How's business?

[PartyMania]

Just wondering how many sales (or avg sales per day) you guys have on your e-commerce site, and how long you've been up.

 

As for me, I've been up and running for about two months. No sales yet, but I'm cool with that, just hoping to get a sale sometime in the third month :P See sig for the site.

[theman]

im still in the process of setting my site up..hopefully many of my b&m customers start to visit the store to help them make purchases

[SunnyWales]

Hiya - I've just set up too. I keep looking at the customers online report in admin - but I think it's a bit like a watched pot never boils! I'll be so excited when I receive the first order!

 

Best of luck to you.

 

Wendy

[bglkk]

We got our 1,000th order on Dec. 30, and have been up for about 10 months. That's a bit slower than what we'd hoped for, but I guess it depends on what you're selling, doesn't it? :P

[kkashi]

We got our 1,000th order on Dec. 30, and have been up for about 10 months. That's a bit slower than what we'd hoped for, but I guess it depends on what you're selling, doesn't it? :P

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Could you provide some input on your marketing strategy? I started a site and after three months of being in production, just received 1 interested customer.

 

Thanks,

Kevin

[bglkk]

Could you provide some input on your marketing strategy? I started a site and after three months of being in production, just received 1 interested customer.

 

Thanks,

Kevin

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Hi:

 

What kind of business are you in? I'm afraid our experience won't have much value for you... We are a small computer hardware manufacturer--we've been doing OEM business (principally in the Far East) for some time, but we didn't have any B2C operation until opening our osCommerce store. Even with an existing business operation, we chalked the first six months mostly up to the "learning curve"--ecommerce is quite different than what we were used to. But traffic and sales have slowly been picking up... Having a unique product (for us, it's Xbox upgrades) is a definite advantage. Other than that, we've gotten good effect from reviews, a few well-placed banners (they do help, on the right site), and word of mouth on bulletin boards. That's classic viral marketing, I guess. Good luck!

[Guest]

Could you provide some input on your marketing strategy? I started a site and after three months of being in production, just received 1 interested customer.

 

As said before, we need to know what kind of business you are in and what kind of marketing you are doing.

 

My wife and I just processed our 1569th sale on December 29th and the average sale is around $30.00. We sell gourmet teas, incense, herbal products and various accessories.

 

Didn't really have any sales for the first half of the year and the business also includes local festivals. We attended 12 festivals in 2004. I would say that the festivals accounted for 80% of our total sales. However direct sales at the festivals only accounted for 40% of sales. The rest came in direct referrals to our website via word of mouth and business cards. The rest of the sales came via word of mouth advertising as well, either direct or through mailing lists and online communities.

 

My wife and I hope to increase sales this year simply by dedicating more time towards promotion and running the business. Last year we only put in an average of 4 hours a week running the business, this year we plan on putting in a combined 50 hours a week.

[Guest]

We broke $200,000 in gross sales in 2004. Been in biz for 2 yrs. Somewhat happy with that number. What really matters is the net when all is said and done. Advertising costs rose to $10,000 this year. Experimented with many different mediums. some work and some don't. Much depends on what you are selling. You will have to experiment and research what your competitors are doing.

 

Good Luck!

[kkashi]

Thanks for the feedbacks.

 

You guys are doing great.

 

I started a flower / gift basket store. Did some online marketing, signed-up with google adwords (0 response) and some other marketing. After 3 months, only 1 interested buyer :'( .

 

This is why I was interested in other store owners strategy for marketing. Rodney indicated

Advertising costs rose to $10,000 this year.

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Could you please let us beginners know what type of advertising you did? I very much am interested in an online business and do not really want to quit my store, but if things don't turn-out good, I may have to.

 

Thanks

Kevin

[GraphicsGuy]

I started a flower / gift basket store. Did some online marketing, signed-up with google adwords (0 response) and some other marketing. After 3 months, only 1 interested buyer  :'(  .

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I too am in the gift business and had a good year. I have used Adwords and Overture. While Adwords brought more visitors, I experienced higher conversion rates from Overture.

 

After careful consideration, I chalked this up to different search engines having different users. The users of Yahoo and other Overture affiliates evidently are more probable buyers of midrange gifts. I found this to be surprising and even a little hard to accept, but after several months of using both, analyzing results, tweaking keywords and descriptions, that's what I found.

 

I'm sure that the reverse is true for some other product categories.

 

You could explore this at no expense by asking your in-store customers what search engine they use when they are on the Internet (in casual conversation). After getting enough replies to be useful, compare the findings with the two companies search engine lists.

 

hth

[brenridley]

I too am in the gift business and had a good year.  I have used Adwords and Overture.  While Adwords brought more visitors, I experienced higher conversion rates from Overture.

 

 

I am trying to get the conversion tracking to work on adwords. Do you have it working? If so, how exactly did you do it. Please show me how to place the google code.

 

Thanks,

Bren

[Guest]

I started a flower / gift basket store. Did some online marketing, signed-up with google adwords (0 response) and some other marketing. After 3 months, only 1 interested buyer  :'(  .

 

So far, I have gone with a more grassroots advertising method. When my wife started our business, we purchased the remains of a local similar business which had gone out of business due to health issues of the previous owner. This allowed us to get some starting inventory for a low cost.

 

We then contacted her customer's and let them know we would continue the business and she would help us as a consultant. They were a very loyal group of customers. However, our business would only be online whereas hers was only Brick and Mortar. From there, we improved the inventory and brought in new products and removed product lines that never performed. We also updated packaging for a better visual impact.

 

From there we talked to people and told them about our products and handed out business cards. We also joined mailing lists such as those provided by Yahoo! Groups. We also started doing local festivals to increase sales. This year we plan on attending an 11 day fair in order to help raise money for a brick and mortar store. I also might purchase some online advertisement this year as well. So far everything has still been word of mouth.

[Gil-Gallad]

We made about 3,000 sales on Dec. 31, and have been up for about 2,5 years. We broke $110,000 in gross sales in 2004 as well. Average price of goods is $80. Advertising costs: $5,000 this year.

 

We work at Moscow City at Russia only.

 

We sell personal digital blood pressure monitors.

[GraphicsGuy]

I am trying to get the conversion tracking to work on adwords. Do you have it working? If so, how exactly did you do it. Please show me how to place the google code.

 

Thanks,

Bren

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I placed the google conversion tracking code in checkout_confirmation.php. I created a new row/division right after column right and put the Google conversion tracking inside it. (note: I have x'd out my id code, you would need to use the script supplied by Google for your site.)

 

<?php require(DIR_WS_INCLUDES . 'column_right.php'); ?>
? ? ? ?<tr>
? ? ? ?<td width="<?php echo BOX_WIDTH; ?>" valign="top"><table border="0" width="<?php echo BOX_WIDTH; ?>" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2">
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?<!-- Google Conversion Code -->
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?<script language="JavaScript">
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?<!--
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?google_conversion_id = xxxxxxxxxxx;
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?google_conversion_language = "en_US";
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?-->
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?</script>
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?<script language="JavaScript" src="https://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/conversion.js">
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?</script>
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?<noscript>
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?<a href="https://services.google.com/sitestats/en_US.html" target=_blank>
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?<img height=27 width=135 border=0 src="https://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/conversion/1071587587/?hl=en">
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?</a>
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?</noscript>
? ? ? ?</td>
? ? ? ?</tr>

[Guest]

Hi, folks. This is a very useful topic! Nothing hurts more than spending weeks getting a store up, only to have no one walk through the door and lay down their hard earned cash! We've been on-line for 6 years but just converted to OSC a couple of months ago due to some ugly database errors in our old cart.

Marketing idea #1: Stay on-line. We dropped huge dollars on print ads twice with little response. If folks are on already, its easy for them click into your store.

#2: Find an active forum that discusses your product and sponsor it. We spend $500/year sponsoring three forums targeted at our products. The revenue from them is outstanding.

#3:Optimize your pages! There are contribs that will help with this. Also look at the product name and whether or not folks will search by that name. I even use the product name for the name of the image file like this: blue_tone_watch.gif instead of bltonewatch4453.gif. This helped greatly on my old html pages, so I still use it. I rank well on Google searches. Top 3 on many of my products.

#4: The customer is ALWAYS right. Yeah, retail can suck and there are jerks out there. The only thing worse than having to deal with them endlessly over their $15 purchase is having them trash you on 15 forums discussing your products. We've bitten the bullet on several purchases by jerks, but the cost is worth protecting our reputation out there. It is spotless and we like it that way.

#5 Love your customers and woo new ones. Always, always, always answer e-mail questions quickly. Yes, you'll answer some of the same ones 85 times each month, but a fast response amazes them. They think of e-mail and contact forms as a slow process but if you get back to them quickly you'll win them over. I use Opera for mail and the notes feature makes it easy to insert preformatted answers to those common question. Yeah, it's all on the site already but half of them won't read the details.

#6 shop your competition. What do they do better? Can you beat them on price and/or service? Also, have people you know shop your store. Is it easy? Is it logical? Are your Terms, etc. clear and spelled correctly? Are your descriptions good enough?

#7 make your descriptions complete and have pictures. Much of my competition lacked pictures for a very long time. Some still do but they're catching up.

 

I hope these ideas will help anyone who reads this.

[bglkk]

I hope these ideas will help anyone who reads this.

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Nice tips, thanks. Sponsoring forums especially--we'll have to give that a go.

[acas1959]

anyone any luck and/or experience with Market Reasearch Tools?

thank you

[BearHappy]

This month we will have been in business for 1 year. We are a small store with a majority of our stock kept in our basement. For our first year in business we did around $20,000. Now only $3,000 of that came from our osC shop. We sell candles and collectibles, which sounds sweet and cute. But, let me tell you the competition is ruthless, as I'm sure it is with everyone. For my first year, my goal was to try and spend as little as possible for advertising. I was hoping to get an idea of what free actually got you. Well, it got me $3,000... Free advertising consisted of

 

Froogle

bulletin board seeding (only on "looking for boards")

Webrings

Linking

flyers at festivals and craft shows (URL on flyer)

PRWeb

 

I realize that some of these methods have nothing to do with advertising, well not directly anyway. The idea was to get our link to as many places as we could, to increase out search/hit ratio on SE's. This year we will step it up a notch and see what we can do with the advertising budget we accrued in 2004. In all honesty, I always find that when I think outside of the box (find new customers in ways your competition never thought of) I am always surprised.

 

It all boils down to hard work and dedication. With out that your just another hack with a web site...

[ChrisW123]

No sales here after 6 months. I'm thinking I may have to find a real job soon and I'm lothing the idea. :P Hahaha!

 

I like the idea of selling something online that is work free, meaning your product is a downloadable product that doesn't require shipping or other involvement, but so far no go.

 

I may have to change tactics and start selling electronic blood pressure machines like someone else posted, or even try to invent the second "Pet Rock" idea to sell online. Who knows.

[Guest]

I like the idea of selling something online that is work free, meaning your product is a downloadable product that doesn't require shipping or other involvement, but so far no go.

 

This is a fantasy. There is no such product. Online Download sales are rife with support issues, fraud issues, and a myriad of other problems.

[PartyMania]

This is a fantasy. There is no such product. Online Download sales are rife with support issues, fraud issues, and a myriad of other problems.

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It can be done, but it'll still require a LARGE, if not more amount of work to accomplish. There are plenty of downloadable software sites out there that make a ton of money, but it takes a lot of work.

[Guest]

No sales here after 6 months.  I'm thinking I may have to find a real job soon and I'm lothing the idea. :P  Hahaha!

 

I like the idea of selling something online that is work free, meaning your product is a downloadable product that doesn't require shipping or other involvement, but so far no go.

 

I may have to change tactics and start selling electronic blood pressure machines like someone else posted, or even try to invent the second "Pet Rock" idea to sell online.  Who knows.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I looked at your site and then Googled some phrases that came to mind and didn't see your site even after many pages. Consider some optimization and possibly some pay per click. Best of Luck!