Life of an Online Business – My Pillow place

In the last post, I brought about the frustrating trust of inconsistency.  Traffic has been down, even though keyword positions are generally good.  I wanted to bring in new batch of potential customers, but I hate paying for traffic.  I bit the bullet and turned on my Google Adwords ads anyway.  I figure, I can spend a few dollars today.  I turned on my old ads for Floor Pillows and Bean Bags. 

Well, it paid off quickly.  We got a floor pillow sale this morning.  Its not always bad…my pay per click targets were misguided early on.  I used to target really general words like bed pillow. There are many different types of bed pillows, so that was mostly a waste…I think, early on, I spent tons of money on bed pillow ads just to get 1 or 2 sales out of it.  I had to narrow down the focus, because people who are ready to buy are looking for specific things, not general categories.

I also want to address the issue of abandoned shopping carts.  For some reason, Wednesdays seem to be our abandoned shopping cart day.  We had one today and last Wednesday.  You never know why someone enters all their information into your website forms and then gets to the final page and decides to leave it.  Sometimes people don’t see the submit button at the very bottom of the page.  And I suspect that sometimes people learn the total cost after shipping gets included and say…”whoa, that’s too much!’

Whatever the reason, abandoned orders stink because you think of what could have been.  Especially if the sale is large.  My website doesn’t not allow the customer to view their shipping charges till you get to the very last page, and that really stinks.  It may have saved some sales for us.