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drdan
Joined: Eons Ago
# Posts: 105
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Posted: 2006-Feb-20 07:00
I have built up a fairly steady business at my website with ups and downs in sales from day to day of course. I have been plagued with persistent but intermittant long term problem. Every few months my sales will suddenly drop like a rock and stay that way for several days and then, just as suddenly, go back up to the normal ups and downs but steady average sales of about $11-12,000 per month.
This is hard to pin down but since sales vary so much anyway. After this happening about 4 times in the last 10 months or so I do believe there is a definite phenomenon that occurs. I have also seen that sometimes there are also some reports from customers during those times that they could not get their orders to go through. It seems on the face of it that I should just get another shopping cart. This is not a simple (to me) as that though.
I do believe this may have also happened to me at least once when I just had PayPal generated buttons and no shopping cart or merchant account. Changing the shopping cart is no small matter as I have 400+ products currently with separate info pages (with their own buy now links) for most of those products. I have recently added about 1700 more products to my cart and was in the process of creating all the pages for them when I experienced another sudden drop in sales and increased reports of customers not getting their orders to go through on occasion. Regular customers or friends will often try again later and have success but I suspect that this is at the bottom of the problem.
I need to know how to make an overall evaluation or test for what might be causing this. I have tried numerous time buying products through this cart with never a hitch at all. I don't want to go to the large expense timewise if it is not the shopping cart. Could it be my webhost (sannibel)? It's a cheap website (19.95/year until I needed more bandwidth) My shopping cart (1shoppingcart) uses html links instead of genrated add to cart buttons. Could that be less reliable? Could it be a problem with my gateway or merchant account (Linkpoint)?
I don't really know where to start or what to look for or what questions to ask when I talk to support for my shopping cart, webhost or merchant account. I've approached my webhost and shopping cart support before about this and they always say everything is "working fine". I believe they think I'm just paranoid over a slump in sales and there is no actual problem.
If I can't find what it is I guess I need to just start replacing everything. I have heard that transferring a site to another host can cause headaches and for pages and forms etc not to work properly. Any advice on that?
BTW. During these sudden drops in sales, I generally see no appreciable changes in hits or click through rates.
I would like to compare the percentages of people who get to the order page without completing an order between slump and non-slump times to at least confirm there is a problem with that but I don't know how to do that. I have Webstat for stats but the order page is generated off site when they click on the "Buy Now" or "Add to Cart" HTML link.
One other clue is that I generally test the cart with a special "test product". In this most recent slump there were some indications that only certain products were affected. Sales of most products were down but couple of product lines seemed unaffected. I also got a higher percentage of PayPal sales during the slump which might mean that regular credit cards wouldn't go through but PayPal would which might point to the merchant account rather than the cart.
I am confused and frustrated!!  
[ Message was edited by: drdan 02/19/2006 11:35 pm ]
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drdan
Joined: Eons Ago
# Posts: 105
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Posted: 2006-Feb-20 07:29
As I was rereading my post I remembered that I recently had a script or database added to my site for linking purposes. This was well after the slump started so I doubt it is directly related.
However, I had the automatic checking for links stop working and the tech said it was because of the way my webhost "was redirecting all your pages to a tracking script so they can monitor the traffic amount that your site uses"
After a while this automatic checking started working again without me changing anything or having a chance to contact the webhost.
Is it possible that this "redirection" could intermittantly cause problems with the Buy Now links to the secure shopping cart site?
Again any advice on smooth transfer to another host would be appreciated. I have a good FTP program (WS_FTP) and I could download all the pages to my computer and upload them to the new host I suppose.
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drdan
Joined: Eons Ago
# Posts: 105
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Posted: 2006-Feb-23 06:53
This appears to be a tough question.
I mostly want advice on how to evaluate or narrow down the problem?
If I can't get it narrowed down, what should I do first in terms of changing carts hosts etc.
The thought of an already integrated cart/webhost system is very appealing but the ones I've seen don't seem to have as much autoresponder, client database and other features and more important are a completely different type system. This means all my 1000 or so pages must be rebuilt from the ground up. That is an enormous amount of work and time.
If I get another webhost, a good professional level one this time, and I get different shopping cart but one still ofsite and based on hyperlinks, how much chance that the same intermittant problems will occur?
That would be much less time consuming as I just have to upload my products and clients to the new cart and change the hyperlinks for my products. Tedious but a week or two rather than 2 months or more.
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Dinkar
Staff
Joined: Aug 12, 2001
# Posts: 4391
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Posted: 2006-Feb-23 08:58
You should collect more info from your customers who failed to complete the transaction. Make a 'Report a problem' form and collect the following information:
- Browser info.
- Cookies enable/disable? (you can add a script on your site to see if it is enable or disable)
- URL where the transaction failed and the previous URL where they found the failed url.
- IP
- Error message they received.
- Product name(s)
- Any other information they want to share.
Try to collect as much data as possible with automated solution. Give your visitors to choose answers from options. Don't tell them to type everything.
Using the above data, find the exact problem and then take the final decision to either change host or shopping cart.
HTH.
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drdan
Joined: Eons Ago
# Posts: 105
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Posted: 2006-Feb-24 04:43
Thanks Dinkar, great suggestion!
I was even thinking of giving them a $10-15 store credit for reporting on problems but didn't think of specific questions or form with choices instead of typing.
I assume I need to provide a link to a form which has drop down menu capabilty? I think I can find such but any suggestions would be appreciated.
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flyingrose
Staff
Joined: Oct 30, 2003
# Posts: 3361
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Posted: 2006-Mar-05 09:41
Yes this is a difficult issue to diagnose. I have seen this caused by several different technical problems. Since you believe your traffic is not dropping I'll skip the ones related to that.
I can sometimes confirm that a site with a sudden drop in sales is failing by adding multiple items to a shopping cart. I add them randomly and click on checkout and watch for anomalies.
When that site was failing items would appear and disappear from the shopping cart. That issue turned out to be some kind of problem with the product database server.
On another site which had a hand coded shopping cart (bad idea with all the already de-bugged options available now) there were all kinds of problems that were dependent upon the data entered. For example:
1. Addresses longer than a certain number of characters
2. Special characters in the data such as using a pound sign for an apartment number
3. Items with more than single digit quantities
4. Orders with large numbers of items
These are less likely to be involved in your failure if your sales are generally fine and the drop is dramatic.
For many e-commerce sites, checking out involves multiple servers all of which must be functioning and communicating properly. The main site may be on one server, the database of products on another, the shopping cart on a third plus the merchant account portion of the transaction.
Whenever you see a drop in sales contact the technical people involved with each server and ask them to check for problems. They may or may not have the expertise to actually resolve what is happening. Sometimes just rebooting the server or taking some other action that resets communications will resolve the problem, especially on Windows based servers.
One solution I recommend you check out is prostores.com. The best hosting reseller and Prostore Designers I've come across is neoverve.com.
[ Message was edited by: OAC 03/06/2006 08:13 pm ... Reason: No links in posts please. ]
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