Hello, This is my first post here and frankly this is the first time I'm really worried and really stumped. I have administered an online website since 2002. The site has done well over the years. It's had it's ups and downs, but it's always been a reliable site overall. But starting in May this year something happened and it's effected the site owner tremendously. See the stats below. In fact this month will be one of the highest traffic we've ever had. However the sales are plummeting. I know what you are thinking.... a lot of things can contribute to this. And you'd be right. But I believe this is a browser/shopping cart/security issue. Back in the beginning of this year I worked on the site a lot and sales were going up strongly as was traffic. And the traffic has continued w/o fail. But the sales have dropped to about HALF of what it should be based on 10 years of history and the actual traffic. The shopping cart is very old and no longer supported. So I suspect it's something in the new browsers concerning security that is causing people to not compete the sale. Does anyone know what might have happened this year in regards to security/browsers that would cause people to not complete their sales? Thank you.
Note we had a "sales page to visitor" ratio of 12.5% from Jan to April but only 5.3% for May, June, July and Aug and it's dropping every month. The overall sales dollars have also dropped by a similar amount. So this is an ongoing trend, not something that's going to average out.
What do sales conversions have to do with traffic? Seems highly likely the website was penalized, it effectively lost 50% of its traffic overnight.
What (if anything) was done differently over that time period? Did you stop any ad campaigns? Start any ad campaigns? Make any adjustments to the website? Have you considered switching to a more prominent eCommerce platform? Are you doing any advertising in Google/Bing?