Ecommerce Sales Slowing - Are you seeing the same?

Hi There,

I look after an ecommerce site that sells laundry related products for the housing market and over the last 4 months we have seen a significant drop off in sales. I then launched a new site design 2 months ago and saw an uptick in sales for a few weeks but now we're back on a downwards slide.

I think its to do with the problems in the housing market rather than the site itself but wanted to confirm before I go about making any major changes.

Is anyone else seeing any downwards trends with online sales?

Many thanks
Jan

 

Hi Jan

Do you have at least 2 years of sales data for your site? Because some ecommerce sites have seasonal highs and downs. For our main ecommerce site, summer is very slow, especially june, july and august, but sales start to pick up during september, and christmas is the big time.

So if you have sufficient previous sales data to compare the difference, it's great, but if not, it may be an early decision to make any major decisions.

 

Benchmarking could help you to sort out the missing links, also during such phase focus more on branding part as well as marketing.

 

For the housing market he would need data all the way back to 2000. People are still buying, they just have slowed on high end stuff at this minute.

The housing market dropped in 2005, and just last month the banks figured this out and dropped when credits came due on ARM loans.

If you had one site that was working why did you create another site for the same market? It always takes 10x more marketing to launch a site and keep it going then it does to continue to market an older site.

 

Hi

I sell laptops online and I also found the market very slow and the sales have dropped but expect sales to grow in Oct Nov Dec. The market is very tough
and the consumers are more tight with their pockets compared to prev years.

thx

Paresh

 

I think the trend is that they slow down during the summer and start picking up again here soon. I know my sales have picked up over the last couple of weeks.

 

Today and yesterday I noticed a drop in sales for my type of products, otherwise it was going along fast before. I think it'll pickup. Just a hiccup.

 

I have experianced both a drop in sales and a big drop in hits to my website since the start of this month. ive gone from a steady 220 uniques per day down to 85uniques this month which i really dont understand, because my website hasnt changed in any way. my hits of 220 uniques per day has been steady like that for approx 8 months, so i really dont get what is going on this month.

 

Its a very usual scenario with e-commerce businesses. We sale shoes, denim etc. In summer sales drop by 65%. In winter it goes up again.

 

Yes, what i can share is at certain time, e-commerce such as selling shoes,shirts and bags will decline tremendously because there is su much OFFLINE SALES everywhere at this particular time...people are willing to buy OFFLINE considering the price is in SALE mode

 

I think you are right on this. On summer, there are huge sales everywhere. Another thing is, summer products are cheaper then winter products.

 

I agree that it's probably the season. Over the summer people are traveling and outdoors more. They just aren't spending as much time in front of the computer, then at the beginning of September they're busy getting the kids back to school and spending money on the back to school stuff, clothes, paper, pens, etc.

In about two more weeks, I predict, people are going to start looking back on the web more in preparation for the Christmas season.



Vanessa