Poor Conversion - need unbiased opinions

We launched our site https://exdemohut.com in jan 2014. We sell ex-demonstration IT equipment via Google product listing ads.
We are very competitive with products at least 20% cheaper than like for like Brand new items, and until recently had a decent conversion ratio.

I would be grateful for any opinions that are constructive, Good or bad

regards
John

 

John, your website was registered in October of 2013 and you said you launched your site in January this year. According to Alexa, you are ranked around 6.9 million globally, which is an improvement of 3.5 million in the past 3 months. I know it may not seem like it, but this is phenomenal. Most new websites do not start gaining these sort of stats for at least a year. Your website looks very well done and your prices are certainly competitive. Just be patient and keep doing what you are doing and I guarantee it will all work out.

On another note, I would suggest that you consider removing the word "cheap" from your website and replace it with "affordable" or "low cost". Many people view cheap as something of low quality. Just a suggestion. Anyhow, best of luck to you.

 

Wow!

Your site looks like an eyesore.

Everything looks like it's been jumbled all onto all page. Where doe they even start?

Putting less information on your page is better.
The human mind runs a million miles these days so your website should reflect something that can be described in less than five seconds.

 

The homepage of the site has general contact info at the top of the page, a paragraph of basic info, a customer testimonial, 6 "New Products", and the footer. The remaining pages have standard e-commerce product listings, about 15 per page. Granted the appearance of the homepage could be improved, but all in all, there is not a lot of stuff on the site. If the font were smaller, it might not look as "cluttered". As for the statement "putting less information on your page is better", this is simply ridiculous. As anyone with a background in SEO will tell you, "content is king" and the more the better. In my last job, I handled a company website with over 1,000,000 products on it. When I first took over the website, we were ranked around 7 million globally in Alexa and none of our search terms were ranking us on the first page of the search engine results. I added a ton of informative content throughout the website, nearly doubling the size of the site and within 6 months, we were ranked 520k globally, 131k in the United States and nearly every single search term I optimized on was getting us the number 1 spot in Google. Today the site is 380k globally and 81k in the US (and I can back this up with proof).

The fact is, in order for the search engines to effectively index and rank your website, you must have enough quality content for them to understand what your site is all about. The more quality content on a webpage, the more optimized it becomes for the search terms throughout the page. "Keyword density" is a phrase used by SEO specialists to refer to using an abundance of different search terms throughout the content of your page. As people use a wide variety of terms and phrases to find what they are looking for, you need to include as many of these as possible in your content. But you don't want it to appear "spammy" or contrived; it must look like it was intended for the reader, not the spiders and this requires more content. In other words, you wouldn't want to have "buy computers, laptops, and lots of computers because desktop computers and laptop computers are the perfect type of computer to use..." While this uses the term "computer" many times in a relatively small space, it is clearly "spammy" and will eventually get your site penalized ib the search results. A better way to do this would be something like this: "At SomeStore.com, we carry a wide variety of desktop computers, laptops, iPads, computer towers, and computer accessories. We also have many highly trained and qualified computer technicians, instore and on-call, around the clock. Whether your desktop PC is freezing up, or your laptop CD Rom drive no longer opens, we can fix it. We have hundreds of USB Flash Drives and larger external Drives, including our Western DigitalWD 1TB Elements Portable Hard Drive..." Typically, a good rule of thumb is to include between 100-300 words on product pages and 500-1000 words on informational pages.

 

That's great but I am speaking from design perspective.

Everything shouldn't be jumbled all together in one page.
You can put all the information on other pages because it's not just the home page that's indexed and ranked, it's every page.
That also includes conversions, purchases, and all that jazz.

The truth is that you have too much on your home page. Slim down and allow white spaces in your page.
White space psychologically enables people (while on your page( to think clearly and competently).

Also, turn your capitalized letters into lower-case if that suits your branding.

 

Hi John
I would place the SSL Security logo in the footer of all pages (it's where most people find it for reassurance) and get one big special offer on the home page in a prominent position. There is too much text up top which could be made more succinct—by all means, say that a lot of the stock is ex display but don't use too much of the home page to do it as a site called 'exdemohut' tells the user what they're getting.

I would agree with Jameyson too about dropping the word 'cheap' in your marketing. You might have it mentioned in places and perhaps keywords in your Google Ads campaigns as people will type 'cheap laptops' but it's not a good idea using it within proximity of your products.

When did the conversion ratio dip? Was there anything that changed at all just before this? Trust is a massive factor for individual webstores that don't have huge brand awareness so I would honestly suggest Googling 'gain trust for ecommerce store' to get some good tips about improving that side of things.

Lastly, do you regularly click through the entire buying process to ensure everything is working? Depending upon what platform you use, I would suggest doing this as frequently as possible, particularly if you get any days with no sales. Hope this helps!

 

Quick Lance, the homepage may not be the only page getting indexed, but it is by far the most important page. I agree the cluttered look should be fixed, but the last thing he needs is a bunch of white space. More than any other page on the website, the homepage needs to be optimized for search engine visibility. This means actually adding more content, not less.

One reason everything looks so cluttered is the size of your text. There are way too many heading elements on your page. You only need one h1 tag on each page and it should only be 2-4 words max. The other heading tags you have should ideally either be h3-h4 tags, or simply emboldened. If it were me, I would get rid of the two images in your intro text (the laptop and "Make the Smart Choice") and add more actual content here. The content should also be optimized and keyword-dense. Right now, there is very little in this content that is optimized for search engine visibility. You need to determine which keywords you are trying to generate traffic with and have them in your content.

I agree with RepricerExpress on the need to make sure everything works. I once worked for a company that had their shopping cart running on a perl script located in the CGI bin. There were always issues and I was always having to double check the code and do mock purchases to make sure the cart was processing orders. Many times it wasn't and I had to fix the coding errors to make it work again. Most of the time it was simply a matter of a quotation mark missing or something equally simple. Nevertheless, I had to check it and keep checking it and never assume that simply because I hadn't edited something in a while the shopping cart would always work. Systems get updated and sometimes unforeseen changes take place. You always have to stay on top of that because if your cart isn't working and people try to order and discover they can't, most of the time you will have lost a customer.

Trust is another big one. Make sure that you have no "http" links on your web pages. Either use localized links ("/product.php") or "https". Having "http" links anywhere on your page will cause an error to popup when someone is in encrypted mode (i.e., "https") that says "not all content on this webpage is secure". Even though you have an SSL certificate, these errors will do terrible things to your credibility with customers. Also, make sure your SSL verification logo is visible on every single webpage. People have short term memory problems; if they don't see that on every page, they'll forget you have it.

 

Yes I do agree with all the points which are brought to notice here.

Content is king for sure, but the way it has to be excepted by search engine.
UI is as important as content bcoz it has to be easy for visitors to get the desired product/information on the website.

At the same time using cart everyday is also important, the same problem I am facing, where visitors are trying to buy the product but due to some minor errors they can't and finally they send a mail floor using the product.

SSL is good suggestion, I would also try to do so, as I am running my website on http so I think https would be better way to sell the product online

 

Find out your primary competitors who are really a headach for you. analyze their online selling strategies.
Find out your niche target market and identify what they want. cheap price, fast shipping, easy navigation on site, verity etc. Check where you lack
Modify your site look, presence according to user's requirement.
Now site is ready for on page optimization. Rewrite content, add meta data and other required information and then start its link building, social media marketing.
I can help you with this process. I am professional web marketing and SEO expert. If need further assistance, please email me at

 

I am sorry Jameyson, but for someone claiming to know SEO your example is just nonsense. I can't think of a more useless metric than the Alexa Rank and something easier to cheat. The rank is based on traffic coming ONLY from users with the Alexa Toolbar installed. And especially for a new website significant increases in ranking are completely normal and doable. You can have the people at the office and a few friends install the toolbar, some of them can put the domain name of the website to be a homepage and everytime it opens - voila, a new click. Even if don't sit for a couple of hours a day clicking you will still rise very quickly. That is because the rise/drop is based on the traffic of your "neighbouring" websites too. So if your website is in the Millions, there is a high chance that many of the sites around it are either weakly visited, or abandoned. This is why this metric is so crap, it does not tell you anything apart from the stats from visitors with their toolbar.

As for the website, I agree it does not look so visually pleasing right now. I am not a designer, but I work with one every day sitting next to me and I have learned to determine good from bad. Everything is too cluttered, too bright, too popping-up from everywhere. The SSL sign on the bottom right is useless, seeing that you already have another on the right column, this one just hides behind the columns or the upwards arrow anyways. And while we are on SSL's I wouldn't necessarily agree of making all the pages SSL protected (https). The SSL can easily be installed only on the sections where customers need to put any billing details, so they can be encrypted, why would you need it on the Laptop section for example, it can just load the page and make it a little slower.

Another recommendation would be to put/write a Comparison plugin. Comparing similar products is something very convenient, especially for such products as you need to measure specific aspects (CPU, RAM, HDD...).

Anyways, sorry if I'm being harsh, I do think you have started well, just continue tweaking and modifying and you will surely get it right. Hope this helps

 

I usually do not concern myself with Alexa; I typically focus is on writing SEO optimized content for my company's website, managing the Adwords campaigns, and dealing with various e-commerce accounts. I honestly had no idea that Alexa generates rank solely through users with the toolbar installed.

 

Yeah, Alexa is a bit like having a boat with a hole in it—totally unreliable and a bit pointless! Hee hee!!

 

Hi, many thanks to all for your contributions to this post. After careful analysis and taking onboard some of the comments we've cleaned up the product page and added our SSL information to the background so that it's visible on all pages throughout the site.

As the majority of our products are ex demonstration units does anyone think it's confusing to sell both ex demo and new products side by side. We ask this because our conversion rate decline seemed to be around the time we introduced the new product range (signified with the 'NEW' label) to our portfolio.

We would really like to add more products to our range and expand our advertising but with our conversions not being so hot at the moment we feel it's better to hold back until we attain some stability.

Any further thoughts are always appreciated.

 

Lots of great information in this thread.

I'd boil down what I see as the two most important pieces of advice for you as follows:

- Redesign your site. I'd go for a cleaner, more modern look. Rely on high-quality images and great copy to sell your visitors.

- Add content. You can start a blog attached to your site wherein you create and/or curate content that's related to the lifestyle of your customers. This shouldn't be tough at all, and will really help you not only with the building of authority and trust around the web, but with your SEO positioning, as well.

 

Few Pointers:-

1) Site needs a lil redesign - can be my personal opinion but I found that it can be improved
I really thing you need clean and crisp design, this is just not perfect

2) You can keep your most popular products on the top and the video at the bottom
When i visited your website I wanted to see what you sell (products) but found the same after scrolling

3) One more suggestion - add products from different categories on the homepage.
Refere to the flipkart.com - you will see there 4-5 products from different categories as when you scroll down.

This automatically increases the chance of high CTR and better conversion.

Let me know what you think
Cheers!
Boni