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Ebiz#1 update

June 5th, 2008 by Kenric

Conversions

I thought I’d post some conversion numbers here from January 2008 to May 2008.  My store had 19,976 visitors in the first 5 months.  During this time the site had approximately 160 sales.  I say approximately because some sales were me testing the system and others were cancelled.  This comes out to a 0.8% conversion rate which is just about average for ecommerce stores.  Actually, I believe my store conversion rate is alot better because I get about 1/4 of visits to my store blog only.

160 sales / 19,976 visitors = 0.8% conversion of total visitors

Another metric that I look at is shopping cart vs. sales conversions.  This is the ratio of people who added an item into the shopping cart vs. completed purchases.  This does not include phone orders.

Unfortunately I switched my analytics program and goals so I don’t have the full year’s data on this.  But I do have March 2008 through May 2008.

77 sales / 498 shopping cart adds = 15%

I was only converting 15% of the people who actually found a product and added it into their cart.  My shopping cart abandonment was 85%.  I read that industry standards for shopping cart abandonment is 70-75%.  My store has an abandon rate higher than industry norms.

One-Page Checkout

Which leads me to the implementation of the one-page checkout.  It’s been a week since I implemented the one-page checkout onto my ebiz#1.  Now I know that it is way to early to come to any conclusions, but initial data shows a decent increase in conversions.

I only have one week of data with the new checkout.  I’ll revist this post at the end of this month.

12 sales / 49 shopping cart adds = 24%

So in the past week, my shopping cart conversion rate has increased 9%.

Branding

I also made major changes to my site last week.  The first thing I did was remove the 800 number from the top of my site.  It’s still shown on the contact page and shipping page.  I decided that I wanted to decrease the amount of phone orders that I received.  Removing the 800 number has all but eliminated phone calls and probably has cost me a few sales, but I wanted to go back to the simple dropship model.

I hired a graphic designer to create a new logo for my site.  This logo is very different from other stores and is now prominently displayed on the front page and the checkout page.  I kept having issues of people calling my store when they actually ordered from another.  This is because all the stores in this niche look the same and have similar names.  Customers will not mistake my site for others anymore.  I also think the professional logo helps to make my store look more legit. 

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