Andrew Bleakley

I often get dragged to meetings with clients that want to throw buckets of money at agencies to “fix” there website because sales are slack. The lazy agencies charge a few hundred (to a few thousand) dollars a month and run lack luster Adwords campaign’s, the smart agencies charge thousand’s upfront to redesign the shopping cart and then follow up with expensive Adwords campaign’s.

Should you be worried ? Only if you have already lined up an agency.

Truth be told most issues with slack sales can be rectified without spending a lot of cash – in fact you can do it for $100 at most. To find out how, send me $95.00 – or keep reading your choice.

What causes online sales to drop off ?

Does this sound familiar ? Your online shop was running along great, a nice number of consistent sales, lots of visitors and then for no reason things started dropping off ? Your once proud site now barely gets enough customers to pay for itself. You want to know what is goign on because you sure didn’t change anything!

I hear this every couple of weeks. Customers who we set up with online shops travel along wonderfully for a while and then, after time notice a gradual slide into oblivion and occasionally over the edge. We run down our checklist of things and invariably arrive at the same point. When they stopped caring about there website, so did there customers and then Google. Of course to make matters worse, I was speaking to Mr. Johnson your largest competitor and while you were doing nothing he was out there getting people to link to him, adding new things to his website and Twittering with all your customers – you better get moving – he has you on toast at the moment.

If you don’t care about your website, why would Google.

Search engines will index and return your website as long at it remains relevant to it’s users. If you haven’t added anything new to your website in 12 months you have to expect that you will slowly become irrelevant. Have you made changes to your website but it still isn’t making a difference ? Don’t be disheartened, there a few very simple things you can do to make sure that everyone knows when and what you have changed as soon as you have changed it.

Get rid of that stupid splash page

When people visit your website they want to know what you can sell them and for how much. The do not want to wait and watch your crappy introduction. Concerned that visitors and Google are not aware of all the new products you have been adding – put them on the homepage.

Stick them right there in front of everyone the second they arrive and give them no choice but to bask in there glory. People research purchases or making purchases o the internet are inherently lazy – if they weren’t they would get up off there bum’s and walk into your shop. Don’t make them work for it – give them what they want as soon as they want it – guaranteed increased sales.

Send out newsletters

Are you one of these companies that collects customer emails and details but has never actually sent anything out ? You aren’t alone – but you are stupid. If customers gave you there email in the first place it is because they wanted to hear from you, or they wanted something off you badly enough to give you there details. They want you – quit holding back.

I don’t condone sending pointless newsletters for the sake of it – but surely you can muster up a few paragraphs once a month to say thank you at the very least. Not everything you do has to be about selling. Once in a while surprise people by not selling them something. Just ask how there day has been. Form a relationship and you have a customer for life.

Blog, Twitter, Facebook – You know the drill

Take your pick, work out which one best suits you and get out there amongst your customer base. Just remember to temper your “buy my shit” posts and messages with plenty of old fashioned conversation. Let people get to know you and encourage them asking your expert opinion – the sales will come.

Ask people to link to you and to review your products and services

If you want more visitors you need to be found in more places. Getting people to link to you is the key to any online success. Links help people find you form other parts of the internet, and links are the votes that Google uses to see who’s on top. Links are as easy to get as asking. Talk to your suppliers and ask them to add a link on there website. Find industry directories on the internet and submit your information (more to come on this – in the meantime if there is any doubt contact us and we will explain). Find blogs in your area of expertise and offer to write a post for them – the will certainly let you include a link to your website. Write an article and submit it to places like articlebase.com.

Do anything.

There is little bad that you can do on the internet by trying. So long as your first priority is providing useful information to your customers you will get the increased visitors and increased sales you need to pull your stagnant shopping cart up by the socks.

What things have you done to boost sagging sales online ? Let us know. Have you had any success with any of these ideas ?

We have had a few emails lately about the future of X-Cart and what is going on over at Qualiteam. To make sure everyone is up to date here is the short version.

• Late January 2009 Qualiteam (the people that make X-Cart) announced that they were no longer going to drop X-Cart and Lite Commerce and develop a new shopping cart that was a merge of both and would be created from scratch to include all the fancy new features modern shopping carts have.
• This announcement came out of the blue (they continued selling software the whole time) and came on the back of two horrible upgrades that cost there users an awful lot of money
• The off and developed http://www.ecwid.com which is a massive failure of an apparent 4th generation shopping cart. Zero SEO, Extremely Limited Options and Features, Almost no developer documentation – shall we continue – check it out for yourself – it is appalling that’s why the link is click-able – we don’t want to look like we like it :0(
• The only dribble’s of information getting stuffed into the forum’s speak of supposed upgrade path’s and late 2009 releases.

We know why you are frustrated – we know where to look and we know the phone numbers to call and we can’t find out anything substantial – certainly we can not find anything that reassures us that as an investment they are worth backing. Before we sandbag them and say do not hitch your online success to this nightmare we will step back, drop a little emotion and remember all the good things that have come form this development shop.

For along while X-Cart was the bee’s knees. It was powerful, fast, useful and cheap. As time went by they stopped keeping up with internet trends. There idea’s of SEO, presentation layers, ease of use became very outdated and now to see an X-Cart shopping cart it is hard not to gasp in horror.

Do you want our professional opinion ? Sure you do, who doesn’t ?

If you are thinking about using X-Cart – Don’t.

If you have X-Cart and have to move forward soon – move it all to Interspire or something similar.

If you have X-Cart and are not pushed for time – wait until the new year and see what X-Cart 5 is like – hopefully is put’s Qualiteam back on the map – they deserve to be there and we would throw them a big party if they could get back on top.

We will set the monkey’s t task to create you a few lists of X-Cart alternatives and assess the cost and difficulty in moving your website – hopefully you don’t need it – but just in case.

For the record the two consulting jobs I have had with X-Cart since the announcement the decision was made to cut loses and ditch X-Cart and use the import feature of Interspire to move. In the end it was a massive money saver and moved the clients onto a stable, supported and shopping cart with a clear future.