Good Traffic - Few Conversions

Hi All,
I'm having a bit of trouble converting sales.
My past experience has been dealing with affiliates, banner clicks etc.. and I never sold products before.
But now I have a ton of products to deal with and not quite sure what I'm doing wrong.

At first no one was sticking around so I redesigned the site.
I've made some great headway in getting traffic. About 350 hits per day and with the redesign the average site visit is 6 minutes.

I see many people add items to their shopping cart but when they get to checkout they die off.

At first I thought it was because of paypal but they're never getting past creating an account. I'm even having a drawing for a new Nintendo Wii for everyone that signs up. But that hasn't seemed to help.

Any ideas on what I may be doing wrong?
The site link is in my footer.

Thanks in advance,

Ken

The lack of SSL probably isn't helping. I also found the site hard work. The black makes it very bleak without being stylish as some black sites can be, and I found it difficult to read even though my Zen Cart experience means that I already know exactly what to look for. For somebody who doesn't work with Zen Cart day in, day out, I imagine it would be difficult to navigate right the way through.

It's an attractive site, but I have a personal dislike of white text on a black background. Your body font at 62.5% is a little small, and when there is a lot of text, for me, it's uncomfortable on the eye.

I looked at the home page in firefox and did this to your CSS body tag:-

body {
margin: 0;
font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 65%;
line-height:150%;
color: #ffffff;
background-color: #000000;
}
It made it more readable for me.

I would swop the positions of the CATEGORIES and IMPORTANT INFORMATION side boxes. Make links to your products the most prominent feature of the site.

Do you have the USER TRACKING mod installed? You could then view a few sessions to see where people are deciding to exit.

The WII competition is a great idea... Make more use of it on the HOME PAGE - a nice banner. Again, I found reading the text relating to the competition a little uncomfortable. Less text to start with, more links to associated products. Provide the competition detail in a separate Terms & Conditions ez-page.

A nice site, though... Can't really see why you're not getting good sales...

After adding a product to the cart, I clicked the Estimate Shipping button and it didn't show any rates. As a customer, I had no idea what your delivery costs were. I would be surprised if anyone would register and go through checkout without knowing. If you have free delivery, state this clearly, and get rid of the Estimate Shipping. If you don't have free delivery, provide the costs.

Not familiar with some of what you are selling like games etc but the hardware listings lack organized specification details

You might look at the tabbed-lite module to get this organized

And you need to hawk why one should buy from you versus others like NewEgg etc:

Are your prices better?
Are your shipping terms better?
Is your stock better?

Hard market...

Steven300:

After adding a product to the cart, I clicked the Estimate Shipping button and it didn't show any rates. As a customer, I had no idea what your delivery costs were. I would be surprised if anyone would register and go through checkout without knowing. If you have free delivery, state this clearly, and get rid of the Estimate Shipping. If you don't have free delivery, provide the costs.

?

Not sure what was up with this. It works for me.
Anyone else have this trouble?

I do use Google analytics. People are dropping off at creating an account.
Might be correct about the SSL. I do have this ability. I'll try setting it up for the sign up section.

I made the font changes as fairestcape advised.

Might be correct about the SSL. I do have this ability. I'll try setting it up for the sign up section.
You just need to install it and enable it in your configure.php file - Zen Cart then uses SSL when required automatically

I find that the shorter the sign up process, the better.

Do you need..
Company Name
Salutation
Fax Number
DoB (perhaps required)

About the shipping, I've tried it a few times. Still doesn't show any rates. I can provide a screenshot if it helps.

Research recently conducted in the UK indicates that two of the factors that stop sign-up are lack of SSL and a cumbersome sign-up process. Zencart is probably "average" when it comes to sign-up systems, but the process saves time for customers later, and enables other shopper benefits.

You could incentivize sign up with a sign-up discount (configured in Coupons), but I agree that lack of site-SSL may put people off.

You need to get a SSL certificate from a SSL cert provider - there are plenty to choose from, starting from $20 and going up into the thousands. The procedure is a bit tedious (for security reasons it has to be), but it's worth the effort.

Get your host to install it for you on the server - some hosts may even sell you a Cert and install it for you. For a dedicated Cert, you will need a dedicated IP address, but that's usually just a few dollars a year.

When the Certificate is installed on the server, configuring zencart is easy - just a couple of small changes to the two configure.php files.

Advertise on your site that you have SSL, when it's installed and functioning.

I agree about the SSL - that could be a big part of your conversion problem.

Shipping Estimator works fine for me in IE7 and FF.

ok, SSL set up. But now I have images and banners not on my site that shows on the sign up pages thus giving a warning.
I don't suppose there is a way to keep these images off the secure pages without hard coding it?

You all are great and have some terriffic suggestions.

I have followed most suggestions or am going to.
I think a discount for first time purchases may be a good thing.

Once I finish my contract with GD I think I'll relocate my site. :thumbsup:

Now to figure out why the shipping isn't working for some.

Thanks,

Ken

If your banners are enabled and managed inside of Zen Cart you can go to
admin > tools > banner manager > and insure that they are checked for SSL

Regarding the images, this thread might help.

And this tutorial..
https://www.zen-cart.com/tutorials/index.php?article=150

OK, I have the SSL warnings sorted.

I modified the code previously so I could have offsite images for my products. I'm now finding the downfall of this dealing with SSL. So I had to deactivate the specials sidebox until I load all of the images to my site. Only about 20,000 of them so shouldn't take more than 5 years to do :)

Thanks again for everyone's help. I'll post if securing the signup helps any.

Ken

A quick note, I installed a "Live Help" to see if this ummm....helps

http://www.craftysyntax.com/

Seems like it might be a nice way to interact with potential customers.

Anyone else use anything like this?

Ken

I tried them, maybe it will be helpful. but not big.

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

Your total site size is a whopping 408KB!! That is way way too big and slow to load. I gave up on my dial up after a few pages, it just took way too long.

You really need to optimise your images. The easiest way to do this site-wide is to install Image Handler 2 from the downloads section. It will automatically resize and optimise all of your site's images.

I like the look, but I can't even get to your checkout page to see what is happening. Another thing you might want to consider, if you are losing the majority of customers at sign-in or account creation, is to use the Fast And Easy mod from the downloads, it makes a one page checkout after the initial sign up page, and also install Easy Sign Up and Login, which makes signing up a little quicker. This should help you reduce cart abandonment.

Matt

I hear you on the size. I've knocked it down quite a bit also and was going to resize all of the images. But I'm always into better things. I'll give the add on a try.

I did make several sales over the weekend I am happy to say.
Funny how those first few customers are so special :hug:

On my way to the downloads area.
Thanks for the info!

Ken

I knocked my k down to just at 300k usng the 3 image sizes for the ads.(1.5 gig so far)
Still got 30000 more images to go in the movies and audio sections. :huh:

Most of my competitors are averaging a bit higher in K than HCG. (amazon.com 475k)
I'm fairly happy with the site except the left menus. I think..

It's been live for a month now and if it holds this pattern I should be good to go.
Attachment #3797

No mistaking the day Google gave me their blessing. My non stop 18 hour days, pre-google, might have helped some too....at least I like to think it did :unsure:

People are still dropping at registration though.
Think I'll try making registration requirements for the giveaway just email and name.
Placed on the Product Information pages above the image.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Ken

I quite like your checkout page.

On my sites I try not to mention creating accounts and try to make feel like checkout.

having looked at yours though I'm going to remove the fax details input box