Hi All! It has been about 3 months since I published this ecommerce website. People are saying they love the website but I am seeing hardly any conversions. The SEO is pretty on-point and I know my rankings will improve in time, but why can’t I get the conversions? Any suggestions would be so helpful, and if you need a critique from me…just let me know!
Hi @Carrie_Atkins,
I moved your topic to Business, as I think this is more a business discussion than a design & ux one. I’m also going to invite @zackw as I know he helps manage an ecommerce site and may have some insight.
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There are a lot of factors to consider, of course, so this conversation may have to develop.
I see you have your Google Analytics tracker installed, so make sure that is functional and recording all your stats.
You said “people” are telling you it looks good. What people? Friends and family? Actual random users on the internet?
Conversion rates (very generally speaking) can be less than 3%, sometimes less than 1% for very general stores. So if you’ve only got 100 people browsing a month, don’t expect more than an order or two from it. I don’t know what your actual numbers are for visitors, but guesstimating a 2 or 3% conversion rate is one way to think about it.
You have a very specific niche, so if we assume that your marketing is very targeted to people who WANT this kind of thing, then good targeted users can convert much higher, from 5 to 15%.
The “look” of the theme is probably your last concern at this point. If there is anything worth worrying about, it’s mobile support, page optimization, SEO, and advertising.
I visited a product page and it was 83 requests, almost 4MB in size, taking 4.5 seconds to load. Your main concern here would be optimizing the graphics. For example the largest asset on one product was an image of 1.2MB and it wasn’t even the main image! It was an image from the “related products” section. Woocommerce is taking the full size image and just resizing it to thumbnail size via CSS. This adds to page size if you can’t have multiple fully-optimized images for small/medium/large display.
You’ve got a connection with Linkedin platform. I haven’t seen this before so not sure what it’s doing for you. If you don’t absolutely require this Linkedin stuff, the js file is the 5th largest asset on the page.
You can always analyze the page assets yourself by using your browser’s web tools and looking at the network waterfall.
If you haven’t already done so, hook your site up to Google Webmaster tools as well. They will find some performance or other potential issues and report them to you.
Practically speaking, you have three means of marketing your new store:
- On-page SEO. Be sure to KNOW KNOW KNOW what your target keywords are for any given page and make that extra little tweak to cater to them. For example I would take a guess that one primary keyphrase is “craft beer candles”. Searching Google for this returns 1,620,000 results (not bad but a little low for a “good” niche. Your website does indeed show up on page one as the 6th result. Good work!
If I search for “beer candles” alone, the results jump to over 11 million sites, but you’re now on page 2. This is still pretty dang good considering it’s a 3 month old store, so well done! All I’m saying is make sure your pages are “authoritative” for the keywords you want to target. The pages should be ABOUT those words. Google will sort it out eventually.
Being on page one of your chosen keyword will give you as much traffic as that keyword is going to handle.
Using Google’s keyword planner, you can experiment with good keywords to target. A simple example is that “craft beer candles” had 1.6 million results, BUT Google says only 30 people a month are searching for it! “Beer candles” had 11 million results, so more competition, and 480 searches a month. You would be better off targeting your pages for the more generic term, because it has a larger audience searching for it. In other words, focus less on the “craft” part, and a little more on the “beer” part.
If I search for “artisan candles”, there are only half a million results, but it still gets 210 searches a month. Even this keyword would perform better for you than “craft”. 30 people search for “craft” but over 200 search for “artisan”, so which keyword is likely to convert better?!
If there are even better performing keywords relating to your products, which have larger search volume, continue catering to that end.
- Your second method of marketing is ads. Even if you don’t have much of a budget for advertising, your keywords are relatively low competition. When I search for “beer candles” there is one company with a paid ad. This is actually a good sign! Consider also having a Google ad, if your competition is doing it, you might want to as well. You can always set a low bid. You only pay for the clicks after all, so it’s worth the experiment. Just make sure the ad is targeted very well, nobody will click if they aren’t interested, and you won’t have to pay for uninterested passersby.
Facebook ads are gaining popularity extremely fast. Facebook has so much data on people, you can target your ads almost exclusively to the people most interested, such as age and gender for starters. Spend a little cash and do a campaign for just a few days, just to see what kind of traffic you get from it. People who click on these ads aren’t doing so accidentally, they see a product and are genuinely interested. The conversion rate should tend to be much higher.
I might add that if you bought your domain name, most of these companies give you some free Google cash for advertising. You might check if you have some free money with your host. There may be other ways to score yourself some play money, search around.
- Guerrilla marketing. This is every technique available that doesn’t cost anything and is still ethical and acceptable online. If there are good sized Facebook groups for candle lovers, join them. Beer groups, why not! Forums? Blogs? Guest posting? Affiliate program for your customers? Run a “free” giveaway or a buy-one-get-one sale to try and attract some first time buyers. Do small free samples if they pay for shipping.
Buy the Guerrilla Marketing book by Jay Levinson for ideas. Or just search Google for it, tons of ideas out there.
Lastly just make sure your website works well. Be sure to “act like a customer” and use your own website, buy something all the way through, use your credit card and everything. Make sure the whole checkout feels nice and smooth and secure. Have your mom buy something, if she can’t figure it out, something needs to change!
Can you track abandoned carts? Keep an eye on that if you have so few customers already, why are they abandoning the cart? This is typically due to annoying checkout, price was not expected, didn’t want to pay shipping, etc.
I guess practically speaking, try to analyze your traffic, where it’s coming from, what keywords they used to find you, your bounce rate and average time on page, demographics. Then double down on what works, improve where it looks bad. Test your site, optimize page load and SEO.
If all you need is more eyeballs, don’t count on Google’s 300 or 400 searches per month. Even if half the people who search for these things click through to your store, a 5% conversion is still around 10 orders a month. A normal 2% conversion is just 4 orders.
You said nobody is converting. So based on how many unique visitors? If you have hundreds of visitors with a 0% conversion rate, that would be very interesting. Are you simply too expensive based on competition? Look for a simple answer. Do you require people to create accounts to buy? Maybe consider allowing guest checkout.
Anyway good luck! We’re all here for you!
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Thanks for all the great information that you are offering for free. I really appreciate it.
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Umm, wow. That was completely unexpected but probably the best response I have ever gotten on an online forum. I am going to go back and read through this response and check off everything on the list that you had recommended. It is so very hard when you work for yourself as a designer and entrepreneur, you really don’t ever get that much feedback or someone to bounce ideas off of. I just want to thank you again and I will be responding soon .
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Hi Carrie_Atkins! I was able to read your message and I’m willing to help. One factor for the lack of conversion is maybe you aren’t pushing too much efforts in promoting your ecommerce site. So here are some of the suggestions I can give to effective promote your business online and gain more conversions based on my experience:
(Take note: you might notice similarities of this message with one of the threads I’ve previously visited. That’s because you are somewhat experiencing the same issue and therefore I decided to share the same advice as well.
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You mentioned that your SEO is on-point so we’ll leave it at that…
No issues on that area… -
Create an online domain (website) that features contents of promotional value. Other than that you also have to provide information about the product or service you are offer and how your target market can benefit from it.
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Use mainstream channels to promote your business over the internet. One example of this is by creating social media accounts and post promotional contents that showcase your business.
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Create a newsletter about the latest developments in your business and send it to your subscribers. Of course, you must have an email list and you can only do that by encouraging visitors to register with you. The moment they give out their email address is a strong indication of showing interest and therefore the more possibility for them to purchase something only if you make the right move…
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Make a promotional video and post it in social media (optional)
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Use an affiliate tool that will not only help you generate more revenues but will also attract customers from coming into your website. Like an offerwall for instance, this tool capable of giving rewards to your visitors every time they avail of any offers displayed on that wall while you earn $$$ at the same time. Kinda clever don’t you think? Now you don’t have to place banner ads in your web pages as this will only require your visitors to get out of your site once they view that ad and distract their user experience… Just bear in mind though that this tool can only be acquired after finding the right affiliate company to help you business grow…
Hope this helps! Please don’t hesitate to send a message if you need more help…
It is definitely a niche subject, I’ve never even heard of beer candles, so I can’t imagine it is something that people are often searching for. For such a product, I would think time and word of mouth are going to be your best allies, because imo this is something you’re going to have to ask people to buy, rather than them searching for it specifically
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