Why can't I get a sale?
After four months, an online clothing entrepreneur hasn't had one customer. FSB diagnoses the problem here, but we know you experts out there have more to say. Help Belissa and other online retailers by sharing hints and tips.
From juan ramon, Madrid, Spain I have also an online store on ebay, and also a web to sell. I sell replicas of very ancient coins. I have the profit on the sales of my shop, but it have few exposure, so, sometimes I put for auctions some coins. Usually I lost some money on them, but It attracts buyers to my shop. The total result is positive.
http://www.copycoins.com
http://stores.ebay.com/Roman-Coins
From Javier, Reading, PA Your website must be attractively designed, easy to navigate and must offer some kind of secure encrypted transaction system. Also this seller needs to promote his/her business more aggressively in order to increase its targeted traffic. Optimization is a must too. workonline
From tunatofu, Alexandria VA I would have advised the seller to start out offering things on Ebay or craft/art shows first to see if there was a market for what she sells (and to start making a name for herself). Ebay stores are inexpensive and very easy maintain – it is also a HUGE ready-made audience. Everybody has heard of Ebay but not the seller's individual little store and when seeking such things it may not occur to folks to LOOK for her designs or items. One can search easily on Ebay (say for sweaters) and her items will come up in the search with every other hit for sweaters. Besides the audience and ease, there are also payment and security infrastructures in place on Ebay.
From Walter Wimberly, Apopka, FL While the article provide some good insights, there are a couple of things it left out, namely: analyze your existing traffic. If you are getting people viewing your site, but not buying, then find out why. If no one comes to your site, then you also need to know why. (Good points about being search engine friendly in the article.)
Assuming the marketing of the site is being done so people are getting to the site, the usability (alluded to in the article about the order now button) is not optimal, and could quickly frustrate users and turning them away.
Using a good analytics package and/or usability specialist would help identify those key issues.
From Gleb Esman, Ottawa, Canada Ok, from the quick look zabeshop.com is a nice looking website. For humans – but *not* for search engines!
Here are few mistakes made on this site:
1. Main page "keywords" meta tag is stuffed with keywords like a thanksgiving turkey. Search engines often consider this as a spamming effort and might penalize the website.
2. Home page does *not* have any text description or content to speak of. As a result – search engines have no clue what keywords to rank this website is for – hence it's buried deep into organic results.
3. Title of home page is: "Zabe – Sense of Nature". Text and keywords of title tag is often used by search engines to understand website theme and rank it on their organic search pages. But how many of your potential customers search for phrase "zabe" or "sense of nature" to find a products to purchase? Probably not that many.
4. Javascript and Flash are used heavily to improve visual impression. Please note – these technologies takes longer to render in people's browsers and search engines never use them to rank website pages. So while improving visual appeal they does not help you to rank higher on search engines.
5. Product pages does not have any rich text descriptions of items for sale. While they are certainly nice looking products – search engine have no clue what these are about without good "keyword rich" descriptions. Hence – no ranking in search engines – and no chance for this webportal to be found on google and yahoo and others.
Hope this will help you a bit to improve rankings and gain more customers!
Gleb Esman, MENSK SEO, Ottawa, Canada. glebesman@gmail.com
From Justin, Pierre, SD I would agree with a lot of what Brent Birch said with emphasis on making your site more search engine friendly.
There are a lot of tools out there to help you online when it comes to getting your site to rank in your proper categories. It is going to take mostly hard work that only you can do best since you know your business better than others but I would suggest getting advice from a non-competitor website that is successfull. Do some research on your keywords to find out how many people actually type in your targeted keywords each month – you may be surprised. http://www.VisionBedding.com gets nearly all its traffic from online visitors coming from all the major search engines, understand that it took a year to start to see good results. I wish you the best! – Justin Poile CEO of VisionBedding.com
From Russell, Warwick RI You might consider a clicks and bricks strategy. Analyze where the bulk of your web traffic is coming from geographically, then work to get deals with independent retailers in your heavy traffic areas. You can place signage with your web address, and/or products in those stores. You can share revenue with the store. The visibility will reinforce your brand and authenticity.
You might also consider reciporcal linking agreements with complimentary websites (wherein you exchange banner ads and/or links to one another's site…
From Tyler Corlen, Baltimore, MD Agreed.. you must market like crazy. Anywhere you send anything electronically, put the web address on it.
http://tylercorlen.com
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If your site doesn’t have a lot of features look a using an ecommerce solution that already has everything already built in. They are easy to set up and usually very reasonably prices with low monthly fees. We built our site http://www.toolcritter.com and had it up and going in less than 30 days.