marketing, e-commerceI have a site, let’s call it “Bikemarket” which simply serves classifieds to people in bike sports. Not a big thing. It is well designed, has reliable functionality and the foremost users are satisfied. After all it is just a classifieds market.
The thing is: We have about 20 to 30k unique visitors (and rising) and want to take advantage of it.
We integrated a shop where people can buy new bike stuff. It has the same look and feel like the market has.
Facts and strategy:
we decided to go on renewable energy, great service, best functionality, easy user experience and NOT on the lowest price
we integrated some ads for the store which presents some random hightlight product of the shop
in the categories as well as in the articles itself we present random new products of the same category from the shop at the bottom of the page
with the market we’re online since 2006 now
we did a complete relaunch and redesign early 2015 (traffic rose since than to over 1000 unique visitors per day)
with the relaunch we integrated the shop
Problems (now season has ended):
people don’t convert to the shop (less that 0.0…1%)
people don’t convert to puchase (less than 1%)
The questions are:
Is it the wrong medium to advertise our shop (after all it’s basically an ad banner on a related site)? If not: What could be our mistake?
Is it, nowadays, possible to build a brand, such that people visit a shop directly to buy there (understand what I mean)? Or is just “be on google”, “be on amazon”, “be on ebay”?
Do you have any ideas, how we can take advantage of our market-traffic to sell more things from our shop?
Well, to begin, I’d ask, are you serving relevant ads to the right people? For example, are you serving ads selling bike frames to people searching for frames? Or are you listing random products based on random searches?
Secondly, how well presented are the ads within your design? I have a little bit of a bias being a partner at a web design shop, but unless the site design communicates value to the user, they are going to disregard as an ugly add and not pay attention. The presentation of the product should come across as a value add to the customer, not a random sales opportunity.
It seems like you’ve got some analytics installed, which is great, so you’ll want to figure out how to serve relavant products to the right customers, and then optimize, optimize, optimize.
Seems like you’ve got the foundation, now just need to iterate.
Good luck!
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