'My online store gets just one sale a month!'
We enlisted e-commerce experts to help a bricks-and-mortar retailer make the transition online. What do you recommend for Melange Home Decor?
From DaveU, Sunnyvale, CA Amy from Not Dead Yet Studios posted an article along these lines recently. To summarize, making it hard for people to give you money is A Bad Thing.
http://www.notdeadyetstudios.com/blog/2009/04/are-you-making-it-too-hard-to-give-you.html
From GUDesigns.com / Akron, Ohio As an organic seo I need to comment that you cart needs to be optimized for friendly urls, just checked and you are using version 3 of the shopping cart script, you need to upgrade to version 4 which offers search engine friendly urls.
> As a new site you should optimize for what you do not who you are.
> Localize your site and build out from there as you build incoming links.
There are several other items needed, like a better design on top of your entry page.
From Rex Edhlund, San Diego CA As Mike stated, LOCAL FIRST. You may be getting more sales as a result of your website than you know. I would also recommend more people. Many of the items look "stock" and having friendly people around make things look homier and give a reference to scale. Our site and merchant group San Diego Business Startup Incubator places a HUGE emphasis on "people friendly internet experience". Get them in the store or give them the feeling that they are already there.
From Roxanne Stone, Denver, CO I also agree with all the advice provided. However, as I own an e-commerce site (http://www.familyplaque.com) I know how expensive design and SEO services can be. Much of what was being described sounded expensive to me, so I wanted to offer this suggestion. If you don't already have it, get Google Analytics plugged into your web site.
Here is why Google Analytics is a great tool. You need to see what your online visitors are doing – how they enter your site, what they click on (or don't click on), how long do they stay, etc. This is easily done if you have Google Analytics plugged into your site. The code from Google is free and your web designer can implement it easily, and inexpensively. Best of all, you log into your free Google account and view and manage the information. You will begin capturing data immediately and it gives you day-by-day information on what people are doing on your site. If you already have Google Analytics, read it carefully and take full advantage of it, as it has a lot to offer, such as keywords visitors used to find your site, time on site and bounce rate. Bounce rate is important, as it tells you very clearly if your homepage is working. If you have a 100% bounce rate, it means people never go any further than your home page. If that's the case, then you should consider some tweaking of color and headers. Until then, save your cash.
One of the key things to keep your eyes on is key words. Those key words will help you update your Meta Data and enhance your product copy. You also want a site rich in top keywords. The more relevant key words you have for your product offering, the higher your site will rank on search engines. You also need to discover what keywords your top competitors are using and try to put those words into your site. The editors suggested your competitors, now go to KeyWordSpy.com and research them. You can obtain a lot of data for free, but if you want more, you'll have to pay a fee, but it's a good starting point.
In addition to Google Analytics, your web design agency should have provided you with a CMS (Client Management System) tool. This should allow you to manage certain parts of your site, the Blog you can create, for instance, but it should also allow you to watch visitors in real time. If you know the busiest day on your site, which Google Analytics will show you, log in that day and watch what people are doing. It can be really frustrating, as you may see some visitors get all the way to the checkout page only to abandon the purchase, but it's a good way to see what's working and what's not.
Finally, I would suggest reading "Ultimate Guide to Google Ad Words" for information on how to take advantage of Google, regardless if you plan to use Ad Words or not, and also read "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug. You can visit his web site, http://www.sensible.com/ and get a lot of great information as well. Online shoppers act very differently than in-store shoppers, and he's an expert understanding and reaching online customers.
Good luck and keep at it. A few small changes can provide huge results, and with out a lot of expense.
From Jim Mintz, Nashville, TN. I am the owner of http://www.oscsolutions.net
I agree with the editor and I would like to add to the following advice:
1) Make sure that your hosting for your website is very stable, I noticed that your site is extremely slow and this will cause site purchase conversion to be low as well. As an anology for this is that you would not build a million dollar home on a wood foundation. you need a solid foundation to support your customer experience to ensure they have a seemless and fast way of navigating your site. Website page load times are very important especially since you are not using a 1 page checkout scenario during the checkout process or signup process for your customers. If you have cheap hosting, then do not expect the world to have no issues with your website. Just because you host with a large well known company doesn't mean that your site will be stable. The only way to have a stable platform for your customers is to have a dedicated server where you are the only one using the resources for your customers to be able to use. Shared hosting for ecommerce sites is a sure way of killing any startup business if you rely upon ecommerce sales. Get a dedicated server, costs more, but you can get better statistics on a dedicated platform and rule out any issues upfront to dal in your seo (search engine optimization).
2) Make sure that if you decide on using flash for your site, keep this to advertisements only, do not use them for design elements as this can be and will be problems for customers that do not have their browsers updated. I highly do not recommend using flash for any ecommerce sites. For one example is that any content inside of flash doesn't get indexed in the search engines.
3) All startup sites should be mostly white, this is because of the product visibility and the fact that if you are not a very famous or a well known site, then design will be an impedence to your customers. Typically well designed and graphical sites are good for informational site, promotion.
4) Your home page needs to explain to your customers what your site is about and how you handle your customer service. Case in point: If your customer knows that you will be there to provide an excellent service to them before they buy from you, then you are more likely to get that customers' business.
5) Offer an affiliate program for your loyal customers for them to put banners on their blogs and personal pages or signup on shareasale.com to help with direct targeted marketing of your products.
6) Offer live support on your site, this is a great way of ensuring your customer is feeling supported with good customer service if they have questions or concerns.
There is many more things that you can do for your site and it would take too long to post them here but this should be a good start along with the editors post.
I have been doing ecommerce work for many years and I do know what does drive good sales and what it takes to keep your cusomters happy. The shopping experience is strictly 3 things. Customer service, presentation of your product, keeping the customers eyes on the product not on eye candy and 3 is follow up on your sales.
I hope this helps and feel free to contact me at our site.
From Nicola, Tampa, Florida great article .. I agree with all the points the experts made.. The economy is tough on all of us right now but don’t give up. Definitely continue marketing & advertising your store through local and neighboring areas, but I don’t agree with “dumping your site” as someone suggested. One of the most substantial benefits of e-commerce, is that it gives small businesses the same "reach" as the larger companies. While "branded" companies may be given a formidable advantage over smaller companies, the internet allows consumers the flexibility to research products. The internet allows for smaller companies to have a web presence, targeting specific groups of customers, and sell products within markets they may never had previously had an opportunity to reach. Continual sales to new and existing customers may also be attained, due to the ability to perform customer profiling. And I agree that finding a more e-commerce friendly platform might help. I actually know of a great e-commerce application called “Comgine” (www.Comgine.com). Comgine is completely customizable to best leverage your business model and with Comgine e-commerce you can reduce transaction costs, enable sales and revenue growth without additional staffing, facility or infrastructure expense, improve customer service and loyalty, dramatically reduce inventory and warehousing costs, reduce the costs of accounting or data input errors. Check out their website, its worth a try or you can contact Cornerstone Consulting Inc. who is the reseller of Comgine's integrated e-commerce application.
From Jennii, Minneapolis MN I agree with the other comments.
What might be helpful is for her to place Google analytics onto her site if she doesn't have this already. That way she can see more information on her site visitors, including the browser resolutions they have. I think there are a lot of web designers out there who do not realize that not everyone uses the same (typically huge) screen resolutions that they do. I've had my screen at 1600×1200 for quite some time – I also do web design, but more predominantly graphic design and illustration – and this screen size is for me easier on the eyes. However, I realize that the majority of people do not keep their resolution near this size and I definitely keep this in mind when doing my work.
Another consideration your web designer could have taken is a free service called "Browsershots" that shows graphical previews of your website across different operating systems, browsers and screen resolutions. What shows up for a lot of your site viewers as 1/3 of the screen for that heading Flash on the site is significantly smaller for me – because of my 1600×1200 monitor. I'd guess your web designer has a larger resolution as well and didn't take that into consideration.
Lastly, speaking of Flash – this is probably also affecting the loading time of your site. Flash is fine and well in its place, but I don't think that it is necessary on your site. It isn't achieving a spectacular effect on your site. There are also a lot of interesting studies that have shown that Flash on sites can actually cause visitors to LEAVE a site. At least your entire site isn't Flash and you don't have a splash page – that makes that percent leaving higher.
Even other small touches could be made to increase the professionalism. Keeping those images on the front page the same dimensions and image quality can increase the professionalism, for example.
From Brian Pasch, Little Silver NJ You can also feed all your inventory into Google Base for free which serves two purposes. Greater exposure to your products and also additional links to your website internal pages.
From Shirley Tan Joanne:
I wanted to give you some feedback on your site:
1) The white text is really hard to read.
2) There are too many colors conflicting with the product photos, it may be taking attention from your products since the consumer have to try harder to focus on all the white text against the sharper black buy buttons (on the List Grid pages)
3) If you're requiring the consumer to register before they buy, this could turn them off.
4) I agree with Masud, you may want to step back and re-evaluate your expectations of revenue and figure out how you're going to manage the site before you invest anymore money into it.
5) You have to evaluate your competition, your site doesn't have to be just as beautiful as the big brand sites, but they have to be better than your competition.
6) Your current SEO on your site does need a lot of work, so you may want to consider a more ecommerce friendly platform that you can easily manage yourself without having to call your webmaster for every change you need.
Our store is on the Yahoo Store Platform, you can check it out AmericanBridal.com, let me know if you have any questions, I love to help my fellow women entrepreneurs.
From Lynn Geiger What "pulls" me away from a site is when it is slow downloading and when I have to scroll right or down. I will click out of those sites and find another. The page should fit in my 800×600 / 1024×768 screen!
From Mike McNesby, Mt. Laurel, NJ I live around the corner from where Joanne's store is located and I've never even heard of it. I kind of agree with Masud. It's never going to be a "destination" site with the stuff that she is selling. I can probably find similar items at Bed Bath & Beyond in their on-line store if I were looking for those types of items. I just don't think that the inventory being list would ever do well on the internet. Nobody goes on to the internet and says "I wonder where I can find a sign about "Shopping"". That's something you see when you are walking through a store and it catches your fancy. I'd recommend saving the money by dumping the site and use the money to concentrate on marketing her store in the Marlton/Mt. Laurel/Medford/Cherry Hill area. It looks like quality merchandise. Start building that foot traffic in to your store. Not quite sure if you get a lot of foot traffic in The Shoppes at Ellwood … if not, get out of there and start looking for a walking destination where people will go in to your store (Main St. Moorestown) … (Kings Highway Haddonfield), etc. Good luck!
From Gleb Esman, Ottawa, Canada Hi Joanne,
Here are good points of your site:
It is fast. Google loves the speed.
I also like the way nagivation of your site structured – front page, subcategories and then single items.
Likings ends here.
I'll leave it up to designers to discuss visualities and colors but below are serious points that takes buying traffic away
from your online business.
I am not sure what your SEO guy did. I do see incoming links coming from irrelevant (to home decor) 'daily ramblings' PR2 blog and
majority of others are used to appear from horse forum, likely due to paid advertising efforts.
Horses are not related to your business at all and horse people are not likely give you any buying traffic.
You (or your WEB guy) built store based on Joomla CMS + CubeCart.
They do work but the way your pages are structured are in the most Google *unfriendly* way possible.
Your URLs are totally non-SEO optimized in the worst possible way.
Each product URL on your page utilizes 'bad spirited' query string ('?act=viewProd&productId=29')
instead of keyword friendly descriptive way: /Flicker-Battery-Operated-Candles/
Your Title tags are the same in majority of pages and they all start with the same phrase: "melange Home Decor and Gifts".
This means Google will rank all of your pages for the phrase: "melange Home Decor and Gifts" but you will nowhere be found
on a search engines for buying phrase: "Flicker Battery Operated Candles".
SEO guy who takes money should know above principles.
Joomla (CMS that your site was built on) has certain software add-ons to makes it URL's SEO friendy.
CubeCart probably sa well but htese points has not been taken care of.
What would i do if i'd want to built a store from scratch:
A. I'd use WordPress.org – based CMS for small – up to 50 items store. Plus hosted shopping cart solution.
I develop and sell online software and using wordpress I got on the first-second page of Google among
more than 30,000,000 of competing pages in only 6 months (after registering brand new domain).
B. For large online store – i'd use http://www.magentocommerce.com based solution.
It has it all, it is super SEO optimized from the ground up and does not require combining CMS (such as Joomla) with
other e-commerce/shopping cart add-ons.
What to do to help your store at this point?
1. Consider technical options to fix URL structures, Titles and other on-page optimization elements.
As I mentioned Joomla has add-ons that could make each page SEO friendly.
Web/Technical SEO person knows what needs to be done.
2. Get your products to Google base.
3. Add descriptions of your store, products, specials to power social media and content sharing sites,
such as squidoo.com, hubpages.com and some others.
Create "satellite" blog at wordpress.com and write supplimentary articles about your store and items on it.
Tag them properly as wordpress.com is very powerfully ranking portal.
This will help you to build incoming links and ranking.
4. Hire SEO guy to study where your competition gets links and traffic from and follow in their steps.
This strategy helps to learn from online stores that are already successful instead of reinventing the wheel.
5. Open and maintain Google Webmasters account + Google analytics account to study traffic.
6. Try spending small amount on Google Adwords and see how they convert to find out which product are carrying buying power.
Trying small on Google adwords will help you to study current economic conditions and see which items carrying better
buying power compare to any others. It also helps you to plan your marketing budget precisely without surprises.
Gleb Esman,
MENSK Technologies,
glebesman@gmail.com
From Masud Osman, Newport Beach, CA Look at what she sells. The items appear to be of high quality, yet not branded. I am on her site right now typing in this pop up box and you know what…I can't even remember the name of the company. The advice from the "experts" is very good, but in the end I don't think her sales will increase by much. In today's economy, I wonder if people are even spending a dime at the actual store….wait her blog states sales are super!!!!! The money is just too tight!!! Also, the items are hard to sell online. They are touchy-feely items….hard to sell online. I wish the folks who took your hard earned dollars for the site would have explained to you a bit more about what can sell online and what's can't easily sell online. While we're at it….do you have traffic? How many people per day and how many minutes are they browsing around….are they adding items to their shopping cart and then not completing the sale….why? These questions take up time and I realize you have to work on your store biz, personal life, etc etc….I know it isn't easy…nothing in life is easy; but I have to give you credit for trying! :) There is more to "talk" about….just wanted to say hello and give some thoughts. I wouldn't mind if you email me and we can chat via phone to brainstorm some more — no charges….just would love to see your store take off!!!! Please feel free to contact me at mo@Gnet.com — best wishes to you for health, happiness, and love!
Whatever you are paying your SEO guy, you need to ask for a refund. If he calls himself and SSEO expert….. then the folks below, are SEO Gods. Even the most basic SEO Stuff is not done on the site.
What the folks say about other online shops (Yahoo, amazon, etc) is well worth it as well. You will not be a destination site for others…..Sorry, but that is just a reality of it. Use Amazon….that is where people go to shop, and it will increase your sales.