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osCommerce

The e-commerce.

Massive drop in orders all of a sudden


joyces

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Hi

 

Sorry if posting here is inappropriate but have reached the point of desperation looking for help. 

 

I have an OSCommerce site for 6 years and there have been the usual ups and downs and this year has been tough.  All of a sudden in the middle of last month orders dropped right off and have continued to do so ever since. If I can't find a solution I will go bust very soon.

 

I have PPC campaign that doesn't seem to be the problem so I suspected it was organics but when I look at Webmaster tools and do searches my position hasn't changed.

 

The website seems to working OK maybe the odd gliche because I use Paypal but nothing that would explain this.

 

I have spoken to my webdesigner, PPC company and read so many blogs but nothing offers any suggestion which would explain why this is happening.  I am convinced there is a reason but I'm just not seeing it.

 

Does anyone have any ideas, experience of this happening to them or any advice.

 

Thanks

Andrea

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What version of osC? If it's been around for 6 years, it's probably 2.2-something, and may well be acting up if your host has upgraded their PHP lately. Have you tried visiting your site as a customer, and going through everything (including placing an order)? Maybe something has broken there.

 

If in the past, you had modifications made to your site to incorporate certain sleazy SEO practices, Google could be punishing you with their recent ranking algorithm updates. You might have to back out such things, but if your rankings haven't changed all that much, it might not be the problem.

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We rebuilt the site to be mobile friendly in May so its bang up to date.  We have no bad SEO and webmater tools show no problems with HTML no missing title tags or duplicate tags, no missing description tags just a few short description tags which I'm working my way through.

I've started adding 200 words of original text to the pages - although this is a big task as there about 1700 pages to cover.  All have some relevant text but I'm improving it along Google Guidelines.

 

It sounds ridiculous, everything I can think of doesn't point to a problem but there is obviously something, I just can't identify it.

 

Thanks for taking the time to reply though it's very kind of you

 

Andrea

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how about your visitor numbers ?

 

perhaps a windows 10 issue on your site ?

 

I'd look at google analytics if you have it and try to find the trend.

If visitor numbers are pretty much the same, then I'd test with different browsers (desktop, tablet)

KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON

I do not use the responsive bootstrap version since i coded my responsive version earlier, but i have bought every 28d of code package to support burts effort and keep this forum alive (albeit more like on life support).

So if you are still here ? What are you waiting for ?!

 

Find the most frequent unique errors to fix:

grep "PHP" php_error_log.txt | sed "s/^.* PHP/PHP/g" |grep "line" |sort | uniq -c | sort -r > counterrors.txt

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I don't know what products you are selling but sometimes you know how it is, last year a product/product group was very popular and sold like crazy and the next year before you know nobody cares about it anymore and sales drop. From what you explain though, I doubt that this is the case. Maybe a link to your site would be good so that we can have a look at it? If it is a 18+ site please warn us!

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We rebuilt the site to be mobile friendly in May so its bang up to date.

 

Well, you still haven't told us what the base osC version is. Is there a template on top of it, or heavy customizations? "Rebuilt the site" could mean almost anything, so it would be good to tell us what the history is. Anyway, with drop-off like that, can you check your hosting access logs to see if you're getting a lot fewer visitors in the first place? If your search rankings haven't changed, could people be having problems accessing the site? Can you tell what pages they're getting to, and most importantly, what pages did they exit at? If they are all dropping dead on the payment page, for example, that would bear looking at. If you haven't already done so, I would run through a complete browse and purchase for a few sample customers (all the way through the end of checkout) to see if something is going off the rails somewhere.

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Just a shot in the dark. When you rebuilt the site did you keep all the products and everything the same, or did you create redirects for each of the products from the old site page to the new sites page. Maybe customers are searching for your products and getting the old links show.

 

Like I say just a shot in the dark.

REMEMBER BACKUP, BACKUP AND BACKUP

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