As you may already know – I take great pride in the fact that we not only design great ecommerce sites – but we also own a few too. I love ecommerce. The concept it brilliant, especially when it works.
But what about when it doesn’t? I have owned (and closed) a few “duffer” sites. Ecommerce sites that I thought would be great and turn a tidy profit. But how do you know whether or not it is a “duffer” site and close it or persevere with it?
Well, firstly, I am going to assume that you have a demand for your product and you are not selling it at uncompetitive prices. This is a big assumption to make, because without these two things – you will have a “duffer” site.
But let’s say you have a great product with good demand and reasonable prices and excellent service.
There are two other things to check – your traffic and your website, and I would check them in that order.
To get any useful statistics from your website, you need to have had at least 1,000 unique visitors. You can monitor these using your server logs, Google Analytics (free) or a subscribed service like our zStats system.
Unique visitors are different to page views and hits. Forget about hits. This was trendy lingo a few years ago – but it is meaningless for the purposes of your site. You need to know how many people have visited your site.
If you have had under 1,000 people visit your site – then you should boost your traffic (try using Goodle’s Adwords). If you have had over 1,000 people come and you haven’t had any sales – then you should check the quality of those visitors.
The reason I like Google Adwords so much is that you can get highly targeted traffic to your site. There is no point having some one interested in buying a mouse-trap visit your website that sells digital cameras. You have to focus your traffic.
So if you have had over 1,000 highly targeted visitors to your website and it is still not selling anything, then your website design is not working for your customers. What is happening is that you have highly motivated buyers coming to your site and they are not buying anything (remember, we have the demand, right pricing and right visitor). So your website cannot be designed correctly to persuade your visitors to buy from you.
What makes a successful ecommerce website design? Well the principles are simple: easy-to-use navigation, quality search facilities, effective headlines, easy order systems, secure credit card facilities, telephone orders, simple layouts, fresh content and intuitive processes.
If you think there is a problem with your site, give me a call and we can give you an honest appraisal – but before you go down the route of re-designing your site, check your demand, pricing and traffic first!
