Decreased Sales

We have a cart that was a proprietary shopping cart no longer being updated as far as software goes so we had decided to switch to Zen Cart. We were getting 6+ orders a week and sales of around 500k a year. We have not had a single order since the day we launched zen cart in place of our old cart which has been 2 weeks. I know the shipping, orders, and payment modules are working correctly because we have done test orders with real credit cards.

If anyone could please give me some advice on what might be the problem, what is scaring off the customers? Google analytics says 80+ unique hits a day, and 60+% are coming from search engines. I know thats not a huge amount of visitors, but according to conversion ratios we should be doing 5.6 orders a day.

The address is http://www.police-equipment-worldwide.com

I'd like to make a few suggestions.

The site currently feels like it's still under construction, or at least very new. You have a sidebox with no reviews and a sidebox called More Information that contains default pages. You have the following text on the shopping cart page, "You may want to add some instructions for using the shopping cart here". This would definitely be enough to scare me off.

Then I got a security warning in IE8 when viewing the registration page. This was due to both the Digicert and American flag.

I think you could make it easier to get visitors to the product pages. For example make the images that rotate on the main page clickable. By the way, with JavaScript disabled, this shows a massive empty space.

Also, do you need the Languages sidebox? Seems to be futile.

Thank you for the quick reply. I will get all of those things fixed tonight, but I do have a question about the security error, I had that before and cant figure out whats causing it. The certificates are all up to date, how would the american flag and digicert images cause that? they are simply <img> tags pointed at 2 images on the server.

All suggestions are appreciated!

When you view a web page using ssl, all items on that web page have to start with https and not http. In your case, the path to the two images start with http. You can fix this by making the paths relative instead of absolute.

Related FAQ:
https://www.zen-cart.com/tutorials/index.php?article=150

ah thank you, I bet the jscript banner has the same problem.

ok, all of those items are fixed, all simple things. I think the layout needs to be re-done, if only I was a designer. Any other suggestions from anyone out there with more experience than me (which doesnt take much when it comes to zen cart) I would really appreciate it. No orders in 2 weeks is really bad!

Do you have any images of what your last store looked like?

Is this store somewhat similar in appearance?

Was there any down time between the two stores being operational?

Was the domain name the same for the last store? I mean was teh store in the root folder or a sub directory that people may have bookmarked that no longer exists?

There are a lot of questions that need to be asked if you are really looking for justification for the lost sales.

I was just looking at your old site pages on alexa.com and noticed that you had a lot more content about your products in the past and looked professional for an older site. Keeping the customers well informed about your products is important.

What else has changed? Besides the economy...

Marc

The Future Zen template is a nice basic start, but you need to perk it up some from that. Even if I wasn't familiar with it, I would look at your site and think it had no customization. For police equipment I would think you want a couple of clear, positive colors rather than one pastel. Security and stability would seem to be a high priority, and a site that looks slapped together in a hurry does not inspire confidence.

You have a BIGG problem with the redirects you have attempted for the old store's urls

urls like these
https://www.police-equipment-worldwide.com/Training/Civilian_Clinics
&
https://www.police-equipment-worldwide.com/Mounted/CertificationInstructor

Indexed in Google, return the following response... But deliver your main page

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 03 Jul 2009 06:47:11 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.63 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.63 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 PHP/5.2.6
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.6
Set-Cookie: zenid=f9a46feab3c52033be2ae1c90b7e4284; path=/; domain=www.police-equipment-worldwide.com
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

This looks to be because you have not properly redirected these old pages.... and your 404 error is not correctly responding as well.

So all of your indexed pages in Google are dying along with their rank, authority, PageRank and link juice...... and you are creating a little over 1900 duplicate pages by not returning a proper 404 as well.

Your OLD cats pages need to be 301 redirected to the new and you need to properly configure your 404 ASAP.

~Melanie

Marc - The only thing kept from the old site was the banner with the pictures of police officers, there was no downtime, the url and uri were the same (root folder) from old site

Glenn - I agree, I am trying to get a fully customized template up, im not the best designer.

Melanie - I am trying to fix this problem now, I cant figure out why the 404 page isnt showing up.

edit: I forgot to mention and I dont know that it matters, but old site was completely SSL. Every page including products were under secure connection.

I noticed that you were working on the site. Looking much better. I took the liberty of creating a couple background images and applying them to your site. Take a look and feel free to use them if you like them.

Images attached.

Marc

Thanks Marc, I like that alot, How did you get them to line up correctly? When I apply them as a background image to the body I guess my resolution isnt the same and they are off alignment a bit. The left one is cut off and the right one shows 2 halfs. Or is there any way to do this. I am not the best at css, my apologies.

Since I changed the layout I had 2 new customers sign up today which we werent getting anyone signing up for the last 2 weeks either, still no orders, but its a start I guess.

Any other suggestions are appreciated. Still having a problem getting the 404 to show up. If I type a url with index.php?main_page=blah then you recieve the correct 404 page. But if you just type /blah it isnt being redirect to the index.php correctly I guess.

In my .htaccess I have RewriteRule ^(.*) index.php [L]

I thought that would do it but it isnt obviously.

screenshot attached

I think that I got something even nicer for you. Try this code in your stylesheet.css

file:///C:/Users/Marc/AppData/Local/Temp/moz-screenshot-2.jpgfile:///C:/Users/Marc/AppData/Local/Temp/moz-screenshot-3.jpg

body {
    margin: 0;
    font-family: lucida sans unicode, verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
    font-size: 80%;
    line-height: 160%;
    color: #111;
    background-color: #000000;
    background-attachment: fixed;
    background-image: url(http://www.needlejig.com/images/police_bg.jpg);
    background-repeat: repeat-y;
    background-position: top;

}
```Marc

I think the gloss black template would go great for your site.

I can actually show you what a almost live site would look like with Gloss Black if you want to PM me.

The site is looking a lot better now than it did before. With a few more minor improvements, I'm sure you'll start to see some orders again. One thing I would change is to show some thumbnail images of the products in the bestsellers sidebox.

http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_page=product_contrib_info&products_id=207

This should take care of your drop down menu colors to work with the rest of the site.

stylesheet_header_menu.css

body {  
    behavior: url(includes/csshover.htc);
    }

div#dropMenu li a:hover, div#dropMenu li.submenu li.submenu:hover, div#dropMenu ul.level2 a:hover {color: #4f4f4f!important;background:#6496FF;}

    
div#dropMenu {
    width:100%;
    margin:0 auto;
    text-align:center;
    z-index:1000;
    position:relative;
    }

div#dropMenu ul {
    margin:0;
    padding:0;
    }
    
div#dropMenu li {
    position:relative;
    list-style:none; 
    margin:0; 
    float:left; 
    line-height:1em;
    width:16.667%;
    *width:16.649%;
    }
    
div#dropMenu ul.level1 {
    width:100%;
    margin:0 auto; 
    text-align:center;
    background:#283c68; /*background color of top menu when NOT selected. */
    z-index:1000;
    float:left;
    }

div#dropMenu li a {
    display: block;
    /* Hides from IE5-mac \*/
    height: 1%;
    /* End hide from IE5-mac */ 
    padding: .6em 0; 
    text-decoration: none; 
    text-transform:uppercase; 
    color:#ffffff; 
    text-align:center; 
    border-right:1px solid #ffffff;
    }    
    
div#dropMenu li:hover {}
/*div#dropMenu li.submenu {background: url(../images/dropmenu.gif) 95% 50% no-repeat;} */
div#dropMenu li.submenu:hover {}
div#dropMenu li a.noLine {border:none;}
div#dropMenu>ul a {width: auto;z-index:1000;}
div#dropMenu ul ul {display: none;}
div#dropMenu ul ul li {border-bottom: 1px solid #CCC; width:12em;z-index:1000;}
/*div#dropMenu li.submenu li.submenu {background: url(../images/submenu.gif) 95% 50% no-repeat;} */
div#dropMenu ul.level1 li.submenu:hover ul.level2, 
div#dropMenu ul.level2 li.submenu:hover ul.level3,
div#dropMenu ul.level3 li.submenu:hover ul.level4,
div#dropMenu ul.level4 li.submenu:hover ul.level5,
div#dropMenu ul.level5 li.submenu:hover ul.level6,
div#dropMenu ul.level6 li.submenu:hover ul.level7,
div#dropMenu ul.level7 li.submenu:hover ul.level8 {position: absolute; width: 12em;display:block;z-index:1000;}
div#dropMenu ul.level2 {background:#3c5a96;z-index:1000;position:absolute;left:0;}
div#dropMenu ul.level3, 
div#dropMenu ul.level4, 
div#dropMenu ul.level5, 
div#dropMenu ul.level6, 
div#dropMenu ul.level7,
div#dropMenu ul.level8{top: 0; left: 12em; background:#3c5a96}
div#dropMenu ul.level2 a {padding: 0.5em 0 0.5em 0.25em;color: white; text-transform:none;}  /* this is text color on drop-down submenu */
div#dropMenu ul.level2 a:hover {color:#3c5a96;}

.clearBoth {
    clear:both;
    height:0;
    font-size:0;
    line-height:0;
    }
```Marc

Was too late to edit the last post. Use this code instead so that the text stays white when hovering.

body {  
    behavior: url(includes/csshover.htc);
    }

div#dropMenu li a:hover, div#dropMenu li.submenu li.submenu:hover, div#dropMenu ul.level2 a:hover {color: #ffffff!important;background:#6496FF;}

    
div#dropMenu {
    width:100%;
    margin:0 auto;
    text-align:center;
    z-index:1000;
    position:relative;
    }

div#dropMenu ul {
    margin:0;
    padding:0;
    }
    
div#dropMenu li {
    position:relative;
    list-style:none; 
    margin:0; 
    float:left; 
    line-height:1em;
    width:16.667%;
    *width:16.649%;
    }
    
div#dropMenu ul.level1 {
    width:100%;
    margin:0 auto; 
    text-align:center;
    background:#283c68; /*background color of top menu when NOT selected. */
    z-index:1000;
    float:left;
    }

div#dropMenu li a {
    display: block;
    /* Hides from IE5-mac \*/
    height: 1%;
    /* End hide from IE5-mac */ 
    padding: .6em 0; 
    text-decoration: none; 
    text-transform:uppercase; 
    color:#ffffff; 
    text-align:center; 
    border-right:1px solid #ffffff;
    }    
    
div#dropMenu li:hover {}
/*div#dropMenu li.submenu {background: url(../images/dropmenu.gif) 95% 50% no-repeat;} */
div#dropMenu li.submenu:hover {}
div#dropMenu li a.noLine {border:none;}
div#dropMenu>ul a {width: auto;z-index:1000;}
div#dropMenu ul ul {display: none;}
div#dropMenu ul ul li {border-bottom: 1px solid #CCC; width:12em;z-index:1000;}
/*div#dropMenu li.submenu li.submenu {background: url(../images/submenu.gif) 95% 50% no-repeat;} */
div#dropMenu ul.level1 li.submenu:hover ul.level2, 
div#dropMenu ul.level2 li.submenu:hover ul.level3,
div#dropMenu ul.level3 li.submenu:hover ul.level4,
div#dropMenu ul.level4 li.submenu:hover ul.level5,
div#dropMenu ul.level5 li.submenu:hover ul.level6,
div#dropMenu ul.level6 li.submenu:hover ul.level7,
div#dropMenu ul.level7 li.submenu:hover ul.level8 {position: absolute; width: 12em;display:block;z-index:1000;}
div#dropMenu ul.level2 {background:#3c5a96;z-index:1000;position:absolute;left:0;}
div#dropMenu ul.level3, 
div#dropMenu ul.level4, 
div#dropMenu ul.level5, 
div#dropMenu ul.level6, 
div#dropMenu ul.level7,
div#dropMenu ul.level8{top: 0; left: 12em; background:#3c5a96}
div#dropMenu ul.level2 a {padding: 0.5em 0 0.5em 0.25em;color: white; text-transform:none;}  /* this is text color on drop-down submenu */
div#dropMenu ul.level2 a:hover {color:#3c5a96;}

.clearBoth {
    clear:both;
    height:0;
    font-size:0;
    line-height:0;
    }
```Marc

I also noticed that you do not have any right side boxes now. If you go to configuration>layout settings and look down to 'column right status - global' you can edit that to show '0' and then your center column will flow to the right edge of your site.

Marc

Marc - Thanks for all the help. I will be using alot of what you have said with the new layout we are doing. We have decided to change alot of things and are starting with the ican academic theme for the layout, and changing all the coloring. I hope this will work out better.

You really need to change the z-index on your contentslider.css file to 900 because you can not view all of your 'mounted' subcategories because the slider is in front of the drop down menu.

Marc