As I Suspected…
October 6, 2007 at 12:11 am | In online retailing | 1 CommentTags: bean bag, body pillow, kid furniture, SEO
October is starting out as last October did…few sales. I still think this is the calm before the storm. Holiday buying will be ramping up in November. We hope it makes up for a potentially bad October. I am hoping I have to increase the limit our credit card processor allows us to charge before the end of the year.
On to the site…we just posted our new Body Pillow a few days ago and got a sale for it today. This is great because this page isn’t even indexed yet….that is why I love splash pages. You can add new products to the site, and as long as they fit in an existing category, people will be able to find it and buy. Sadly, I’ve seen our bean bag listing fall a few places in Yahoo. We’re still on the 2nd page, but I was hoping for a move in the other direction.
Its been almost 7 months since we added a kid furniture section to our site. Based on the fact that this is a very competitive niche, I didn’t expect to be listed high for this keyword. It takes time, links and luck. Though, someone found us today looking for children’s floor pillows.
It amazes me that if you are not constantly working on your site, and doing little tweaks for optimization, you will fall. As other webmasters are constantly adding content, links and products to their sites, its a big game to get the top listing. Today I saw something that amazed me. The site listed right after me for Bean Bags (listed highly at number 20) is under construction, has no content, no links and has a page rank of 4. What is that?!
Q4 2007
October 3, 2007 at 10:33 am | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: bean bag, body pillow, traffic growth
September ended up being our best month to date as far as sales go. That is a good thing. But our growth has been very minimal over August’s numbers. Over the last few days, I’ve added a new product. A new body pillow called the comfort U. We noticed that we were ranked high for body pillow in Yahoo, so we wanted to add to our very small selection of body pillows.
One of the best things to happen recently is that we flew all the way up to the second page in yahoo for “bean bags“. This is huge because it is a great traffic generator. After seeing our traffic hover around the 4000 visitor per month mark for the last 3 months, I would like to see us have growth in our traffic.
October has been historically bad for us. Not sure why. Its probably the calm before the storm of the holiday shopping period which will ramp up soon. I know the industry is slow right now because one of our drop shippers, who usually takes up to 3 weeks to ship out items, is getting stuff shipped within days right now. That tells me that this must be a slow time and its not just us.
I am hoping that the finally 3 months of 2007 can really be terrific for us in terms of sales, visitors and just general exposure to people in case they ever need something we are selling. To help our October along, I’ve sent an email coupon code to our former customers who opted to be on our mailing list. I hope a nice discount encourages them to come back and become repeat customers. Our mailing list is short right now, but as time goes on it will grow.
Back to Pay Per Click
September 19, 2007 at 11:20 pm | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: bean bag, floor pillow, soft furniture
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.
Milestone
August 27, 2007 at 7:31 am | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: bean bag, decorative pillow
Today we reached a milestone at My Pillow Place. We’ve created the 100th page on our site. My server system told me (as I tried to create my 101st page) that I had reached my limit of 100 pages. Which is unfortunate because I have many more products to add. Our site is growing by leaps and bounds and I find that as the site gets bigger, the easier it is to get traffic to it. I need to contact someone at customer support about how to get more than 100 pages.
Today I have added a new set of decorative pillows. They are a less expensive, ready to ship set of plush designs. They will be a counterpoint to our nicer fabric, made to order and slightly more expensive designer decorative pillows. We have posted an incentive on each of these pillow pages that if you by 3 or more of these items, you will receive an automatic discount. We’re obviously trying to encourage people to buy more than one of these.
When I created a second decorative pillow page, I thusly needed to provide a decorative pillow splash page to show people the choices available. We’ve actually been getting a good amount of searches for decorative pillows and I wanted to give people as many options as possible.
Some of our other keywords have been fluctuating in Yahoo lately. “Bean Bag” as a keyword has been down to 27, then up to 83 and has now settled in as the 50th listing. I need to get that bad boy up higher, but I’m running out of things to do to optimize it. I could try getting more links right to that page, but it hasn’t seemed to help much in the past.
It happened yesterday with 2 good sized sales. Augusts sales numbers finally surpassed our monthly goal. I thought that we would have no problem based on the stellar first half of August, but the second half has been much slower. I hope September has a more steady upward climb.
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