Scott Porad

I’m have a friend with a web site who sells laptop cases online (which he designs and has manufactured in China). In the month of January, year-over-year his sales are down quite a bit, so he asked me to help him figure out why.

First, I checked to see if visits were up or down. He has an increase in visitors, and his search engine traffic is way up, so that’s not the problem.

Next, I looked at conversion. Way down. I mean double-digit down. This explains the difference in revenue.

Digging a little further, since search traffic was up, but conversion down, I took a look at his top keywords. For his top keyword, you could tell they were highly qualified customers because they were searching for “ laptop cases”. Even for these types of visitors, conversion was down.

This made no sense to me. He hasn’t changed his site, yet highly qualified prospects were converting at a much lower rate. How could this be?

The answer lied in acting like a user. In went to Google, and searched just like a user would. His site was the first three natural results–awesome, the SEO is working.

The problem was that Amazon, Target and others who resell his product were buying all the paid results. And you know what else they were doing? They were selling his product at a discount!

The exact same product that he was selling for $99 wad on sale at Amazon for $64! All thing considered equal, why would a potential customer have any reason to buy from him when Amazon, Target, et al, are completely trusted sources?

The lesson here is that not all conversion problems are solved by twiddling with your web site. You can redesign your landing pages and checkout flows and what have you until the cows come home, but it won’t make one lick of difference if the store next door is selling the same thing for less.

It reminds me of the expression: to a man with a hammer, everything is a nail. All too often companies spend time fixing something that will never, ever solve the problem because it’s the only “hammer” available. Or, if not the only, then the most convenient.

A web site is just one of the many components to an online retail business–it is the equivelant of the physical store in the real world. Price, product, and location are the other components. All of these work together to convert ptospects to customers.

This applies not only to online retail, but to all businesses that are selling goods or services. The web site is only part of the equation.