Odd Problem With Sales, Need Some Input.

I have been having off and on problems with both email and people ordering from my site but I can't pin down where the problem is.

The most significant event was about ten days ago my sales dropped from 2-5 items a day to zero for a whole week. My traffic remained essentially the same, the CTR on my ads remained the same. On one ad I had been getting a 15-20% conversion rate and it dropped to zero and stayed there for that whole week until suddenly I started getting sales again.

My site was up and working the whole time (traffic stats were normal as far as I could tell), my shopping cart and gateway appeared to be working (I "bought" some test products during that time and they went through normally).

My gateway (LinkPoint) moved from Burbank to Denver not long before this and from notices I was getting the transition was not smooth at all. Still I could never find any problem with the gateway or shopping cart.

Although I have been running this site for a couple of years and built from templates using FrontPage, I don't know too much about reading weblogs. I don't even know how to check if customers were getting to my shopping cart and somehow getting stuck or bumped out when trying to order. I use webstat to track stats but since I can't load the tracking code to the shopping cart pages I don't know how to determine if the customers were even getting that far.

Any help on trying to analyze this would be helpful.

I also had a customer email me yesterday that he tried to pay withPayPal through my cart and had all sorts or very weird problems (he didin't elaborate). On my end the transaction and notification came through normally. Today I had a customer try to order a couple of items and my notice from the shopping cart said declined and gave error codes. When I checked the gateway itself the order went through normally. Unfortunately the customer went elasewhere after supposedly being declined twice, then noticed that she was charged. I had to refund the money of course.

I have also had email problems with all my email addresses, including all of them through two other websites. It seems to trace back to MSN which does a lot of filtering at the server level. I don't know if that is related or not.

I am starting to get a level of business for which I really need solid reliability for everything. This site/shopping cart/gateway did seem pretty reliable up until recently. The time and expense to change webhost, email/ISP, shopping cart, gateway/merchant account is too costly to just start "replacing parts" to see if it fixes anything. I have close to 400 products for instance and setting up all those ina new shopping cart is a lot of work. I know sometimes you can export/import them but that sometimes doesn't work.

I also switched to Qwest DSL with MSN recently but still have my MSN dial up account. Sorry for being so rambling here, I don't really know where to start looking at this.

FWIW, in other forums I have seen a raft of complaints about LinkPoint problems around 6/21. Apparently they had problems. Here is what one person said "I just hung up with Linkpoint and they confirmed it was a change made to their server on Friday".

In respect of your PPC advs, did the volume suddenly jump? If so, you may have been a victim of fraudulent clicks. So the clickthrough rate remained the same but fradulent click applications will never buy.

Another possibility is your web server had problems and was slow, thus causing people to lose patience and leave without buying anything.

Yet another is that "WebBusinessWizard" (i.e. your Checkout process) had problems.

There are a whole lot of other possibilities.

PS: There are a quite a lot of complaints about LinkPoint in these other forums. I have no experience with LinkPoint so am somewhat reluctant to suggest looking at alternatives but I don't see any compliments in these forums - rather, plenty of comments like this: "I'd drop linkpoint, they have a history of reliability issues, especially during the holiday shopping times."

As I say, no experience with them myself, so take that hearsay with a grain of salt.

But possibly it is worth looking into.

Hope this helps

PS: I see store owners reporting problems with LinkPoint from 5/23 to 5/27 and 6/11. However, remember that if LinkPoint made a change and advised your "WebBusinessWizard" folks and they didn't promptly make a necessary change then a "LinkPoint problem" would actually be a "WebBusinessWizard problem". So be cautious about waving the baseball bat around LinkPoint's face - it may not be their fault.

From your description, I suspect something went wrong in the the checkout process so you'll need to look into all of these possibilities.