I think I really need to redesign my entire site but I am afraid whatever I do won't convert to the v7. The mover over seems like its forever away and I feel like I am missing out on sales by not making the site look more "fashionable" but I dont want to do the work only to find out it has to be redone. Any advice from ?

Hey Tahj.
I think you are worrying about nothing. There is no firm schedule or scope of what will or wont work on the conversion. I would focus on building your business.
If you feel a redesign is in order to help conversions--do it.

Planning is critical, but there is nothing to plan for at this time.

If you "really" want to be on V7, why not contract the platform and redesign on V7...and shut down V4? Im not suggesting though.

I dont think that the conversion issues will be aesthetic, so much as issues with conversion of variables and custom coding.

Just my 2 cents.

Thaj,

I kinda agree with Martini.

Don't waste your time with Redesigning, unless you really hate the way your site looks or some customers told you it sucks. Also, forget about v7, instead I would spend time adding content to your site. See that thread I started on SEO triumph. Take your womens category, you have no content, add some to that category and your others, pick some phrases, use em in the content, the metas, maybe rethink the name of that category, etc. . .

Also, I bet you probably like us, need some links from other sites, its hard and a pain, but you got to try. Of course, if you can get good content, people will link to you naturally. I say you want links to your homepage for now.

All of that type of work is going to transfer over to the new version when the time comes. Don't forget, things move slow, SEO wise.

As far as conversions over the last month or two go, heh, many have had the same problem. I bet people with other versions of the cart, even merchants with different cart companies carts had bad septembers too.

I think your site looks great.

Have you run tests to see how the SEs see your site? I ask because your homepage has no left menu, but if you click on "Men" at the top, the Men page has a left menu. I didn't even know it could be done? Have you thought about adding Categories besides Men and Women? Like Girl's Ts, Girls baby-Ts, girls shorts. Winter's coming what about expanding your inventory adding long-sleeve t-shirts, shorts, or those comfy baggy chillin-pants; can't think of what they're called...maybe make the homepage image smaller and add the left Cats menu? Just ideas.

I agree with mac n' martini, add content, don't redesign. I'd write some articles on the culture, it's influence on the cloths, etc.

just trying to brainstorm for ya....

Hmmm, thanx for the input guys. I dont know maybe I am putting too much stress on look and skipping functionally and content. Maybe I should make the main MEN'S CLOTHING and WOMEN'S CLOTHING. Maybe the use of clothing will help. I don't have them brokedn down too much because I don't have that many products.

Bama my home page is a HTML page. its not ASP. I created it off line then uploaded it as index.html. The .html is automatically defaulted over the ASP. The ASP page is still here, it just doesnt come up first. Besides typing it in manually, I think the only way it comes up is if there is an error, i have it redirect to the ASP page....also i think if you empty your cart it goes back to it. I was jus thinking I was going to add more content on the index.asp page because I notice both the it and the index.html page are showing up separately in serps

As far as articles about culture. I actually have have a blog that i write articles for. Its hard work though. I write in waves (which is no good). it shows up pretty well in G. I see its potential but i dont have the time right now to keep writing articles. I cooled off since the summer. I have a few ideas about how I will get other people to write the articles but, Im not going to try it till spring. Right now I am most concerned is not getting more traffic but its getting the pople here to check out. I was thinking it was the design because even thought I offer a limited selection, tons of ppl add them to the cart. They just dont convert. That shows me I have what they want...but I am not convincing them to buy it. So, I will try beefing up content and see how that goes.

But going back to the articles, I plan to unroll my "marketing plan" in spring because I feel like I am not doing a good job of handling my current traffic. So instead of creating a bad first impression for the tons of new traffic I want to create a good first impression for people I have now so they wont be window shoppers. But on the other hand I wonder, if having way more traffic can help in the numbers game...so I dont know. Its tough.

As far as getting more traffic goes... since budget is an obstacle with traditional advertising I thought of a bunch of ideas that seem crazy but will create a lot of buzz. Since bees fly...and the site is FLY AS I... i have this cheesy idea of a creating a buzz team with bee mascot. Basically its a bunch of HS and college kids running around and slapping stuff all over the web. I think thats gonna be a lot of fun and will really do good. But I just want the site to look really good and to have more products before I "let the bees loose". But I don't know my head spinning and I am confused

Ah, didn't realize homepage was html.

How do articles on your blog help your website? Maybe they drive some traffic but it does nothing for you site's serps. If you turn the articles you've written into html pages on your website, that's great content (as long as it's not duplicate)

I just don't understand abandoned shopping carts, who fills out all their info then just leaves? I can see adding stuff to a shopping cart to see what the cost will be, shipping, etc. There are no surprises on my site, yet i have like 400 abandoned carts, many with all the customers info filled out. I don't require logins, doing 2 step checkout, no surprise handling charges (I've abandoned carts with sneaky hidden fees). Otherwise, my checkout process is straightforward. What the heck?

Will be interesting to see how buzz team goes, sounds like street teams for bands. college and high school kids might be into it, they wanna look fly!

Tahj, adding clothing to the cats is going to give you a better chance at something, but it is still kinda broad, for now, it is a step in the right direction, but realize you are competing with JC Penny, Sears, Macy's etc. . . in Mens Clothing and Womens Clothing. Now I know it may look odd, but if you were to somehow call em Mens Reggae Clothing I don't think you would be competing with Sears, Macys, etc. . . It may seem redundant, but I bet it would help ranking and conversions.

There is a difference in putting items in a cart and those that actually start the checkout process.

Those that are putting items in the cart, might be trying to see the shipping costs, if there are taxes, and maybe just testing out the functionality of it, those that start the checkout process and abandon the cart is tough. Was the checkout process complicated? did someone interrupt them? did a page time out? the shipping scare em? all kinds of things that I am not mentioning. Believe me I wish I could figure it out? I believe our cart conversion is 30 percent over time, that means two out of three that start the process jump ship. Not to good.

Right now i rank pretty well for most of my homepage keywords. Reggae clothing, Jamaican clothing, dancehall apparel and stuff like that. Those are the most relevant to my site but are pretty low traffic compared to other things. With the articles I can get keywords that really have nothing to do with my site but will interest my shoppers. Such as artists names: tina nunezz , events like "Poughkeepsie Caribbean Day Parade " or whatever. Those show up on the first page of G under the site (www.ilandeye.com). At first I had the blog as a sub domain of the store i made it its own site so I can talk about and review anything I want w/o articles being directly connected with the store. So no one can be mad because I said their favorite artist was bad in concert or something. For example, there was a lot of talk about an artist having a fake accent. I got some traffic from an article that shows up on the first page of G if you search "collie buddz fake accent". Now once on the site you will see banners and ads to my site. This is a hit or miss tactic but its the best thing I could think of in order to keep the store professional.

As for articles on the main store site...I want to put a section up with press and articles...but I don't really have much press or news to announce at the moment.

hmmm good points....this stuff is a headache. I wish I could just sit down with everyone that jumped ship and ask whats the problem? It would eliminate the guessing. Most times I feel like I am shooting into the dark

Tahj,

I use to say the same things as you. "Don't want to work on getting anymore traffic until we can figure out how to convert more of the current traffic we have, then when we do get more traffic, it will be that much better"

Then we would try stuff, add this, remove that, change this, etc. . . and not really see any differences for the positive. Then one day, I discovered that conversion rates are ridiculously low in many industries 2 - 4 percent. I was looking at our stats, using all of our visitors to get our conversion rate, then it hit me, "We don't sell to people outside of the US, why should we count those visitors when it comes to Conversions, I mean, they don't even get the opportunity to buy from us"

When I looked at the conversion stats for US visitors, it seemed like we were in line enough, to where we needed to not be overly concerned about conversions and work on the many other things.

To me, conversions, checkout abandonment, and design are the three things, you need to get scratched off of your list early on and kinda forget about so you can work content, keywords, SEO, marketing.

what is the v7.

Hi laser,

V7 is a new version of the Ecommerce Storefront Software that was released but is currently still in development for our older v4 clients to be able to migrate to this new platform.

Tahj, When checking your site - the only two quick recommendations that I can recommend is one - maybe have a larger checkout/view cart button that will be easier for clients to find and then know to click there to checkout. Also - you use shared SSL. From our own studies at MC - we proved all other factors aside that if your site has its own ssl - you would have a 5% higher conversion rate. Petco.com recently had a study too about SSL seals - they showed that just having an SSL seal on your site with your own SSL guarunteed an increase in conversions. Also when they put the SSL seal in the upper left corner of the site they had their highest conversion rates due to this. Now note that not all sites are the same, but when clients do see your URL change in checkout from domain.com to xxxx.netsolstores.com or xxxx.monstercommercesites.com - this can throw some potential customers off.

So if you are looking for two quick fixes for conversion I recommend those two above. For more info on getting your own ssl checkout http://www.netsolssl.com.

Joe

hello joe !!
did you write all of this about the url to me??
i think that i have the ssl certificate bought directly with network solutions!!!
please reply

Hi Laser,

The only thing that I commented to you about was what V7 was. The rest was for Tahj hense the break and then the text

Tahj,

Joe

Maybe 5% improvement in checkout conversion rate, not conversion rate. Of course, with a brand like Petco, maybe they could pull off a 5% increase in regular conversion.

How many people around here, or in ecommerce have higher than a 5% conversion rate?

This may sound really stupid but...I never thought of searching "top online converstion rates" until you posted this. Ive tried a million other serches but not this. Dont ask why.

This is what I found...its from April 2005 but I think the #'s paint a pretty good picture of online sales. This page looks blank at first but scroll down and you will see it. (horrible design)

http://www.clickz.com/3496786

Nice find Tahj,

So the Top 100 retailers average was 4.9 percent conversion. Anybody around here pulling 5%? Not us! YET!

What ratio is used to figure that out? Is it # who start checkout vs # who check out as the MC conversion report determines? Or is it page views vs sales?

Its number of sales divided by number of visitors to your site. Or what I like to do is use number of US visitors since we don't sell to people outside of the US.

5 sales
100 visitors
5 % conversion rate

5 sales
400 visitors
1.25% conversion rate

Okay, thanks. Urchin says I had 203 sessions yesterday (I'm guessing it counts bots and other garbage hits), Analytics says I had 0, and I had 1 sale. This is all a big mystery.

Lets see, hate to continue this Hijack, but just have to address this urchin.

To measure your site by hits, is really old tyme, prehistoric. If I remember right, a hit is whenever a browser makes a request for an item, like an image, graphic, etc. . . If I browsed your homepage and you had 10 images and 20 graphics on your home page you would get 30 hits from me on one page. 1 Visitor, 30 hits.

I think sessions are somewhat closer to visits, but I think 3 sessions = 1 visitor

You mention that analytics says you have 0. I am guessing this is 0 visitors for yesterday. Check your stats again, hopefully you have some now and they were just delayed. If by chance, it actually does have 0 and remains at 0 after a few days, then you must have something wrong with analytics. You know if you browse the site yourself, then you would have at least one visitor in GA, if we click on your link here in the forums and browse your site, you will have some more visitors.

You know whats weird? I redesigned for the new year and was inspired by NS's site to place the homepage content below the fold. The funny thing is that when i view the page with two diff PCs the fold moves even if the resolution is the same. Isn't that weird???? I have been trying to figure how thats possible.