12 replies to this topic

[webslingers]

Looking for some opinions on the site. I won't say much to influence anything, let me know what you think could be better!

Thanks

Edited by Jan Zonjee, 24 September 2012 - 11:33 AM.
no longer using osCommerce

[DunWeb]

@webslingers

The site looks ok.  You spent some time on the colors and layout, you should spend some time on the buttons.

Also, on this page:

You spelled 'available' wrong:

Quote

Chemical reverse enginnering services availalbe.

Chris

Edited by Jan Zonjee, 24 September 2012 - 11:33 AM.

[webslingers]

Thanks Chris!

I've fixed those issues now. What would keep people from buying? Any other suggestions or ideas?

[Mort-lemur]

I have not compared products with other sites, but I find the prime reason that people dont buy something these days is down to Price - ie. product price + shipping costs - people shop around to get the best deal they can.

Also I see that you have a $25 minimum spend before you can checkout - this may discourage a lot of smaller sales.

Have you submitted to google / Bing shopping?

Have you joined forums to get some mentions and valuable links to your products?

[Biancoblu]

Something with your URL rewriter looks odd, when I hover on your links I see for example http://www.yoursite.com/index.php/cPath/4, but when I click the link the URL changes to http://www.yoursite.com/-c-4.html which looks incomplete, it should read http://www.yoursite.com/some-category-c-4.html.

Your contact page is emtpy, the first thing I look for when I buy online, especially abroad, is a contact name and address. I see you have a phone number listed, but as a potential client I want to know at least your name if I'm going to buy from you.

[webslingers]

Mort-lemur, on 07 July 2012 - 07:56 AM, said:

I have not compared products with other sites, but I find the prime reason that people dont buy something these days is down to Price - ie. product price + shipping costs - people shop around to get the best deal they can.

Also I see that you have a $25 minimum spend before you can checkout - this may discourage a lot of smaller sales.

Have you submitted to google / Bing shopping?

Have you joined forums to get some mentions and valuable links to your products?

I will do something with the pricing/shipping to show deals etc. Great idea!
The 25 dollar minimum is so we can keep offering discounted shipping as a standard.
I have not submitted to google or bing shopping and havent been able to find a couple answers about that. Do you sell through them or just advertise products though them? Im interested in this.

Biancoblu, on 07 July 2012 - 03:24 PM, said:

Something with your URL rewriter looks odd, when I hover on your links I see for example http://www.yoursite.com/index.php/cPath/4, but when I click the link the URL changes to http://www.yoursite.com/-c-4.html which looks incomplete, it should read http://www.yoursite.com/some-category-c-4.html.

Your contact page is emtpy, the first thing I look for when I buy online, especially abroad, is a contact name and address. I see you have a phone number listed, but as a potential client I want to know at least your name if I'm going to buy from you.

Yes, I don't really  know what happened to the URL's but I will try to figure that one out. I'm pretty sure that the seo url mod needs to be updated, but I'm not sure how.

I will update the contact page with some info. Good suggestion!

[Mort-lemur]

@webslingers

Quote

I have not submitted to google or bing shopping and havent been able to find a couple answers about that. Do you sell through them or just advertise products though them? Im interested in this.

I submit google feeds to google shopping every couple of days - however I dont use google checkout. I find that an increasing number of shoppers are coming to us from google shopping, as they seem to use it as a price-comparison website for certain products.

[sapguy]

I agree with the others, the $25 requirement is an issue. I have never seen that requirement on a website before.

Instead of posting the red warning sign (which gives out a very negative vibe imo), why not flip it around to something positive and say Discounted shipping on orders over $25! and charge all others an extra few dollars for low dollar amount orders? Or even - be bold and offer free shipping on orders over a set amount $50/$75/$100?

I would remove the $25 requirement completely for a week or two and then compare your sales.

[1player]

Having been on the commercial 'net' since 1996, and on the old arpanet since the 70's, I've never seen much 'buying' online in high ratios, compared to 'response' ratios.
And I've sold millions on the net over the years. And made even more millions putting companies on the net.
How are you judging your traffic, a lot of traffic is not traffic at all, robots and auto scrubs are often most of the traffic in logs.
So unless you really understand your 'traffic' what's real and how they are coming to the site, you can't really do proper response ratios.
I tell my new clients this about the net, you can't tell if the net is for you until you have had 100 legit users to your site.
Luckily, most of my clients are small businesses that are service/professional oriented and not tryng to sell products.
So when I send a lawyer or a mechanic 100 qualified clicks from say google ppc, and we use a tracking number, the numbers are real, you know after 100 clicks you got X leads or responses.
The reason, you use a traffic number and email accounts to track every 'response', but there's no selling involved in most of the marketing I do for clients.
Now I myself over the years have sold many things on line, made millions, most of it in 'membership' access to sites and also in digital downloads for software and ebooks and films.
Most of those sites had 'traps' to get potential clients info, like email addresses.
And the traps would often hit huge responses like 25% to 33% of surfers responded, gave an email to go to the next level, usually to get short term access to a membership site or a free download of something.
Then it's pure numbers, you devise various 'follow ups' to keep hitting the surfers that identified themselves in what you do.
So for you, maybe sending a 'free sample' of one of the product is how you get your client identified and then you have to develop a way to constantly contact them via email and or legit mail and even phone calls to turn potential buyers into real buyers.That being said, we've done a ton of local development, usually for service oriented companies and we often get up to 75% response ratios from a click to a lead/call.
But you can't 'sell' any of these services on line, since lawyers and other professionals sell themselves with a consult usually and they often turn down potential clients like we do all the time.
So having a 'new client' sample page, may get you potential client responses (info), then the actually bottom line may be you collect the info and then at the last moment you 'include' a minor shipping and handling charge, so you drop the real give me everything for FREE losers out there and you end up with a minor income stream and send product in sample sizes to show you have something 'good' or 'better' than all the other companies with what you sell.
So just that one little step, having a 'free' whatever for a 'new client' will give you two levels of qualified clients, free loaders you have info on that won't even go for a minor shipping/handling fee and clients that are interested in what you do, and at least are willing to go for a few bucks to get samples.
So first question is,how are you getting legit users to site, are you using ppc with google, are you just looking at your logs and seeing hits and not realizing all the traffic is SE's and their robots.
Then, what 'hook' do you have to get 25% to 75% of the real surfers to RESPOND.
Having the site designed to bury the shopping cart inside, so you can 'sell' stuff with slick HD video squeeze pages and such, allows you to track legit users throughout the site, while you steer them to the ultimate prize, a qualified shopper on a buy page, shopping carts are not really designed to sell stuff, they take orders, the selling is on the pages that lead up to the cart.
Being a software developer over 30 years, I personally hate any business with 'hard products', I like digital products, and the net is perfect for that, and you still have have a myriad of sell pages way before you get to any 'order' pages.
Now we have a new start up with 'hard products', but the only place to get what we sell is from us online through our 'store' and we're still playing with these carts and see way too many problems with most of them (security issues mostly). We've been approached from retailers that carry the type of stuff we have one of our names on, but we turned them down, not interested in selling in mass quantities to retailers and being like everyone else, the industry is one of the biggest in the retail trade, and the whole industry is about ONETHING, your brand name and who wears it.
So people hear or see our stuff in public and they ask around who sells it, DUH, didn't you see the .com on the product. GO TO THE SITE, so we're trying to keep 100% of the income our brand makes and we refuse to sell it wholesale to any retailers and you will never see it in the discount chains,never.
Once you realize, you buy 1 million facebook ads now for almost NOTHING, and you can buy traffic cheap, you have to have squeeze pages to steer the sheep to the goal of a buy.
That's how we've been doing it for years now, and it worked well with digital downloads. Now we're doing the same thing with a hard product, but since we OWN the name and the only place anyone can buy it is from us, the cart becomes irrelevant, it's all about creating the hype for YOU NEED THIS, and the hook we're using on this brand is social media, you can't afford our name, no problem, you are on facebook, twitter, whatever, plug us and you qualify for a FREE whatever. So FREE has always worked on-line, and then you qualify the freebie seekers with a minor payment angle, like shipping/handling for real world products. In digital world, you just put a timer on the item, limited membership time a few days, limited use of software before it expires, etc.
So what are you giving away for FREE, that's how you get potential client info so you can then build a whole SELL campaign. No one is throwing up shopping carts and making millions, NO ONE. Sorry the net is just not that easy.

[bruyndoncx]

@1player

I hate it when I'm being played likte that and see through the sales tactics, but I understand it does work most of the time

[1player]

@ bruyndoncx

OK
You go to a site, they have what you are looking for, some video of whatever, it's 'underground', say beheading, a celeb having sex or flashing, you know stuff you 'hear about' yet can't see on CNN, so your curiosity gets you, it's X a month to see it, or TRY IT for 3 days, give me your email address, so you give it up, usually to a BS gmail or spam account, ok, so now you check the email, it says thanks, now we need to know you are over 18, give up the CC #, so they do, now they have X days of 'free' access, and when it's all said and done the figures look like this
X% give up email
y% give up CC
Z% don't cancel so they're members

So first response gets you a spam email address they must check to go to next step FREE ACCESS
They then see, ok, I have to be 18, so yeah, here's a CC
They use the site and see you have everything the net has had for years in one spot, and all the new hot stuff, bingo, they stick

So that was the way most 'membership' sites grew in the early days of the net and it worked for years, and still does now, only the game isn't to sell memberships, it's to push people now to live cam girls, LOL

So all the guys/girls that actually raked in dough years ago on memberships did it this way

No shopping carts, just slick squeeze pages, less is more, get them excited, get them to RESPOND, and when you have something no one else has, a certain celeb video or a death video, the only place they can see it is you, so they give up the CC

now that was how most of the 'porn' guys did it, we were just into 'controversial' stuff, yeah some of it was 'sex' stuff, but usually only celeb stuff, and all the crazy beheading stuff, and once you had traffic, it was easy to steer it around to niche stuff, UFOS, nostradamus, etc, so we made up a ton of digital stuff to sell to niche markets, but we would have a whole site made up to sell one thing or two, an ebook or a DVD or movie download on a niche interest, paranormal stuff, psychic stuff, conspiracy stuff, you know give the sheeple what they feed on, they want consipracy stuff, you give them 911 this and 911 that and TWA 800 this and that, they want Diana stuff, you give it, same with 2012 and Y2K, there's always something to sell the sheeple, haha.

They all get played and the PLAYERS play them haha

Edited by 1player, 24 September 2012 - 11:58 AM.

[1player]

Wow the OP ditched the cart
hmmm

maybe they know now, carts are not what sells

it's how you take orders

their mistake was front door was BUY

front doors are SELL
get response
inside is cart/buy pages

internet marketing 101

[webslingers]

I ditched the cart because opencart is MUCH easier to use and has many more updated features.

What does this mean? I came here for internet marketing 101 help... so anything helps. Thanks!

their mistake was front door was BUY

front doors are SELL
get response
inside is cart/buy pages