I heard this is a great place to get some feedback which is exactly what i need right now, i have a website selling software licenses, www.licenses-direct.com

The website has been around for a month and a website its not doing too bad:
Visitors- 50-70 a day
woorank- 60%
Bounce rate- 58%
Average pages per visit - 4
Even average visit duration is 6 minutes

But as a business its failing. I've literally have no sales so far.

Is this normal for eCommerce site? should i change something about the website? maybe someone knows any marketing techniques that might help me?

Hello and welcome to WDF Make sure to say hello in the introduction forum: http://www.webdesignerforum.co.uk/forum/57-web-designer-forum-introductions/

 

I do not believe this would be an "eCommerce" issue more the marketing/sales/etc side of things. Have you got Google Analytics installed to see where your visitors are coming from or if they are actually from countries that would order from your UK based site? What is your marketing plan?

 

In regards to your site I would look at updating it a little as based on design I do not think I would trust the look of it. I know never judge a book by its cover but when it comes to websites I really do. Just think you have to compete with companies such as Amazon, PC World, Adobe (the main corp site) and so on... Your design needs to reflect your status here. I am sure others will give you some ideas on this as the designers here are very good

 

You might want to look at selling on sites such as Amazon / eBay to promote the name and also look into Google Products as this can list you on their site and get extra visitors.

 

This is my starting comments and sure will have more but thought this might get us started to helping you with your website

Welcome to the forums.

 

I think there's a trust issue you need to overcome:

 

a) Why should I buy from you instead of the official vendor site or well known sites such as Amazon?

Are your licences legitimate, how do visitors know this?

 

The site presentation is very generic and looks dated. Would suggest looking to have a unique distinct and branded look and feel to set you araprt from the competition.

 

You really need a good marketing angle I think, whether that's on price, quality of service or something else. It's a tough and crowded market you're in and you need something to make you stand out.

Being a web designer and a ex-store owner, i can say 100% its trust factor.

You need to make your customers feel like they are buying from a company that is bigger then it actually it. Give the impression you are a 'we' rather then a i.

You need to get the point across that you are trust worthy, not going to run off with their money and will deliver. I found what really really helped me was getting a live chat module on my site, this showed people it was not hard to contact me in case anything does go wrong.

 

Heres some ideas:

SSL Certificate - display badge
Sitescanner - Display Badge
Live chat
Contact details with full name, business entity and full address on every page
phone number on every page
more professional unique feeling template

 

For reference i owned and run a video game store online, mainly dealing in instant delivery ( via email ) ps3 / xbox live code, which as you can imagine, requires a great deal of trust building.

EDIT: I can see you are using zencart, either try and locate ur self a nice template, or if you like get in contact with me and ill help you out ^^

Thanks for you feedback guys, I've added trust badges and some links to the social network, hopefully that will reflect some trust upon the website. Now regarding the website design, the website it self serves and an archive of software licenses, these are completely different from the ones you would get from the amazon. Thus the reason our target audience are small business-big companies. To create this website I've used Bigcommerce and to be honest they are pretty terrible, the search bar is full of errors, you cant do in-house payments and the design is very limited so for now i will have to work with what I have.

 

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can improve the design of the website i.e. change colors, fonts, layout or just delete the whole thing..

 

Another thing I wanted to ask is what is the best way to advertise to small business. From what I was suggested so far, google ads will be a waste of money and most likely wont help my website sales at all. Bing is a good option since their users are aged 25-50. And other this i was suggested was to go on the businesses websites, find they email addressed and more or less spam them directly. Would do you guys think about this or do you have better suggestions?

 

Thanks for your feedback again, anymore comments are more than welcome

Product <> Reassurance.

 

So many people fall in to the trap of starting an online shop and expecting sales, it's not that easy.

 

Is the product good?

Is there a USP?

Is the service good?

 

If any of those are a no, fix it.

 

You're using quite an old fashioned layout, 3 columns.

 

I'd work on making the product pages stronger, at the moment I don't see a reason to 'add to cart'. Where's the USP, where's the reassurance, where's the service pointers etc?

 

I clicked on Kaspersky and it took me 5 clicks (5 steps) to get to a product, that's really too much and killer usability.

 

When I land on the Kaspersky product I don't see a boxed product, nor do I see the fact you're an authorised reseller - why not - fix that!

 

Your related products are conflicting with your main product, near same image sizes, same heading colour and size etc. The product is key to the page, cross-sells are there as fallback. Fix that.

 

I could go on and on!

 

 

Another thing I wanted to ask is what is the best way to advertise to
small business. From what I was suggested so far, google ads will be a
waste of money and most likely wont help my website sales at all.

 

Without doing a cost analysis you can't just generalise, we run a dozen PPC campaigns for clients with a >95% retention rate. If it didn't work, they wouldn't continue to employ our services.

 

There's a lot of nonsense on the internet, a lot of hear say and 'best practise' guidance, but ultimately if you don't employ expertise in these fields you're facing an uphill battle.

Where are you advertising currently?

Google site verification is missing in your website.Also there are no links to social sites like facebook, twiiter,pinterest,google+ in your website.For the sale of your products you have to advertise your products on high page rank classifieds,business listing in your target city. Also do SMO(social Media Optimization) to increase the advertisement of your products in people.Hope it will help you.

Edited September 6, 201312 yr by wordpress12

Google site verification is missing in your website.Also there are no links to social sites like facebook, twiiter,pinterest,google+ in your website.For the sale of your products you have to advertise your products on high page rank classifieds,business listing in your target city. Also do SMO(social Media Optimization) to increase the advertisement of your products in people.Hope it will help you.

 

Are you a spam bot?

 

"Google site verification is missing in your website." - how will that help him sell, exactly?

 

"Also there are no links to social sites like facebook, twiiter,pinterest,google+ in your website." - there are WAY more important things to FIX first!

 

"For the sale of your products you have to advertise your products on high page rank classifieds,business listing in your target city." - old school seo?

 

"Also do SMO(social Media Optimization) to increase the advertisement of your products in people" - what does that mean in English?

Thanks for your help everyone,

 

My marketing budget is £20 or $30-35 a day,

 

But after reading all the feedback I think i will pause with marketing and focus on fixing the website a little,

 

My plan right now is to:

 

Start selling on different sites like Amazon and Ebay, not to make money of them but hopefully it will bring some trust into the business

 

There is only so much I can do when it comes to designing the website, Software licenses are not easy to list, for example if you go on my website

and search for "word" you will get atleast 40-50 results and they are more or less correct, the products are the same but the license is different i.e.

Corporate/Academic/Government or Open Business/Open Value/OVS/OVP the list goes on and im sure you get the point.

 

The ideal thing for my website in my opinion is to create a search wizard like the one Autotrader.com has for cars. OR maybe instead of having a multiple products listed

based on their license type, have it as an option on the product it self. That would be a great idea if it was only so easy, my cart provider is Bigcommerce and im not sure

if you guy aware of this but their platform sucks. They have an option to create different options for the products but I need it to also change the Details of the product as you change the option like SKU, Name so on.

 

If anyone has any idea on how I can list these or create the search wizard that would be amazing, even some source material or tutorials would be a massive help

Are you a spam bot?

 

"Google site verification is missing in your website." - how will that help him sell, exactly?

 

"Also there are no links to social sites like facebook, twiiter,pinterest,google+ in your website." - there are WAY more important things to FIX first!

 

"For the sale of your products you have to advertise your products on high page rank classifieds,business listing in your target city." - old school seo?

 

"Also do SMO(social Media Optimization) to increase the advertisement of your products in people" - what does that mean in English?

Hey m not a spam bot.Whatever I know about SEO i have given my suggestion.May be it doesn't suits you.. then you can anytime correct it.. i don't mind.. but please atleast dont reply in a rude manner.

 

But after reading all the feedback I think i will pause with marketing and focus on fixing the website a little,

 

 

Good plan!

 

Start selling on different sites like Amazon and Ebay, not to make money of them but hopefully it will bring some trust into the business

 

 

That can't hurt, if anything that would build up some positive reputation and trust

 

 

 

There is only so much I can do when it comes to designing the website, Software licenses are not easy to list, for example if you go on my website

and search for "word" you will get atleast 40-50 results and they are more or less correct, the products are the same but the license is different i.e.

Corporate/Academic/Government or Open Business/Open Value/OVS/OVP the list goes on and im sure you get the point.

 

Yes there are challenges for listing this sort of product, this is where having good data organisation comes in handy for general browsing.

 

Look at popular sharware sites organise data, such as http://www.snapfiles.com/shareware/ for ideas.

 

 

The ideal thing for my website in my opinion is to create a search wizard like the one Autotrader.com has for cars. OR maybe instead of having a multiple products listed

based on their license type, have it as an option on the product it self. That would be a great idea if it was only so easy, my cart provider is Bigcommerce and im not sure

if you guy aware of this but their platform sucks. They have an option to create different options for the products but I need it to also change the Details of the product as you change the option like SKU, Name so on.

 

Yes being able to do a filter search would be very useful, this could locate specific products quickly. BG probably doesnt support this out of the box so it would have to be custom build, or perhaps the http://www.bigcommerce.com/apps/searchspring/ addon may work for you.

BlueDreamer: searchspring would be great but they will completely **** my budget. They created this formula which takes your views and search query and times it by a fix rate, basically they will charge me around £100/$150 per month. So im assuming if my views go up the price will go up as well, im in the process of find a more permanent solution.

I accidentally came across inside , and after looking through their site www.inside.tm/magento-chat, it morphs a business website into a virtual storefront so business personnel can see and help their site visitors in real-time using chat.

Edited December 16, 201312 yr by Zoey Richardson