Crappy Conversion Rates!

I've recently (Dec 20, 2004) launched my new ecommerce site Hookah Hub (http://www.hookahhub.com) with moderate success.

Within this first month I'm averaging 1-2 sales/day, but I'm now up to 200 unique visitors/day. This is only a .5-1% conversion rate; which I'm very unhappy with.

Please review my site for suggestions as to how I may improve my conversion rates; and items I may be missing or can improve upon. Thank you for any help/advice you can provide.

Hi there...

I have to say that you have some very nice products... I purchased one of those pipes as a souvenier when I was on vacation in Turkey and it's great! I just don't know where to order the tobacco (I live in europe now)...

OK, back to your site. As I said you have nice products, I think the prices are probably ok since you are targeting a market that probably can't just go to the local mall and buy your type (or quality of product).

I found the following problems:

-a bit slow to load (and really slow on a modem, I still usse 56k for testing)
-BAD COLOR CHOICE

These two things bothered me most. I think that you should try making changes in these categories (if possible) and then move on to something else (if necessary).

I have found that slow to load sites will ALWAYS annoy people and kill a sale. The majority of internet users are on dial up access. OPTIMZE for speed. Use stylesheets for formatting and color, every table you use adds tonnes of extra text to your HTML... this adds up to a couple of Kb sometimes!

Further compress images or shrink their size! ALSO NEVER have text as an image. Always use stylesheets to format your text, size and color... you'd be amaized at how much you can shrink your D/L size by.

COLOR
=====
This is probably the most important factor when selling. Color plays such a HUGE roll in selling. People react to color... the wrong colors can ruin you and the right colors can sell total crap!

In general you will want to use BRIGHT primary colors to envoke an ACTION response out of people (such as CLICK HERE, BUY NOW!). Women react well to soft pastel tones like pink, light green, light blue and purple... but they are not ACTION colors... they tend to calm.

Men respond to strong tones, BLACK, DARK BLUE and the like.

MY RECOMENDATION is to make a slight change in your color strategy, instead of the GREY background, choose a lighter shade of one of the primary colors (like a light grey-green for example) and a STRONG, BRIGHT RED for your Highlighted text and areas of interest.

Try this for a period of say 2 weeks - month, monitor your convertion rates... then make a small change, first change the background and other colors that tend to blend into the background...

If nothing works, then either pay a professional to design a color scheme or try lowering prices... NEVER LOWER PRICES UNLESS 100% NECESSARY!

Good luck, please post your results, or email me if it helps!

Pete

Food for though. I had a friend offering affiliate products with great prices. The problem is from feedback from a few potential customers the shipping rates were above normal.

Page load time as mentioned above in a post can be a factor as I had dealt with this a while back. I was able to get my page load time down to 7-10 seconds compared to 13-20 and clickthroughs and conversions trippled.

After Looking at your site the most important area is above the fold ... that is the first part of a page that visitors see without scrolling. You may want to put your best sellers in the fold or even experiment with putting the more profitable items in the fold.

You may also want to get rid of unnesesary graphics to improve the load time.

You could move your search box below the catalog box as it would as the search box would probably still be visible.
It would be interesting to see if your results improve.

Ziv:

Amazing design comments. I've known a lot of designers including some with great commercial credentials and I never heard about action colors before. I'm going to PM you for help.

I looked at the site and thought it looked fine. I guess that's why we have different people with different specialties.

On the conversion rate...one other thing to look at how are people reaching the site. Our conversion rate on overall traffic is weak but our conversion rate off of the most relevant phrases or the most relevant links is dramatically high. Sometimes the conversion rates improve with better focus on the right keywords or keyword phrases that drive the most relevant traffic. Alternatively if you find highly relevant links that could also dramatically increase sales and conversion rates.

Dave

Hi earlpearl (and everyone)

I'm actualy a programmer and have pretty crappy design skills, I just spend a lot of time reading up on the phycology of color and text... there are a lot of very interesting things out there and they have a much bigger effect on people's willingness to buy then even the lowest prices or anything else we might think to do.

I have played around with a lot of these ideas and know first hand that they work very well... unfortunately I don't have any examples to post anymore since I lost my main website due to a trademark dispute and sold my secondary website for small money since I needed some cash.
(I am already working on a couple of new sites, but it's a long ways away)

If you want to exchange any ideas or need a 2nd opinion on something, feel free to send me an email at: zivkovicp @yahoo.com

Pete