I am running a site where we are currently pre-selling deluxe LED light up beer pong tables. Right now my conversion rate is very low, about 1 sale per 400 visitors. I average about 6,000 visits a month currently.
I want to do a split test to better improve my site, but I am not sure what I should try out? Would anyone mind taking a look and throwing some ideas out?
Here are my initial thoughts on problems, but they are not the sites fault:
Current pre-sell status is a turn off, people don’t like to wait, I can’t fix this until inventory is ready.
High ticket item, tables retail for $479 so I’m not sure what an average conversion rate for such a price point is. Maybe offer Paypal Credit?
If what you call “pre selling” is a “turn off”, then surely that’s only a temporary problem. Once the product becomes available, the problem will disappear.
In fact, there’s an argument for taking the product off the market until it is much closer to being available. After all, you’re not making any money during the wait, and you are not doing anything to generate happy customers.
On a more general point, maybe the conversion rate is not the best metric to watch. Better perhaps to look at the overall sales value rather than the percentage.
Take a look at how that rate is being generated. Especially look at who is being counted as a visitor. If you only plan to sell it to USA customers, then you don’t want to count site visitors from Australia. You can do that in Google Analytics by setting up a segment that is only USA visitors.
Also look at how visitors are currently being generated. If viewing on social media of something like a funny picture or video is causing a lot of frivolous visits, then you may want to segment them out of calculation of conversion rate.
I do ecommerce, but have never done a pre-sell. If you research typical conversion rates for a pre-sell you may find it is much lower than the common 2% for active ecommerce.
It might help if the OP could clarify what he means by “pre-sell”. Does it mean promoting the product before it is available for sale? Or doing the promotion now, but only taking orders when it’s available? Or taking orders now against future delivery?
I’m not a marketing person, but I agree with this. The product is kind of gimmicky and very niche. I expect the average visitor had a conversation similar to:
user1: “Hey man! Look at this. Isn’t it cool”
user2: “Yeah it is! I wish I could afford that.”
user1: “Me too!”
Then they go back to using their $20 table they bought at Lowes.
Another point about percentage conversion rates: A low rate might indicate failure on your part to sell the product. But it could equally indicate your success in attracting visitors to the site. On that basis, one way of increasing the percentage would be to make the site less attractive or harder to find.
Does that make sense? Of course not. But it does illustrate how pointless it is to chase after this kind of metric for its own sake.
