If you have had a site up for any time at all, you know it is a challenge getting people to visit it. Once you get them, nothing is more aggravating than not getting sales. It can be complex and difficult to run a web business. You have to get your site designed just right. Next, you have to figure out how to generate traffic. These two tasks can be a full time proposition, particularly generating visitors. One day, however, you will suddenly start pulling a lot of traffic to the site. Ah, finally! Then you notice the visitors are not turning into sales. This discovery is the reason why many male webmasters have no hair. You can find the female webmasters sitting on the bench in the park slowly rocking back and forth with blank, staring eyes. Alas, there are probably some basic steps you can take to rectify the problem.
The first step you need to take is to check is how long it takes for your site to load when a person tries to visit it. The fact it loads fast for you is irrelevant. You probably have the fastest possible connection speed possible. Run over to your moms and try to load it. You might be in for a surprise. If you load time is slow, it usually is not a server problem. Instead, you probably have too many graphics or something else clogging up your pages. Whatever the reason, fixing it can vastly improve the conversion rate of visitors to sales.
The second area to focus on is your shopping cart. There are some absolutely brilliant sites out there with cart problems. The issue usually comes up when a person tries to go from your site to the actual secure server pages in the site. The first transfer can be very slooooowwww. For people on less than blazing internet connections, it can even time out. One way to test this is to run back over to your moms place and try to place an order. The second is to look at your sales data. If you see a lot of people putting items in their cart, but not actually going through with the purchase, you have a cart issue. Obviously, you need to look into it and figure out how to make things work faster. Through the years, this is the biggest problem I have seen with most sites.
Generating traffic for your site is a time intensive and can be costly. Once you get it, make sure you are making it as easy as possible for people to give you their money!
Halstatt Pires is an ecommerce design specialist with MarketingTitan.com.
