Our numbers are terrible. We have a high number of orphaned carts and I am trying to figure out why. I am totally new to e-commerce so I am not sure what to do.

We have the traffic, despite no marketing or advertising. The only way people find us if they are looking for a certain item or they are a repeat customer. Suprisingly enough, the website keeps on going, even when we tried to let it "die."

Our web guy is debuting new features/tools/new system to our shopping cart so I am very excited about that. However, I would really like to decrease the orphaned carts and increase our fulfillment. Another of our webguy's clients sells organic peanut butter and their fulfillment rate is 52%! What am I missing?? :bgh: Here is a link to the site, if someone could help me with what we are doing wrong or if I am taking the right steps below to correct it.

Things that need to be improved that I am aware of:
- need to have more selective, unique items, we don't want to compete with musicians
friend or guitar center
- need to advertise and market ourselves
- need to include reviews and videos of our products (this is readily available from the
manufacturer - just have not been able to get to it yet)
- create product packages (for example, if you buy this ukulele, we recommend Cases
A, B and C and here are the package prices)
- website needs to be updated (this should be happening within a month or so)
- some resource type things, the listening lounge, venue listing, artist pages are on hold
until I/we increase our shopping carts

Things I am doing now:
- updating our current product descriptions and pricing
- creating a small collection of FAQ on certain products (I have very little musical
instrument knowledge so everytime we get a question from the customer I have to
ask my husband about laqcuer shrinkage or the difference between a soprano ukulele
and a concert ukulele, etc. I have been compiling the answers to create a resource
library of sorts)
- researching what tasks can be outsourced and creating a sample project before I
commit to someone (so I can work on the things that need to be improved!)
- 99% of our products are drop shipped so that helps me

What can I do to increase our sales fulfillment and decrease the number of orphaned carts? I am a little hesitant to make a drastic change considering that we are getting an updated website and new shopping cart features.

Right now, the site pays the bills and very little fun stuff. I want to improve it so we can really start pursuing the other aspects of the original plan. For example, I would love to be able to talk to Russ or Yves about the possibility of having a music clinic or festival at their locations. We also want to build up our real estate portfolio, which is where my husband has been spending most of his time. But I need to get more money coming in first!

 

I will have to look at that in more detail. Right now, the customer can select the item to buy, fill out their billing/shipping info, select a shipping rate, see the order total, pay and then receives an email confirming their order.

The only time they would need to create an account is if they wanted to see our lowest price on certain items.

What I do see a lot of is people placing items in the shopping cart and then leaving. I will need to look further if they are leaving because of the shipping/handling (not sure how to fix this as it is a straight pass through from the manufacturer). What do you think about wishlists? It's a feature we will be getting when our site updates but is it really helpful?

 

Yes!! Thank you! This is the kind of thing I looking for!!

Only a few vendors do US Postal mail delivery; it's mostly UPS and Fed Ex. I know that if the customer enters a PO box, we can't calculate the shipping but a message is supposed to pop up that that we need a street address. Also, I know that if an item does not have a shipping weight then shipping/handling can't be calculated so I am fixing that as I go along.

There are some other quirky things I've noticed, such as when I remove the buy button on an item, it isn't removed globally from the site. I'm making a list of errors that I'm coming across to send over to my webguys.

There are some things I can do now, such as make sure shipping weight is present on all items and other things that I need my webguys to fix. And there are other things, like the high shipping costs on some things, that I just don't know what to do about yet. We don't make any money off the shipping/handling so I can't reduce it since it some cases it would cancel any profit we would get on a product. But I appreciate your feedback greatly!! Totally helps!

 

We're in the process of changing products and pricing structure. So there is room to play around with the pricing on some of the products.

Fixed shipping price is something I would like to do in the future. I'm not sure how to work it now because we lack a central warehouse. Items are shipped directly from the manufacturer so if the guitar vendor is in San Francisco, a CA resident would pay less shipping/handling than a FL resident. Also, guitar picks are cheaper to ship than an upright bass, and an upright bass is cheaper to ship than a full size jukebox. Also, while we have not sold any yet... we do have tour busses available! Shipping/handling on that will be interesting...

 

Cactuswren,
I am not sure what opensource is or how it is different from what I have now. We use Spidercart (have the enterprise version) and use awesome.net for analyzing our web traffic. I will look into Google Analytics. From Spidercart, I can get an idea of where people are leaving. But I looked at Biophase's test order and I couldn't tell that shipping was not calculated. I may be missing something so I need to ask my husband to clarify some things.

We use authorize.net and paypal. Thanks for the Marketing Sherpa tip, I will have to find that thread and check it out!

 

Cactuswren,

Thanks for the explanation and links to the other threads!

We use authorize.net along with Paypal. Paypal is not our only source of receiving payments. We don't get much business with Paypal; 99% of our sales are through authorize.net. I remember someone saying that Paypal does not accept personal check but the rare checks that we have received, were through Paypal.

And I think I finally figured out why Biophase didn't see a shipping total. It was driving me nuts, trying to recreate the error because I was always able to see the shipping options/pricing. Somehow, the country selection was EC. We need to remove country designations from the checkout process. International orders take too much of time to ship right now and calculating the shipping was a problem because not all vendors would do small international vendors. We do have a UK contact so we're trying to work something out with them.

And I just "found" a feature on our cart called Reports! Apparently there are already several reports available and I can create a new one anytime. I'm still learning how to use our backend so the information I need to find our bugs or what isn't working is probably there... I just haven't used it yet.

 

FINALLY!!!

We had a loooooooooooong overdue conversation with our web guys today! I knew our website was "old" but WOW! I didn't realize the extent of how out of date! A lot of the problems or glitches that I was bringing up, the answer was, oh, that's the old way, or we've moved on to something better. Uh, ok, thanks for telling us! :smx4:

Anyways, now that we can focus on the website again, I'm excited that things will be working correctly and then we can really promote our website.

 

Thanks for the input! rep++

The unfortunate part is that TODAY is the first time I've ever had the VeriSign logo appear! I have been wanting that and HackerSafe/HackerShield/Better Business Bureau, amongst other things, but had to wait.

We JUST got the ball rolling with our website guys again. So we will be doing a redesign of the the site on the front end AND the back end. One big factor was that we never pushed for anything from our guys so we fell off their radar for a bit and that was ok becuase we were thinking of just dropping the website all together. We just decided last September that we DO want to continue with the business so I had to figure out how it all worked and started noticing problems/glitches/things we should have but don't, etc.

Anyways, our site is very behind but that will change! I think 99% of our problems is due to the fact that everything we have is very outdated! Until this February, we had scrolling descriptions on each product. I hated it and couldn't figure out why it was there. I mentioned it when we were at their office and he said, oh yeah, that's the old way and removed the scrolls right then and there. Unforunately it's not going to happen overnight but anything that can be fixed quickly will get done first.