Ecommerce Store Sales
-
I am the webmaster/developer/seo guy for my company's online stores. Of course doing this gets a lot of pressure based on the sales the websites are bringing in. In the past month or so, we've had a somewhat steep dropoff of sales and I've been having an extremely hard time figuring out why. I have researched our visits, and those are staying steady, our ranks have actually gone up for a few of my targeted keywords, the sites are working fine, all statistics seem like everything is normal other than the amount of sales.
So the question is: does anyone else here run an Ecommerce store that has run into this kind of problem? Have you found any outside influences from google or other search engines that have had this kind of effect that you wouldn't normally think of looking at? I'm just completely out of ideas for things to check... it may very well be they need to re-price things, but I want to make sure I've done my due diligence to find anything I may be able to fix!
Thanks!
-
Here's a nice e-Consultancy article with come clear things to check against: http://econsultancy.com/blog/9848-monday-morning-panic-stations-18-checks-to-make-when-your-sales-are-down?utm_medium=feeds&utm_source=blog
-
Thank you both for the responses! These suggestions certainly help and give me a little more to look into. If I find anything crazy going on, I'll definitely report back!
-
Russ has given you some good leads. Here are a couple more.....
Look at your competitors. Have they reduced their prices? Are they giving free shipping?
Look at new merchandise in the market. Maybe your stuff is old model now and everyone wants the newest.
-
There are a whole lot of potential factors:
1. Seasonality: Take a look at your products and see if certain ones stopped selling.
2. Browser Updates: Take a look at your sales by browser-type. You do have goal tracking in Analytics set up, right :-). It is possible that an update to a browser made a particular part of the checkout stop working.
3. Errors in the Funnel: Run through your checkout process again and see if anything is screwing up.
4. Look at your Users: Are more of them coming in via Mobile?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Issue for Sales Team & Funnelling Smaller Orders
Hi, Hoping somebody might have some suggestions for funnelling smaller orders and larger orders on different journeys. Basically, 90% of our business comes from 10% of customers with larger orders, like contractors and organisations who fill out leads or call us. But about 90% of the sales teams time is taken up from handling lots of smaller calls, which account for <5% of our revenue. Obviously we still want these smaller orders, but would anyone have any suggestions on moving these customers away from phone calls? We've tried to add as much content to the site as possible to answer they're questions, but they seem to just call anyway. Hope you can help!
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Frankie-BTDublin
Thanks1 -
Google Ecommerce Tracking
Hey all, I have GTM set up on a site and I am trying to enable the Ecommerce tracking functionality. My problem is this, I have access to the basket variables all they way through the checkout funnel to the payment page, but they are then lost on the payment completed page. Does anyone know how I can pass the value of the basket across to the payment completed page so I can mark the transaction completed with an actual value present. I cannot post hidden input fields or change the url get variables as the third party system that us used fails. I have thought maybe javascript calls, but not managed to get to work as yet. Can the Google session pass and hold them in the cookies that are set? Any help greatly appreciated. Cheers Tim
Conversion Rate Optimization | | TimHolmes1 -
Figuring out why sales drop significantly from one day to another
Hi all, We're running an eCommerce site and are using Moz to track our organic results i primarily we are using the Rank tracker and On page analysis tools. One strange issue that we experience on our website is sales dropping from one day to the next unexplainably (to us anyway). For example, one day (could be any day of the week or weekend) we'll make £1,000 of sales, the next £200 - the following might be back up to £1,000. I've tried looking for patterns in traffic, but oddly even on the days when we have poor sales we still tend to have almost as much traffic. We also use adwords, which account for about 50% of sales - on some of the poor days our spend on adwords is down, on others it's not. If the spend is down I could make a fair assumption that our competitors are playing around with their bids. I'm interesting in trying to determine why we have such irregular sales patterns. If they dropped 10/20% I could quite easily put it down to any number of factors - even the weather for example, however drops of 80/90% seem strange. I don't really know where to look for the answers - my first thought was that on the poor days I should check whether our organic rankings had dropped significantly overnight - but the Moz Rank Tracker only updates once per week, so perhaps there is an alternative way someone could suggest? I'd be really interested to hear from any of you that might have been through similar struggles, or, have some ideas that might help us get to the bottom of the fluctuation in sales. Thanks in advance for your time. Kind regards,
Conversion Rate Optimization | | SimplyPlastic
Al0 -
Should I add social media icons to homepage of ecommerce site?
... In particular Facebook likes for social proof and credibility? (We have 1.7k likes, more than most competitors). Aimed at the higher end of the market, I've tried to keep the aesthetic a bit more pared down. But, perhaps this needs to be made more prominent?
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Coraltoes770 -
Which eCommerce Platform?
Dear MOZ community members We currently run a custom built IIS/ASP/SQL Server system that is starting to fall apart and needs major overhaul. I'm currently evaluating a number of open source eCommerce platforms (Magneto, OpenCart) and would welcome any advice that some of you may have. We are not a major brand, but we have a good name in our field which we wish to maintain and we ranking very well for our top phrases despite not having SEO-friendly URLs amongst other things. I've downloaded Magneto and installed it on a LAMP could server and got it up and running. It looks very flexible, albeit a little bloated and I can concerned that it's a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Do any other small businesses have experience with Magneto? Thanks for your time! andy www.prendas.co.uk
Conversion Rate Optimization | | andystorey1 -
Question regarding eCommerce sites, relative URLs and secuirty certificates
We recently installed a new SSL certificate on an ecommerce site. Our IT Director is insisting that all pages on the site must be coded in such a way so that the address bar maintains a green background when a visitor is navigating the site after navigating to a secure page or logging in. I have worked on many ecommerce sites and never has this been an issue. Amazon does not use the green bar....but they are Amazon. In order for this to work, he is insisting that all internal URLs be coded as relative instead of absolute. How bad is this for SEO or does it really not matter that much? How crucial is it for trust and security? Opinions welcome!
Conversion Rate Optimization | | danatanseo0 -
Recommendations for Books on Analytics, Ecommerce and Data Manipulation?
Having just moved into a position where an Ecommerce site is now a big part of my responsibilities I'm looking to get up to speed on the topic (been a while since I worked on a shop). Site is Magento based. I'd also like any recommended books on broader analytics and using/reporting data. Obviously finding books on these subjects isn't difficult, I'd just like mozers thoughts on any that are particularly good and more important still relevant ie fairly recently published. Quite broad topics these I know but open to any or all suggestions - however not too worried about covering wider SEO, more 'technical' guide style is what I'm interested in. Couldn't really find any threads on books in general so should be an interesting topic (I hope!) Thanks in advance for any help and suggestions.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | SteveHoney650 -
Tracking Sales to Sources
We're trying to set up a commission system for the different people who contribute to our site. We just want to see a list of transactions and the path back to source for all of them. We haven't been able to figure it out and know other ecommerce sites have had to have figured this out.We have GA Ecommerce tracking on. How can we find last months sales: source / medium / keyword / landing page / revenue / etc Sorry if this is an obvious question. We have spent a lot of time trying to figure it out.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | chrishansen0