Switching to MS2 and no more sales - why?!

[jenso]

Hi community

 

I run now for several years an osc shop. First it was MS1 and since the beginning of the year it is MS2.

Both shops never performed very good in sales nor in getting visitors.

First I thought it is because of MS1, so I changed to MS2. With MS2 I also used forced cookies to avoid the session id in the url of my visitors. In addition I use ultimate SEO and the webaddress got a subdomain.

Now these have been 4 big changes within a short time. The result is, that the grabbers and spiders visit the site, but not many visitors. and what worries me is that the sales went to almost 0, YES there are no more sales. With MS1 I had more sales than now, but I can not go back to MS1 due to a lot of limits.

 

So I tried to find the reason, but until now without much success, in fact no success. I spend some money off SEO and marketing "experts" and no change.

 

What have I done wrong?

Could it be that the search engine do not like subdomains as the main URL ?

Should I change from www.shopping.lioni.com to www.lioni.com/store/ ?

 

Since I have spiders and grabbers coming, I like to have visitors who buy, but before I can make sales I need visitors. So HOW do I make that happen?

 

Can someone help, share some ideas and thoughts ?

 

What are you doing to get customers and a good ranking for your osc stores ?????

 

Cheers

 

Rich

[♥toyicebear]

Hi community

 

I run now for several years an osc shop. First it was MS1 and since the beginning of the year it is MS2.

Both shops never performed very good in sales nor in getting visitors.

First I thought it is because of MS1, so I changed to MS2. With MS2 I also used forced cookies to avoid the session id in the url of my visitors. In addition I use ultimate SEO and the webaddress got a subdomain.

Now these have been 4 big changes within a short time. The result is, that the grabbers and spiders visit the site, but not many visitors. and what worries me is that the sales went to almost 0, YES there are no more sales. With MS1 I had more sales than now, but I can not go back to MS1 due to a lot of limits.

 

So I tried to find the reason, but until now without much success, in fact no success. I spend some money off SEO and marketing "experts" and no change.

 

What have I done wrong?

Could it be that the search engine do not like subdomains as the main URL ?

Should I change from www.shopping.lioni.com to www.lioni.com/store/ ?

 

Since I have spiders and grabbers coming, I like to have visitors who buy, but before I can make sales I need visitors. So HOW do I make that happen?

 

Can someone help, share some ideas and thoughts ?

 

What are you doing to get customers and a good ranking for your osc stores ?????

 

Cheers

 

Rich

 

Why have your shop in a sub domain, why not just have it in the root ie. www.lioni.com ?

[jenso]

Why have your shop in a sub domain, why not just have it in the root ie. www.lioni.com ?

 

The reason is simple and complex to answer...

The first layout of the project was that the online store (osc) would only be one aspect of the name lioni.com

Lioni.com was and still is "reserved" for an other use (information portal or so). At the beginning of the year, as we made the move to shopping.lioni.com, it was expected to have a cms or blog running on the domain lioni.com with a link to the online shop, but it did not materialized until now.

 

In addition it was thought that it would be better to have the word "shopping" as part of the URL - much like shopping.yahoo.co.jp who change now to store.yahoo.co.jp . But now it looks like that was not such a good idea, well at least not in front of the domain name, but it might be better to move the name "shopping" or "store" to the folder as www.lioni.com/store/ .

 

But you are right osc could run right now under the domain "lioni.com" - at least until the next step is done.

 

Would changing to the main domain mean more visitors and sales ?

 

Thanks for asking.

 

Rich

[♥toyicebear]

The reason is simple and complex to answer...

The first layout of the project was that the online store (osc) would only be one aspect of the name lioni.com

Lioni.com was and still is "reserved" for an other use (information portal or so). At the beginning of the year, as we made the move to shopping.lioni.com, it was expected to have a cms or blog running on the domain lioni.com with a link to the online shop, but it did not materialized until now.

 

In addition it was thought that it would be better to have the word "shopping" as part of the URL - much like shopping.yahoo.co.jp who change now to store.yahoo.co.jp . But now it looks like that was not such a good idea, well at least not in front of the domain name, but it might be better to move the name "shopping" or "store" to the folder as www.lioni.com/store/ .

 

But you are right osc could run right now under the domain "lioni.com" - at least until the next step is done.

 

Would changing to the main domain mean more visitors and sales ?

 

Thanks for asking.

 

Rich

 

It would not necesserily mean more sales and/or customers , but its usually the best placment for both.......

 

Adding a news section and/or blog can also be integrated into oscommerce , so both would be using the root domain together giving the potential customer easy access to your shop.

[♥toyicebear]

By the way, using Force Cookies might also loose you some sales.....some people have set their browsers to not accept cookies..at your site they will then be shown a "Please enable cookies to shop page" when trying to add something to the cart....if they do not want to enable cookies..then this customer is lost there and then...

 

Its better to set Force Cookies to False and instead Set Disable spider sessions to true which disables the use of session id for search engine boots.....

[♥toyicebear]

Some more things you might want to look into...

 

- your in stock image does not show....

 

- the design does appear to be only half finished and are not consistant through the whole site, this also includes mismatched boxes colors and buttons.

[♥toyicebear]

Do you really need the customers gender and the customers birth date in the sign up form?

[jenso]

It would not necesserily mean more sales and/or customers , but its usually the best placment for both.......

 

Adding a news section and/or blog can also be integrated into oscommerce , so both would be using the root domain together giving the potential customer easy access to your shop.

I start seeing some some contrib for blog displays which are interesting to look into. A cms is one or two sizes to big right now, I rather think of a discussion group or forum as an extra.

I managed to integrate a simple article contribution. I changed it and I am satisfied with the given abilities for the time beeing.

 

Regarding the domain name, this is already on our list and makes it now toward first priority, especially since the situation is not so good, including the page ranking in Yahoo Japan (which is difficult to get, but somehow important, even so we get most from MSN...). The change in domain is also easy to do along with a redirect or rewrite.

Just like to have a few more thought on it from several other people...

But thank for your suggestion toyicebear.

 

By the way, using Force Cookies might also loose you some sales.....some people have set their browsers to not accept cookies..at your site they will then be shown a "Please enable cookies to shop page" when trying to add something to the cart....if they do not want to enable cookies..then this customer is lost there and then...

 

Its better to set Force Cookies to False and instead Set Disable spider sessions to true which disables the use of session id for search engine boots.....

I get your point and it is also very important one. I discussed this back and forth, but we went along Forced Cookies, because we do not want any session id to show at any time in the url. In the past some customers bookmarked or even linked to us with a URL that had a session id. If there is an other way, I really like to do it, but it has to go along with ultimate SEO contrib....

 

Some more things you might want to look into...

 

- your in stock image does not show....

There is no stock level image or in stock out of stock for this site.

 

- the design does appear to be only half finished and are not consistant through the whole site, this also includes mismatched boxes colors and buttons.

Some pages are further than others. the buttons are not in line, due to the fact that there are several people working on it at different times. Also sometimes there is an addition made, but the design is still basic, yet it is showing.... :huh: sorry!

 

Do you really need the customers gender and the customers birth date in the sign up form?

Well the gender is nice because sometime it is hard to tell what gender the person is, simple by looking and reading there name

 

The birth date is not needed, but nice when you want to send a birthday greeting... :rolleyes:

 

Actually it would be much nicer if the account creation would only ask for the email address and password, later the customer can add the other information and store it. But I do not find the time to make these changes... and it would be nice to change in admin the require statement for all the customer informations, but again I do not find the time to do it, bad isn't it :'(

 

Thanks for the feedback, it does help to get some views and responces

 

Rich

[abra123cadabra]

Thought I'd have a look at the http://www.shopping.lioni.com/ subdomain solution. It took a whooping 3.5 minutes to load. Any potential customer would have left long time ago.

 

Clicking on the marzipan image leads me to a new page all in japanese... you are loosing the language selected and a potential english speaking customer. Again, the page took 29 seconds to load. Way too much on a fast dsl connection.

 

This page (found on google) http://www.shopping.lioni.com/leather-socc...tory-p-137.html loads in 57 seconds. Other pages indexed on google without the subdomain are loading much faster. You certainly need to sort this out.

 

Overall, your main issues are that customers are not willing to wait for your pages to load and secondly that they are presented with pages in Japanese when the referring link indicates that the page to be loaded should be in English.

 

abra

[abra123cadabra]

To add a bit more feedback...

 

All the pages I tried to open had the time issue. I added something to the cart and got the 2gether deal displayed. Thought it's already in the cart, so would go to checkout because I only wanted the first item. Clicked to see what the offered item was, went to product page, decided to go ahead with the 2gether special, clicked on add to cart and had 2 of the first item and one of the offered item in the cart. Not what I expected.

 

Changed the number of first item and clicked checkout without first updating the cart (a potential customer might just do that). You have an amazon style login page. So gave my mail address and was directed to create account. My mail address should already be in the input field. Why did you ask for it in the first place?

 

After a lot of back and forth clicking (entered shipping address in Ireland where we don't have zipcodes) I got the message that shipping is not available to my country. There should be a note about that before creating an account. I know osC so figured out how to change the country to Japan. Got to the point where I'm told free shipping is not available due to low weight or value. Won't bother to select anything else as I already spent ages waiting for pages to load.

 

Proceeding to select the payment option, I get this errors:

Warning: payment(includes/modules/payment/paypal.php) [function.payment]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /homepages/14/d38233245/htdocs/shopping/includes/classes/payment.php on line 51

 

Warning: payment() [function.include]: Failed opening 'includes/modules/payment/paypal.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/local/lib/php') in /homepages/14/d38233245/htdocs/shopping/includes/classes/payment.php on line 51

 

Fatal error: Cannot instantiate non-existent class: paypal in /homepages/14/d38233245/htdocs/shopping/includes/classes/payment.php on line 53

 

So in fact even with shipping address in Japan and a lot of patience, I still can't buy from you.

 

I would recommend to thoroughly check all the functions on your site. Try to go through all the "mistakes" the customer might make while on your site.

 

abra

[Guest]

As has already been said, your site takes three minutes to load. And I live in Japan also so it's not a cross border problem.

You are in dire need of a new host, no customer will wait that long for a site to load.

[dave111]

I cant use your store in Firefox (blocked by forced cookies), so there goes 30% of all internet users.

(Stat Source: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp)

 

Your site takes 199.97 seconds to load at 4.46 seconds per KB (absolutely terrible)

According to this:

http://www.web-hosting-top.com/web-hosting...site-speed-test

(For measuring the speed of your webhosting)

 

Then i got this error:

Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Too many connections in /homepages/14/d38233245/htdocs/shopping/includes/functions/database.php on line 19

Unable to connect to database server!

 

Now i've spent too long even messing around with this site. As i'm not about to wait another 200 seconds to reload it.

[jenso]

Hi Ulrike, James and David

 

Thanks a lot for the comments.

About the speed.

I was testing this morning at 9am Japanese time the site

http://shopping.lioni.com/index.php

http://www.shopping.lioni.com/leather-socc...tory-p-137.html

 

with Vertain

http://www.vertain.com/?sst

 

and I run several test cycles to make sure. Every time I got a different result, anything between 4.3 and almost 10, whereby the benchmark average is close to 3 according to there method.

So my site is slow.

Can someone of you point me to a good speedtest page, where the results are also explained. The numbers do not tell me much. I made a search about speedtest, but each test has different results and exclude or include certain factors. One speedtest I found does not include pictures or video. I need to know what the average is and how much off the site is. So where can I find a good test ?

 

I will also talk to my host now, it looks like that I have a hugh performance (respond time) up and down. I hope he can provide some inside. Because I noticed in the past, that a page was loading slow and than again on other times and days fast. No clue.

 

So one problem this site has is speed. Anyone, please point me to a good speed test site that explain also the result. so I can do some testing while I try to make some changes.

 

By the way, I took one contrib away from the index page, think it add to the slow speed.

 

Thank you for the feedback

 

Rich

[jenso]

As has already been said, your site takes three minutes to load. And I live in Japan also so it's not a cross border problem.

You are in dire need of a new host, no customer will wait that long for a site to load.

Thanks for the feedback

You are right no one will wait that long to load a page.

It is a cross boarder problem, since the host is not in Japan, isn't it?!

Well I have to find a good webpage speed testing tool on the web, so I can check it.

I also will get in contact with my host and see what he has to say.

If nothing help I will have to change the host, even so that is a lot of work, it is has to be done to have visitors and customers....

Thanks for the comment

 

Rich

[jenso]

Clicking on the marzipan image leads me to a new page all in japanese... you are loosing the language selected and a potential english speaking customer. Again, the page took 29 seconds to load. Way too much on a fast dsl connection.

No clue why the language selection is getting lost. Did not change anything in the header that would lead to it.

This page (found on google) http://www.shopping.lioni.com/leather-socc...tory-p-137.html loads in 57 seconds. Other pages indexed on google without the subdomain are loading much faster. You certainly need to sort this out.

So it could also be a subdomain problem, mean that the subdomain is adding to the slow speed of the page. It might be better than to go back to: www.lioni.com/shopping/ or so...

... that they are presented with pages in Japanese when the referring link indicates that the page to be loaded should be in English.

I understood that osc is getting the language information from the browser setting, if not it will use the default language that is set in osc admin. In our case the default language for the store is Japanese. I agree with you it is not nice and also disturbing to have a page in Japanese, when you expect English, but how can I solve that, since the (referring) link is from a SE and I do not have any influence on there display. ?

 

Thanks also for taking your time and going through so many other pages even the checkout. Great feedback.

I have to look into 2gether contrib and see what went wrong, so I will disable it for right now.

Your point about the email address is good, I shall add that to the create account page.

Do not understand why the error came on payment page. It might be that someone installed paypal or messed around with it, since it was talked to add credit card payment to the site. Will look into that.

 

Thanks I have to go to work on the site now... :thumbsup:

[Guest]

Well, I'm not sure exactly what the question is here, but if you think that your shoppig cart is to blame for low sales, the best thing to do is to try other shopping carts and see what happens.

 

Also, just so you know, search engines treat sites on subdomains like comepletely separate sites. Putting your store on a subdomain is just like putting it on it's own Top Level Domain (TLD). So, if you do some SEO for your main domain, it will not benefit your subdomain. You have to do some SEO for the subdomain too becuase it's looked at like a completely different and separate site by the search engines.

[jenso]

Well, I'm not sure exactly what the question is here, but if you think that your shoppig cart is to blame for low sales, the best thing to do is to try other shopping carts and see what happens.

The point is that I used MS1 and moved or upgraded to MS2 at the beginning of the year, because we did not wanted to wait any longer on an MS3. The move to MS2 was also because a lot of contrib are not working with MS1 and it takes some effort to change it, so we moved to MS2. Along with the upgrade we changed the looks, added ultimate SEO and other changed to a subdomain. So it was a bundle of changes. It took a while, but we noticed that the sales went down. First we thought it was due to the change of domain, than because we use ultimate seo, than because of the season. By now the SE are visiting us, our indexing is good, ranking bad, some keyword ranking fine, but no change in sales or the amount of visitors to our webpage.

For that reason I decided to ask in the forum for help and feedback. I noticed that myself has no more the needed distance or critical view, so best is asking people in the forum.

Also, just so you know, search engines treat sites on subdomains like comepletely separate sites. Putting your store on a subdomain is just like putting it on it's own Top Level Domain (TLD). So, if you do some SEO for your main domain, it will not benefit your subdomain. You have to do some SEO for the subdomain too becuase it's looked at like a completely different and separate site by the search engines.

Thanks for that one. I thought so too, but was no more sure about it.

 

Rich

[Guest]

I would recommend you visit a [physical] shop in your neighbourhood and count the number of individial products they offer and analyse how they relate to each other (e.g. milk+bread, tshirts+trousers, software +hardware, tissues+postcards, etc for example). Unless its a new shop they should provide a good idea of product ranges that might be suitable for online customers as well.

 

At the moment your shop has quite an interesting mix, but to be honest I doubt you have many customers buying marzipan, a pack of tissues and a vintage football. Who buys marzipan online? I also believe guys are prone to buy vintage footballs & your clothing whereas perhaps it is more a female clientele that would be interested in your tissue ranges.

 

In my mind layout & design is secondary (or even third) to product.

 

If it is possible to make a transaction on your site the techincalities does not even come into the equation at this stage... until you have a number of orders that makes it difficult for the technology to keep up.

 

Product, product, product.... range range range... Dont aim too wide!