ECommerce - Tell Me Everything 2016

[SparksCW]

I have three online retail shops, two are in a niche, one is a bit broader. Obviously the two niche stores are doing best. But I am by no means where I need/want to be.

I have recently joined this forum and I've seen a lot of posts on eCommerce but haven't come across everything I need to know so thought I'd start a thread, with a slight difference and if it works then hopefully it may help others on here as well as me.

Can you please share ideas, methods, links and experiences on how to effectively promote an existing ecommerce store.

I don't want to know about;

- how to find a niche, I already have one
- how to start a site, I have already done it
- how to sell on eBay or Amazon, already doing it but want to grow the direct sales
- how to import a product, not interested at the moment
- etc

I have made sites, they are selling, we sell a fair amount on eBay/Amazon (still really small scale) and the company is 300% (turnover and profit) on last December so we are moving forward, but this is still really small scale, approx $25k per month turnover. However it is a sideline business that takes up 1 day and a few evenings of my time as I have someone employed to do the day-to-day.

HOWEVER - most of the sales are coming from eBay and Amazon. Let's focus on one site, the average monthly sales is approx $3000 + telephone sales (say another $2000) .. it's really not a lot, I want to be doing $25k + per month from just one of the niche sites.

My products are typically between $150 - $400 and appeal to home owners, especially those renovating or installing a new kitchen or bathroom.

Deciphering The Numbers

Like others, reading TMFL book has really made me think about my business, especially the law of effect, it's pretty clear if you want to make $1,000,000 profit then you need to affect 1,000,000 people at $1 profit, 10,000 people at $100 profit etc etc.

So lets say my average net profit is $50, that means I need 20,000 paying customers, so assuming a 1% conversion rate, that's 2,000,000 targeted visits, a target I am far away from!! I will qualify this by saying most of my higher ticket items make decent margins, but we are starting to sell a lot of lower value, lower margin items as well and the $50 figure has been plucked out of thin air.

In 2016 I really need to focus on GETTING DIRECT TO WEBSITE RETAIL CUSTOMERS not playing around with websites, graphics, colours and other potentially un-neccessary things that aren't really focused on achieving traffic.

I don't intend this to be a progress thread, I'll start one of those later, but an overview of my plan so far is to;

- write buying guides on each category, all available free on the site, then compile into a PDF e-Book to be given away free for email signup.
- email regularly with offers etc
- improve cross sells and upsells
- continue to write meta data for all categories
- continue PPC - although I really don't have much success with this and seem to drink money with little results.
- I've been using SumoME (found on this forum) lately which has given a bit of insight into where people actually click on the website.

And that's about it really, I lose the plot a bit after that hence the thread and you'll see that less than half of my list is directly related to GETTING NEW CUSTOMERS.

So, I'd really appreciate ideas and methods to promote and improve my website direct sales, and I assume most of it will come down to getting people on the site in the first place. Oh and to make it easier, did I mention our advertising budgets are currently really low? Unless it gets a direct response.

 

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