Low conversion, little traffic, few sales, Help!

Your conversion rates seem healthy enough, but you need more traffic (as stated above).

Look at where your competitors are and reverse engineer their marketing strategies. Do what they're doing and be where they are.

Hi truitt661,

The site design is not bad, however consider switching to a Responsive Web Design theme to provide a better experience for all users, especially those on mobile devices.

You mention the free shipping for orders over $100 on the homepage, but do not mention it any place else. This is one of your value propositions and you should drill it into the audience's brains by mentioning it at every opportunity, especially on the product page and in the cart.

The website seemed extremely sluggish, that is a serious conversion killer. So, I checked it on Pingdom tools and found your website is slower than 90% of all tested websites. Try to do some optimization, though I'm not sure how much you can do since it is on a hosted shopping cart service.
https://support.bigcommerce.com/ques...the+problem%3F

Another way to boost conversions is to develop a marketing plan based on market segmentation and targeting ad campaigns specifically tailored for each segment.

Thanks for your useful suggestions.

What's the cost of not getting any sales?

Look at it this way ... you've had a site up for 7 months and have no sales. Add that 7 months to however long it took you to source the products and build the site, and that's how far in you are with no return on your investment.

At this point you don't really know how well your site converts, because you don't have enough traffic to give you a "real" conversion rate. It may calculate out at some percentage, but you don't have enough data to know if that means anything... if I send 10 people to a site and two of them buy, does that make my site conversion rate 20%? Sure, within that sample, but that 20% won't hold once I send thousands of visitors there.

So don't mess with your site yet... your categories could be improved. Men who are searching the Internet for underwear are brand conscious, so there should be an easy way to navigate by brand on the site. But other than that, you really don't know what's working and what isn't, you need more data before you make decisions. What you need is buyer traffic, and that comes from focused keyword-based searches. People who are searching for exactly what you're selling. The only way to get those, without wasting even MORE time on SEO, is PPC.

AdWords = instant gratification. You commit to a budget, even if that's only $1,000 that's fine, whatever you have. But you WILL get traffic, and you WILL get sales. You may not make enough to cover the cost of the campaign, but you'll get the data you need.

Let's say you end up upside down; you spend $1,000 on clicks, but you only get $700 worth of sales. Is that a loss? Not necessarily... here's why:

1. When you analyze the results, you'll see what keywords brought you buyers and what keywords didn't do jack squat. Run it again next month and spend more on the keywords that delivered, drop the ones that didn't. You need this data, and it's worth the cost. I've run campaigns before and discovered that two of the keywords I thought would bring in the most sales actually delivered a ton of junk traffic and no buyers - simply removing them made the rest of the campaign profitable the following month.

2. With a proper re-engagement campaign in place (even if it's just a weekly email), some percentage of those initial buyers will return and buy something else. Maybe next week, maybe in 3 months. Give them incentive to ... it's a hell of a lot easier (and cheaper) to sell a second product to an existing customer than to get a new customer.

3. You'll have enough traffic that your analytics will actually MEAN something. You'll see where they're landing and where you're losing them. You can fine-tune your pages and, over time, improve your conversion rates.

Remember that a 1% conversion bump is a big deal - on a site that converts at 1%, getting to 2% is a 100% increase in orders. That's twice as many sales for the same marketing dollar spent, so it matters. Getting one of my sites from 2.36% to 3.1% this year has resulted in an extra $500k in revenue so far, and the year is far from over.

Here's the thing, even if your margins are too thin to ever support a PPC campaign as a long-term strategy, it's still profitable in the sense of getting the data you need. There are probably a dozen or so keywords that would rake in the cash for your site all day long... but what are they? You don't know. So you can spend another 7 months optimizing your site for the words you think might convert, or you can KNOW what words will convert by dropping a few bucks and testing them. If a word is a dud, lesson learned - you know not to waste time optimizing for that word. But if a word turns into sales, now you know what word to focus your SEO efforts on, so eventually you can rank on those words organically.

A couple of tips when you set up your PPC campaign... NEVER send a visitor to your home page on anything but a generic term. A generic term would be "mens underwear" or "mens boxers".

If a person is searching for "manview boxers", don't send them to the homepage, send them to a page of Manview products.

If they're searching for "clever mayorca" send them RIGHT to the page for that product, not your homepage, not a category.

It's not that hard when you think it through... remove yourself and think like your customer. If you were searching for any of these phrases, where would you want to land? Some homepage where you have to browse through categories to find what you want? Or do you want to land right where you need to be, so you can BUY the item you were looking for and check out?

Product searches are from people who want to spend money. For your site, I would have a separate ad group for every individual product, and landing pages for every brand. Take the time to set it up, spend whatever you can spare, and then roll your revenue into the next month's spend. Put nothing in your pocket. You could do $25k per week with this site easy if you ramp up to it properly.