My Sales Are Down, WHY???

The other day I read a forum thread on Y Store Forums which asked about the causes of slowed sales. Not only do I own 16 Yahoo Stores myself, I am also an owner of Solid Cactus, and I have been working with many merchants over the years. In those years, I have built some good insight (I think) into this topic, and felt it would benefit you, as well. Be forewarned, anyone who knows me knows that I talk, and write a lot, so if you actually read this, go get yourself a coffee…

When sales and orders are substantially less, the best thing to do is basically troubleshoot it from every angle.

• Test the Store- Are your order button & shopping cart working? Are you getting any page errors? Go all the way through with a real credit card number (some payment gateways can go down and prevent order from going through – this can happen on a number of levels, not just at the point of sale itself.) If you have a problem here, stop and contact Yahoo ASAP.
• Have friends place test orders- It helps more if they are in different parts of the country. There are times when communications fail. I can remember a time when I couldn’t access many websites in one day. Later there was a news report that a Sprint data pipeline had failed on the east coast, causing communications failures all over the east coast. If any of your friends can’t put a test order through, stop and contact Yahoo. Make sure they tell you the time they tried to order & who their ISP (Internet Service Provider) is. Browser name, version, and where the order process failed are also useful to have at hand.
• Take a look at conversion rates - Have you made changes to your store, or changed shipping tables? Have you moved or changed your order button? Have you changed your categorization? I had an instance where a customer had managed to orphan (remove from navigation) a few of their best sections, in essence removing thousands of products from the store – with out realizing it.
• It could be “seasonal” factors - Are graduations an issue? Or the bad weather in Florida? This depends a lot on the products you are selling though.
• If you use PPC listings – Check them - If PPCs (Pay Per Clicks), like Yahoo Search Marketing or Good Adwords, aren’t pointed to the correct domain name, customers looking for your site are confronted with a 404 (not found) page.
• Time to look at Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) - Click on the “references” link under the statistics column of your store manager, from here you can see how much of your traffic is coming in from each major search engine – Google, Yahoo, and MSN on a day-to-day basis

Very often at Solid Cactus, when our merchants have very BIG problems, our employees come to me for advice. During the first week of April, two of our customers called into Solid Cactus, complaining their sales were cut more than half. Neither merchant had anything in common; they both sold two different products. I went into both of their sites and saw that on March 27, their Google traffic went from THOUSANDS of hits a day down to practically single digits. Both merchants were pretty sure that the problems had to be because of the Yahoo data center move and that their pages were not serving correctly, therefore not being indexed correctly.

I started by checking the traffic on all of my stores. Traffic was all over the place, three of my stores increased in traffic by 40%, the rest stayed the same, and none of them lost traffic. I also called a few of my friends who operate ecommerce stores… I told them about the problem, and I asked if we could look at their graphs together. Most had very noticeable traffic changes on this date. Of course none of them had lost most of their traffic, but some went up, some went down, just enough to make the blue line on the graph buckle.

This now tells me that no matter what the merchants think, this cannot be a Yahoo issue because if this were the case, I wouldn’t see so many stores actually DO BETTER in Google than they were. This would make the theory of poor indexing due to a data center move not as plausible, since Yahoo and MSN were not returning the same decline in traffic.

I went to the web, looking through forums, trying to find the answer. Keep in mind, problems like this don’t always answer themselves fast. It is usually a good idea to poke around in other forums, such as Webmaster World, and Matt Cuts (the guy who works for Google who is very active in helping people with Google problems). The problem – Google’s Big Daddy update

This blog is a must read - Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO - he has one of the absolute best, most informational, useful blogs in creation today.

The moral of the story is, website and conversion problems are often very deeply rooted, and require a lot of research. Don’t be afraid to talk to people, ask around, and do some serious research. Things are never as easy as they seem.

Take care,

Joe Palko
Solid Cactus Inc.