site review.

I think eBay will be more fruitful than Amazon for furniture so Id start there. Of course try both however. Nothing to lose much to gain.

Like you said there are fees involved but they are all readily available and you will be able to work out what you need to be selling items at to make your profit.

And if you're a brick and mortar place with a showroom then you should definitely sign up to google places.

 

[2012]

I agree with TotallySport, sign up and get a site review.

I think eBay will be more fruitful than Amazon for furniture so Id start there. Of course try both however. Nothing to lose much to gain.

Like you said there are fees involved but they are all readily available and you will be able to work out what you need to be selling items at to make your profit.

And if you're a brick and mortar place with a showroom then you should definitely sign up to google places.

We have both online & brick and mortar, Im trying to give the online side a push, due to being new and the size of some items we can send them via couriers, so we deliver but we can only cover a a distance of 50 or so miles

 

[2012]

How should I get a site reviews ?

Is there anyway to focus more on local customers ?

 

[TotallySport]

look at pay per click but run with local keywords, you might be better posting in the marketing and SEO forum or reporting this post and asking it to be moved.

The problem you will have with an online furniture shop is if you are selling the same as everyone else then your really limiting your market only delivering locally, and you should be doing more to send nationally IMO.

To ask for a site review on the UKBF you need to be a paid member and post in the site review forum.

 

[Shelly Watson]

You should do some local seo for your site. You can optimize some keywords like place+your forniture, best + your forniture + in place, etc. It's one of the main traffic sources. In order to focus on local customers, you can promote your site on some popular local sites.

Another point, what have done with your website for relaunchment? If your sales have dropped, you need to analyze and find out the reason.

 

[Local Trade Leads]

Hi, I hope this info might help

-Improve your marketing and sales processes
-Offer a sales discount
-Launch and improved new products and services
-Create a monthly email newsletter
-Update your website specials page every week

 

[2012]

You should do some local seo for your site. You can optimize some keywords like place+your forniture, best + your forniture + in place, etc. It's one of the main traffic sources. In order to focus on local customers, you can promote your site on some popular local sites.

Another point, what have done with your website for relaunchment? If your sales have dropped, you need to analyze and find out the reason.

the old site was a opencart site this one is a magento site, the old site had a lot more local keywords this site only has a few, the old site had more keywords this one does not.

 

[Mister B]

the old site was a opencart site this one is a magento site, the old site had a lot more local keywords this site only has a few, the old site had more keywords this one does not.

Well as a starter you can fix this which will help.

In addition to the other comments, what off site marketing are you doing? Do you advertise in the local press of have stands in shopping centres at all?

Just because you have a website doesn't mean that marketing activity needs to be purely online.

Mister B

 

[antropy]

the old site was a opencart site this one is a magento site

Out of interest why did you make that move? Were there specific things you needed to achieve that OpenCart couldn't do and Magento could?

 

[2012]

Out of interest why did you make that move? Were there specific things you needed to achieve that OpenCart couldn't do and Magento could?

It been a long time since we decided to make the move, so cant remember, I think It was due to feature we wanted and needed ( opencart did not have ), a more professional looking site.

 

[antropy]

I see but both platforms can be themed to look as professional as you want? Can you remember what feature it was? How are you finding Magento in comparison?

 

[2012]

I see but both platforms can be themed to look as professional as you want? Can you remember what feature it was? How are you finding Magento in comparison?

sorry I cant it been 1 year
We find it to be very good its not had to use after some playing about.
the only downside is, its slower then opencart but not slow if you configure it right.

 

[antropy]

Yes, I think it is much slower. What things can you do to speed it up?

 

[2012]

Try this, it worked for my site.

edit the .htaccess

############################################
## enable apache served files compression
## http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#gzip

# Insert filter on all content
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
# Insert filter on selected content types only
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript

# Netscape 4.x has some problems...
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip

# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
BrowserMatch bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

# Don't compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary

# Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary

# enable resulting html compression
# For security reasons, mod_php is not used on this server. Use a php.ini file for php directives
php_flag zlib.output_compression on

 

[antropy]

I see yes. That should speed up the transfer of bytes between the server and the client browser. Anything else?

 

[2012]

Combine Javascript and Combine CSS files: System ->Configuration ->Advanced ->Developer -> 'Javascript settings' and 'CSS Settings'.

reduce the image size's
Try this to check your site
http://gtmetrix.com/

 

[antropy]

Do those actually have quite a big effect? Because from my tests with Magento it was the processing of the pages - database queries etc. that were slowing it all down?

 

[2012]

Do those actually have quite a big effect? Because from my tests with Magento it was the processing of the pages - database queries etc. that were slowing it all down?

From my test Combine the Settings only gave a tiny improvement, but reduce the image size's did help.
The site above will also give you useful hint and your site score so you try a few things to see what works.

 

[antropy]

Well yes this is true, but why not start with a platform that's already very fast?

 

[crystalballltd]

1. Create a buyer persona and post it back on here.

2. Describe what type of furniture products you sell.
(luxury, one off wooden furniture, reclaimed and refurbished, low cost, etc)

Until you do these two steps it's difficult to help point you in the right direction to find the best quality traffic that should boost your conversions.

For ecommerce websites I'd normally recommend Pinterest, but if you're selling low cost cheap furniture the chances are it's probably not going to get much traction.

 

[2012]

Well yes this is true, but why not start with a platform that's already very fast?

In my option all platforms have there own downsides.

some of my options

open cart - lacks features, the team is only small (2 - 3 peaple) some fixes can take time.

magento - slow - can cast more more to get a site built,

When we first thought about a website open cart was perfect but over time things changed.

The one the main reason we went with magento in the end was at the time not many company's wanted to work with open cart, but lot of web company's worked with magento already and still do, any feature we need could be added with magento and it was not much more in cost to setup.

 

[2012]

1. Create a buyer persona and post it back on here.

2. Describe what type of furniture products you sell.
(luxury, one off wooden furniture, reclaimed and refurbished, low cost, etc)

Until you do these two steps it's difficult to help point you in the right direction to find the best quality traffic that should boost your conversions.

For ecommerce websites I'd normally recommend Pinterest, but if you're selling low cost cheap furniture the chances are it's probably not going to get much traction.

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by buyer persona.

We sell all items from low - mid range - high value luxury items.
We sell custom size items, we also sell fully bespoke beds.

Our website mostly has low to mid range priced items just to try and get out there.

We have not added 100's of items just to fill the site, this would be pointless without customers.