Your First Visitors/ Sales

[gray123]

Hi,

Would be interested to know how many visitors/ sales you were getting in the first cople of months of your new e-commerce business going live??

I know it varies site to site and niche to niche but wondered what your personal experiences are??

Graham

 

[japancool]

Hi,

Would be interested to know how many visitors/ sales you were getting in the first cople of months of your new e-commerce business going live??

I know it varies site to site and niche to niche but wondered what your personal experiences are??

Graham

I'm not going to be specific with figures but it was a slow start. A very slow start. It took me over two weeks to get my first sale and it got to the point where I wondered if I'd made a serious mistake. The first two months of operation I had barely any sales at all. I decided I'd made a mistake in the products I'd ordered, so I got a new order in for more eye-catching and recent products and that generated enough interest such that people were buying the new products and old ones. I managed to reach my sales target that month, which I hadn't anticipated doing for a few months.

 

[14Steve14]

Again I had a very slow start, but this was all planned for. I knew that it could take a few months for things to start happening. I sopent this time pushing the website on forums, directories, and a multitude of other places. Eventually after a few months things started to happen and I actually hit my sales target.

What you have to remeber that your site has to found by potential buyers, and then you have to expect something like one sale every 100 visitors.

 

[deadgoodundies]

We had a very good start (again as others not going to go into specifics) but a lot of that was down to us being in a very niche market plus before we launched I was going on to forums, chat rooms etc. quite a bit prior to launch so got quite well known in those circles for when we did launch.

 

[moo-tique]

Hi all,

In the first few months of launching our business, generating visitors into sales was a slow process but that's what we expected. After about 3 months and after focusing on our Google AdWords Campaigns, we started to see a steady increase in sales but being in a niche market certainly helped us considerably. We expected slow sales and knew it would take some time to 'get it right'

 

[gray123]

Good to hear your stories.

I Guess Adwords are good for getting sales whilst the site is new, as long as it is set up right.

I was looking at some relevant Ad groups in the Google Keyword tools, and across the groups / keywords with an average CPC of £0.10-£0.15 it was saying I could expect around 175 clicks per day, at a cost of around £10 per day - ad position 3. Are Googles estimates fairly accurate or are they a million miles from reality?

 

Google Adwords done properly can definitely be worthwhile, but if you have the budget to employ an expert, who can provide a professionally set up Adwords campaign, tweak your pages to provide higher sales rates, etc, then it's worthwhile looking at one.

Talk to Steve at Steve Gibson Consulting and he'll give you an idea of how much this would cost - but if you have a budget, I'd seriously look at giving yourself the hand-up this can provide.

 

[oble01]

In my first three months I never made any sales! I spent a few hundred pounds on AdWords and still not even any interest. I was sure I'd made a mistake.

Then I made three sales in one day, two of them were big ones . I then had nothing else that month. Eventually I got into a pattern of consistent sales after about 6 months.

That gave me the motivation to continue and press on. Over the first six months I made some changes here and there that I never anticipated before I launched. I think that's a very important thing....it's better to have launched, be having no sales, but refining things a little here and there working towards a better site. You use that time to get better REAL experience of all the online, SEO, AdWords, marketing stuff.