Know-How Exchange : Website Critique

It's likely flatlined not because what you have (or haven't done) but because of what your competition has done. You likely have competition with a better offer than you have. Pretend you're looking to buy a product like yours'. Do a search online (including using Amazon). What do you see? What's the best offer? Make your offer at least as compelling as your competition (and that doesn't necessarily mean changing your price - it could mean changing your graphics, your promise, your story, etc.).

It's almost impossible to say why it happened so suddenly, but one thing I noticed immediately is that your website looks dated and may not be as exciting as it was back in 2005 when online shopping was more of a novelty.

You have a lot of copy, a preoccupation with price/value more than benefits, and not a lot of eye-catching graphics that show off the luxury look-and-feel of your products. A major re-design may be overdue.

But that still doesn't answer the question of why sales stalled so suddenly. If this is as critical a question as it seems, you might need to get an analytics expert involved.

Hi, there. IF your assumptions and statements are accurate -- i.e., your traffic is about the same as always, your revenue has not fluctuated wildly whenever the economy has had its abrupt upheavals, and your competition is not doing anything notably different -- then your problem may be technical rather than strategic.

1) If your traffic hasn't dropped but your sales have plummeted, one possibility is a functional problem with your shopping cart, or parts of your website leading to the shopping cart -- in other words, customers try to buy, but CAN'T. If you (or your webmaster) run your website through a battery of validation and error tests (many available online), you'll instantly receive a detailed list of warnings specific to problems your site (and yes, a simple check reveals that your site does have errors). You might solve your sales problem simply by fixing the technical snafus.

2) Don't take for granted that not much of your traffic is from search engines. Not all reporting in this area is as accurate as you might believe, so get your information from multiple sources before you believe it. I'm suggesting this because the timing of the abrupt steep decline in your business coincides with the timing of the abrupt steep decline affecting a lot of websites. These are the result of Google's recent and rather significant change in how they deliver search engine results. It's too much of a coincidence for you to ignore it without first doing some deliberate detective work about exactly where your traffic is coming from.

For instance, if you get traffic from a link on another site, but that other site gets its traffic from search engines, then your traffic is more reliant on search engines than you might believe, and thus a change in search engine behavior that affects the first website, could have a profound affect yours, too. Your present reporting may not be revealing that to you.

3) Your site is built on a Yahoo structure. I've not worked with a Yahoo-based site but it's possible the problem relates to a change (or lack of change) in Yahoo's store platform rather than in your marketing. It's one more area to examine before you finalize your diagnosis.

4) I'm tempted to slap you upside the head (but very gently -- hope that didn't hurt too much!) for believing that your present income means you can't update your website. If your website is causing its own business failure, this is when you MUST update your website. It's not the giant expense it once was; check into updated platforms such as a WordPress-based store template, and you'll be surprised at how possible a fresh site could be, at a very low cost. More importantly, search engines really like WordPress sites, and if you really like traffic, that should matter to you. So please change your thinking from dismissive to active in this area.

I know that all of this sounds like technology rather than marketing; but in commerce today, marketing and technology are married to each other. Your email and social media marketing won't matter if technical issues are preventing your website/store from closing sales.

Hope these ideas help you find new places to look for solutions. Best of luck to you.

Let me reinforce peg's point #4: Your belief that now is not the time to update your site is exactly wrong. Now is the time to fix something that is obviously hurting the business.

There may be other factors causing the immediate problem, but the website is still the way you sell stuff, and your site needs some help.

I too agree with others that it is high time to update your site. If you look at other websites, they are not only focusing on SEO but they are more modeled towards social media. With functionalities like social login, social sharing and other social analytics.
Even if you are not planning for update, try to make your website social media enabled. Use social login plugins like loginradius and others to provide your users with social experience.