Life of an Online Business – My Pillow place

We’ve reached a point where are traffic numbers have begun to stagnate around the 140 visitors/day mark.  I don’t know what else to do to increase that at this point.  I feel like I’ve hit a wall.  Our sales (although on a terrific pace) have been inconsistent. 

We’ve decided to start looking into the possibility of opening a second online store to help fill in the gaps that My Pillow Place is leaving.  Its weird because we had a terrific weekend of sales, and then the week starts and the its starts weak.  Pun intended!

These days without sales are disconcerting.  It may improve over time and I will work hard to improve our website and get listed higher…but right now, I’ve used up all of my SEO techniques. Each month is slightly better than the one before it, but I’d like to see the business grow by leaps and bounds.  It hasn’t happened yet.

This weekend, I did nothing on the website.  I didn’t add product, I didn’t optimize pages….I did nothing…and it was nice.  You realize that when you are running an online business, it becomes your life.  It becomes this thing that you have to constantly do.  You forget to take some time for yourself.  So, that is what I did this weekend.

September, as I think I have stated, started out well last weekend.  The week was sort of a lull.  Not many sales and our traffic is starting to stagnate. I don’t know why.  I am racking my brain to figure out why our traffic numbers have not gone up.  I noticed that our Bean Bag Splash page has moved up to the 21st spot in Yahoo.  That is tremendous.  If I can move up 11 more spaces, I’ll have our page on the the first page of Yahoo and I expect our traffic numbets to climb because of that.

I did do one thing on Friday to help get some sales.  I tested a new page design for one of our most popular products.  On our square floor pillow page, I moved some things around, reduced the amount of text and highlighted some important information.  We’re testing to see if the new format increases conversions.  We did get a sale for the square floor pillow yesterday, so maybe its working. 

Are you out there with your ecommerce business trying constantly to increase the number of visitors in order to increase sales?  That’s where I find myself now.  How does one accomplish this?  I often read how by bringing more targeted and qualified traffic to your site, you can increase conversion rate.  That may be true if you’re running pay per click campaigns. 

Organic traffic, you may be trying to just bring as many people to your site as possible.  My thought on this is that even if people don’t purchase something today, they may bookmark the site and return later.  They may buy after they’ve done some comparative shopping.  I notice many websites offer the “Free Shipping” USP….but, what many people may not realize is that this tactic (in most cases) just shows a higher base price to cover the shipping costs and then the “free shipping” buzzword, while it looks appetizing, is not really free shipping at all.

I’ve actually noticed that some sites do have lower prices and free shipping and I honestly don’t know how they do it.  I’m not talking about my direct competitors, just things I’ve noticed being a consumer on the internet.

Shipping costs are the single most expensive expensive that our business has to deal with.  Sometimes greater than the wholesale prices of the products we sell.  FedEx and UPS are the bane of the business.  It is unbelieveable how much online retailers have to rely on them.  They are just making an amazing amount of money on every sale that requires shipping (which is all of them). 

An alternative is using the united states postal service…unfortunately, they do not provided the tracking information that I love about FedEx and UPS. 

As far as simply increasing traffic to increase sales…that is a no brainer.  As long as you are converting at a good rate, more traffic should mean more sales.  But how to get it?  Well, I’ve started by increasing our product line.  I look at our web store as a tree.  Each product we offer is a root.  The more products/roots we have, the more people/water we can gather.

The next thing I’ve tried to do was to optimize the pages of our largest traffic generating keywords…as My Pillow Place becomes a well known name, it becomes a Brand…once we are a brand, people who have visited us in the past but not bought anything will think of us when they do need something that we offer. 

The other thing I’ve tried do to increase traffic is to just get the word out about My Pillow Place…using social networking sites, I’ve been able to gather some traffic by going to the people and letting them know that My Pillow Place exists and all are welcome…