Does having small ticket items (say under $1) available for customers to find & buy help or hurt our site?
-
I feel really silly asking this question to begin with, but... as a music store, we have a lot of "smalls" for products, like a guitar pick. We sell picks for $0.50 each, or a single clarinet reed at $0.79. Some believe this is too small, finicky, and cumbersome to have listed for sale on our site. To me, I wholeheartedly disagree with the notiion of excluding "smalls" for a plethera of SEO, customer service, & online SALES reasons... Also we offer USPS shipping to offer low shipping costs on small goods. Can I really be wrong about this? Thanks, Kevin
-
Wow - thanks for the answer EGOL! This makes good sense to me and helps me firm up in my mind that this is a good direction to keep going on. Thanks again!! Kevin
-
We have items on our sites that sell for less than $1.
People buy them. We occasionally get a sale for hundreds of these items.
Lots of people toss them into their shopping cart just like people purchase magazines and candy bars in a grocery store checkout line.
Surprisingly, we frequently see people buy just ONE of these items and pay our minimum shipping and handling charge of $6.99. I guess I have done pretty close to that myself a couple of times, so I should not be surprised.
You know about USPS shipping - which is very important for these types of sales. But, consider offering a discount if people buy multiples. Like one guitar pick for 69 cents... three for $1.79... ten or more for just 49 cents each. Most shopping carts have options for these types of prices.
Our challenge for some of these items is "How many to hold in stock?"... We have gotten huge sales for some of these items that have a long lead time for us to get. So, after getting huge sales for a couple of these I spent $10,000 to stock up on one of them. It is kind of a joke at my office...they trickle out at a few a week with an occasional sale for a few hundred. The woman who does shipping says... "YAY... we sold one". We have enough to last until I retire and I am protected from price increases and we never have to order them. Fortunately they don't take up a lot of space.
I am not advocating sinking a load of dough into inventory... but try these small items and I bet you see them sell. Guitar picks... If I had a music site, many I would be selling them in all different kinds... and the inventory could fit into a shoebox.
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
-
Updating 2013 Site Built with Custom Theme, Modify Existing Theme, Create New Custom Theme, Or Use Child Theme?
Our website was designed in 2013 using a custom theme. Some of the plugins are built from scratch. Ranking in our industry is hyper competitive. We are seeking a better interface and also to improve ranking. I have read that custom themes use lighter code and can rank better. Does this apply to a custom theme from 2013? Will we have an SEO advantage using a custom theme? If so, will that advantage be significant? We are using a discontinued plugin called "Firestorm" to display real estate listings. That plugin has been customized. Can we use that plugin on a new "custom" theme? How about on a "child" theme? In terms of the cost of future maintenance, will a "custom" theme require much more intervention (manual installation of updates) moving forward? Which of the following options is best: 1. Adapt our existing custom theme
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
2. Create a new custom theme
3. Create a child theme Thanks,
Alan0 -
Indexed Pages Different when I perform a "site:Google.com" site search - why?
My client has an ecommerce website with approx. 300,000 URLs (a lot of these are parameters blocked by the spiders thru meta robots tag). There are 9,000 "true" URLs being submitted to Google Search Console, Google says they are indexing 8,000 of them. Here's the weird part - When I do a "site:website" function search in Google, it says Google is indexing 2.2 million pages on the URL, but I am unable to view past page 14 of the SERPs. It just stops showing results and I don't even get a "the next results are duplicate results" message." What is happening? Why does Google say they are indexing 2.2 million URLs, but then won't show me more than 140 pages they are indexing? Thank you so much for your help, I tried looking for the answer and I know this is the best place to ask!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | accpar0 -
Trying to pinpoint why 1 keyword moved down 100 positions in 2 weeks. Help me speculate?
Hi there, One of my client's sites, a very large and successful ecommerce website with great SEO performance, has seen a significant drop in rankings in the past 2 weeks. The rankings have begun to somewhat stabilize today, except one particular keyword with a search volume of 74k has gone from 1 to 100. Here is what has taken place in 2 weeks, sitewide: I revised and improved upon title tags and meta descriptions to make them more user-friendly and contain more optimized terms. Following all of Google's best practices, as always. Google still appears to be indexing these changes (has anyone seen an initial drop in rankings while this takes place?) The site has seen a very significant increase in 404 errors due to one feature of the site breaking. We got a message about it in Webmaster Tools, and this appears to coincide with when overall rankings dropped. The development team is working quickly to get this resolved. As of today, I am seeing the highest page-load time than any other day in 2015. With regard to the particular page/keyword in question: The keyword is no longer "exact match" at the beginning of the title tag, but rather broken up throughout the title tag so the whole title sounds better for users. **Have you found that this type of change is sufficient for a keyword rank to move down ~100 positions?? **(Either way, I have asked the client to revise the title to start with the exact match keyword, once again.) Google has indexed the page 2 days ago, but is still displaying the old title tag in search results. I have not found any instances of internal or external links to this page being removed. With all this information, does anyone see anything that seems like it could have reasonably caused such a huge tank in rankings? Is this a blip in time? Is there anything I am not considering? Should I just be patient?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
2 eCommerce stores that are identical 1 for US 1 for CA, what's the best way to SEO?
Hello everyone! I have an SEO question that I cannot solve given the parameters of the project, and I was wondering if someone could provide me with the next best alternative to my situation. Thank you in advance. The problem: Two eCommerce stores are completely identical (structure, products, descriptions, content) but they are on separate domains for currency and targeting purposes. www.website-can.com is for Canada and www.website-usa.com is for US. Due to exchange rate issues, we are unable to combine the 2 domains into 1 store and optimize. What's been done? I have optimized the Canadian store with unique meta titles and descriptions for every page and every product. However I have left the US store untouched. I would like to gain more visibility for the US Store but it is very difficult to create unique content considering the products are identical. I have evaluated using canonicals but that would ask Google to only look at either the Canadian or US store, , correct me if i'm wrong. I am looking for the next best solution given the challenges and I was wondering if someone could provide me with some ideas.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Snaptech_Marketing0 -
Help with 404 pages
Hello everyone, A few days back, we have permanently removed 3 main categories from our E-commerce website and because of that our more than 50k URLs are showing 404 error (according to Google Search Console). What are the good practices to handle such extensively 404 pages? Please help!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Help in Internal Links
Which link attribute should be given to internal links of website? Do follow or No follow and why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
How does the crawl find duplicate pages that don't exist on the site?
It looks like I have a lot of duplicate pages which are essentially the same url with some extra ? parameters added eg: http://www.merlin.org.uk/10-facts-about-malnutrition http://www.merlin.org.uk/10-facts-about-malnutrition?page=1 http://www.merlin.org.uk/10-facts-about-malnutrition?page=2 These extra 2 pages (and there's loads of pages this happens to) are a mystery to me. Not sure why they exist as there's only 1 page. Is this a massive issue? It's built on Drupal so I wonder if it auto generates these pages for some reason? Any help MUCH appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Deniz0 -
Site less than 20 pages shows 1,400+ pages when crawled
Hello! I’m new to SEO, and have been soaking up as much as I can. I really love it, and feel like it could be a great fit for me – I love the challenge of figuring out the SEO puzzle, plus I have a copywriting/PR background, so I feel like that would be perfect for helping businesses get a great jump on their online competition. In fact, I was so excited about my newfound love of SEO that I offered to help a friend who owns a small business on his site. Once I started, though, I found myself hopelessly confused. The problem comes when I crawl the site. It was designed in Wordpress, and is really not very big (part of my goal in working with him was to help him get some great content added!) Even though there are only 11 pages – and 6 posts – for the entire site, when I use Screaming Frog to crawl it, it sees HUNDREDS of pages. It stops at 500, because that is the limit for their free version. In the campaign I started here at SEOmoz, and it says over 1,400 pages have been crawled…with something like 900 errors. Not good, right? So I've been trying to figure out the problem...when I look closer in Screaming Frog, I can see that some things are being repeated over and over. If I sort by the Title, the URLs look like they’re stuck in a loop somehow - one line will have /blog/category/postname…the next line will have /blog/category/category/postname…and the next line will have /blog/category/category/category/postname…and so on, with another /category/ added each time. So, with that, I have two questions Does anyone know what the problem is, and how to fix it? Do professional SEO people troubleshoot this kind of stuff all of the time? Is this the best place to get answers to questions like that? And if not, where is? Thanks so much in advance for your help! I’ve enjoyed reading all of the posts that are available here so far, it seems like a really excellent and helpful community...I'm looking forward to the day when I can actually answer the questions!! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | K.Walters0