Hi
I decided to set up an online shop with the hope of eventually giving up the day job!!
I have sold on ebay but was fed up with their charges eating away at my profit.
I have purchased an online shop with a set up fee and then monthly payment of approx £20. The design is not really exactly what I want and if I want to make changes it takes a while , and several emails, before they are made. Also I cannot just play around to see what my changes will look like as I am asking someone else to sort these out for me so can't keep swapping and changing my mind.
The store has been online since August and I have not made one sale.
I have had 290 unique visitors but not one sale - is this a poor or good number of visitors - does anyone know?
I am very disillussioned and need advice. Is my product wrong - brand name perfume? Should I change it to jewellery perhaps. Also, it is hard to have large stocks as there are so many brands of perfume and its very expensive so my online shop does not have as much variety as other more established shops - perhaps this is a factor.
I don't know whether to persevere, change product or maybe try and use the zen cart to build a site I can tailor more to myself - but how easy is this.
Any help and advice would be very much appreciated.
Thanks

Karen

Hello Karen
I took a look at your site.
First of all do you have any idea where your hits are actually coming from?
What struck me first was the lack of information.Search engines love information! You don't have a lot of search engine friendly text there on the homepage and no images either to entice people in! You have an awful lot of white space there. Perhaps add some infomation on perfume families you know florals, oriental, etc.
Make sure you have individual meta tag titles for each product and page too, don't make them all the same though!
I like your logo though , and I am partial to pink too!
There is not a lot of products either which may put people off too.
Zencart is very easy once you know how, and there are plenty of people on here you can help you!
Why not add jewellery and perfume! After all the two go hand in hand don't they? It will fill your categories up too.

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Childrens Fancy Dress Costumes and Party Dresses
Childrens Costumes and Dancewear

Hi Karen

That figure is very poor, it should be many times that figure by now. Also many of those visitors are likely to have been bots and not real people.

If you can post your URL we can take a look and try to advise you on how to get more traffic, even better than that, put a link to your site in your forum sig so that anyone who reads one of your posts will see it. Don't just do it on this forum, do it on every forum you post on that allows sig links. The more incoming links you have, the better.

Not only does this open up the opportunity of someone clicking your link from one of your forum posts, it also increases your exposure to the search engines. If you do a search on Google for your username you will see that this thread is already listed http://www.google.com/search?q=karen...e7&rlz=1I7GZEZ Every post you make on a forum is a potential marketing opportunity, so take advantage of it.

The two main ways to attract visitors are to create plenty of text for the search engines to feed on and to acquire as many incoming links as you can get. Do link exchanges with other sites in your field, submit your site to link directories, basically get as many links as possible, though quality is better than quantity, and be careful who you link to. Don't link to link farms and other sites that the search engines deem to be undesirable. If you have to link out to get an incoming link then it's best to link to a site that is related in someway to the content of your own.

Does it show referrers and search strings on your web stats? If so, this will tell you where your hits are coming from, if not then I'd recommend using Google Analytics which will help you determine where your visitors are coming from and what they do when they visit your site.

Google are giving away free £30 AdWords vouchers, if you use one of these it will bring a few people to your site.

If we can have a look at your site, we'll be able to advise you further about page titles, meta description tags and other elements that will help bring visitors to your store.

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Lawrence

Too expensive..i.e.
Zencart is Free, Yearly hosting, if you shop around, between £40/80..
Tinkerbell and Lawrence have given you good advice..combine all three,
problems solved..

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Ready made zencarts/Zencart Templates/Mods Available

Hi
Thanks for all your advice ....... much appreciated.

I will definately be looking into purchasing zen cart and perhaps building something up myself alongside the shop I already have running.

I have attached details of my site below.......I am very embarassed about this as I know it has a long way to go.....it still looks amateurish and I would like it to look professional, sophisicated, expensive, equisite etc etc.

I am going to ask the guy who runs the eshop company to add more pictures onto my front page. It's hard to get the full range of products I would like due to the cost of holding the stocks....but I will work on this.

Please don't be afraid to tell me what you really think. I would rather hear the truth as this is the only way I will be able to work towards something better.

I can add more words to the site but the meta tags I am not sure about as this is all sorted out on my behalf. I can only add more products and view statistics.

www.poshperfumes.co.uk

ps. do you think it would be fairly easy to set up something along these lines on the zen cart system.....I am not the world's best at computers!!

Thanks

Karen

Karen, have seen far worse sites than yours..think with
little extra work, not much, you can have a really great
design..will fit into zencart nicely..
By the way, zencart is a free programme..you just need
webhosting account. We are all here to help you make
the transition...
HTH

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Ready made zencarts/Zencart Templates/Mods Available

Hi Karen

These are the tags from your homepage I mentioned in my previous post.

The title tag is the text that is displayed in the title bar of your browser and is one of the most important elements of a page as far as search engines go. This one isn't bad, but the ones on some of your other pages are terrible, "Browse Our Product Range" which is used on all your cat pages isn't going to help you at all.

The meta description tag is another important tag as far as SEO goes, it's also the text that tends to be displayed on search engine results pages under the link, so it should be both inviting to a potential customer as well as keyword rich for the benefit of the search engines.

I've left out the meta keywords tag as this is no longer considered relevant to the major search engines so is a low priority.

The cat links have good title attribute text (that's the text that pops up when you hover your mouse over the link) but as Tinkerbell said earlier, you are lacking text on your actual pages. You also have no header tags i.e. <h1> , <h2> etc on your home page and they've been waisted on your other pages with text such as "Browse our product range" which isn't going to help anyone find your site.

When I talk about keywords, I mean words that are relevant to the products you sell or more specifically, words that people are likely to type into a search engine when looking for what you sell.

You also have no links from other sites pointing to your store, have a look at this http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&r...es&btnG=Search

Incoming links are one of the most important factors for traffic, they help people find you from other sites and boost your search engine rankings.

It might all seem a bit daunting at first, but it isn't half as bad as it first seems once you get into it.

As Dezina said, ZenCart is free. If that's the route you want to take then it can be downloaded from http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?cP...ain_page=index
Hosting can be acquired easily and cheaply.

Have a look at some other member's sites (e.g. Mumsgrotto, Tinkerbell and Dazina) on this forum to see what can be done with Zen, I'm sure you'll find something that catches your eye.
Don't worry if there's anything you don't understand, just search this forum for what you want to know and if you can't find the answer, just ask.

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Lawrence

Lol, you can pay up to £5000 a month for a multi-national distribution and hosting solution, down to £1 for 6 months with the cheapest provider so cost is not an issue, or the reason for no sales.

Karen, I think you've got a nice brand which is a great starting point, but why should anyone buy from your web shop rather than one of your many competitors? Perhaps think about some USPs (Unique Selling Points) to offer visitors, such as;

10% off their first order with discount code 'posh'
Enter our free monthly prize draw for perfume A
Guaranteed pre-Christmas delivery
Join our Perfume Club and be the first to hear about new products and special offers
Free shipping on all orders over £50

Its a matter of trial and error to see what works in your market, but the more hooks you can add to make visitors stop and think, and perhaps look further into your shop the better.

On a technical point, an important issue with your shop is the name of your category and product pages. For example, your page selling Givinchy Amarige is called http://www.poshperfumes.co.uk/product.php?code=giv001 which is meaningless to search engines.

Ideally you want your page to be named using your product title (as well as the pages meta tags), so poshperfumes.co.uk/givinchy_amarige.php?code=giv001.

The only other issue I'd have is the size of the text (probably due to my eyes ). You will find that a substantial percentage of the increased trade online is due to the grey pound, retired folk surfing and shopping. If your text is too small for me, I'm guessing those with genuine age-related sight issues will give up straight away.

Other than that, Internet retail is a numbers game. The more visitors the higher the chance of sales. Consider putting some time into search engine marketing and see your Web shop as a longer term venture - some of the most successful online shops I've seen took months to get their first order but momentum soon builds if you put the time in now.

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Regards,
Dave

Internet Retailer eCommerce shops . Geran SEO search engine optimisation

Whoops, double-post, I got timed-out

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Regards,
Dave

Internet Retailer eCommerce shops . Geran SEO search engine optimisation

Dave
Thanks for the tips.

Regarding the categories etc. and being useless to search engines. As this website is set up for me by a third party - a rented shop, I am not sure I can amend these. The only bit I have control over is the code ie. giv001 - I could change this myself to givenchy amarige for example. However I can't change the rest.

Would this be sufficient? Or would you recommend I contact the guy who has set up the shop for me - is it a simple job for him to amend this?

At the moment I am finding it frustrating in that any change I want to make, I have to go through someone else and this takes time. I sometimes have to send several emails to amend just one thing. For this reason I have started to set up another website myself with zencart as I hope to have more control over this myself.

Thanks for all the ideas - will be incorporating them into the website I am working on.

Karen

Hi Karen,

Yes, if you have control over the product codes, try changing these from giv001 to givenchy_amarige and that will help somewhat, although ideally if you can get your current hosting service to take a look at the page name generation that would also help noticably.

Search engine marketing can seem quite complex at first glance but there are a lot of things you can do which are simple but time-consuming.

For example, see if you can get your hosting service to add an 'articles' page to your shop. Adding regular informative and relevant content to your shop through articles and information pages helps increase the size of your shop and the amount of relevant content - all good stuff in the eyes of Google (not that Google has eyes of course ).

You can also give some thought to copywriting - a good product description could be 2 or 3 paragraphs long and include the product name two or three times without it being seen as spam. This helps optimise that particular product page for product-specific searches on the search engines.

When adding product pictures, name them to reflect the title of your product - Google indexes pictures as well so its all a plus to people finding your shop through different types of searches on Google.

Good luck with your new shop, perhaps if you 'politely threaten' your current hosting provider they might respond to your first email and not wait for your seventh

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Regards,
Dave

Internet Retailer eCommerce shops . Geran SEO search engine optimisation