Virtually no sales since switching to WooCommerce

Am hoping someone in the community can offer advice.
After taking over the management of a website, and redesigning it with Wordpress with a WooCommerce installation, sales have all but vanished.
What was 2-5 sales per month have gone to virtually nil.
Is this something that other's have experienced? Is there any advice anyone can offer? The traffic seems to be reasonable (at least on a par to pre-WooCommerce and redesign) and search engine presence is pretty good (for local searches).
The website is for a local, UK-based florist: http://youngblooms.co.uk.
What am I missing?

 

Hi,

I just took a quick look at your website and also went till checkout process and I believe these could be the reasons

1) It's loading very slow specially the checkout pages.
2) Home page takes several seconds to load, reduce the size of page and use some cache plugin as well
3) "Add to Cart" button should be always there and when someone press it it should prompt to choose size/color/options etc. instead of showing it after the selection of size/color etc
4) Add some online chat feature on website so when someone find it difficult to order then he can contact on live chat immediately instead of leaving website
5) Also please check the exit under some analytics tool you are using or Piwik if you installed it.
6) Make sure you submitted sitemap to all major search engines.
7) Also accept payments through credit card instead of just PayPal

There can be some more things but if you will check or fix the above then you will definitely see the change.

Cheers

 

You say 'virtually no sales'. Does this mean that you are getting some still? If you have had none at all since changing over to woocommerce then there could be something broken in the checkout/payment section.

 

@Stuart F

Your website takes a horrendous amount of time to load. Even if your across the pond it should only take a few seconds instead of the 10 I waited.
Utilize a content delivery network to help page load speeds regardless of geographical location. Also, install a plugin that will Minify CSS and JS.

I personally use woocommerce and it's an amazing platform, the bad thing about wordpress/woocommerce is that it is CSS/JS heavy. However, it can be optimized accordingly.

Consider changing the text on the product page from "Select Options" to "Add to Cart". While it wont add the item to the cart it will increase the CTR of your products.

I don't know what platform you were previously using or if your sales were from organic traffic but consider this. If you migrated from a non wordpress platform to a new platform, your URL Structure has completely changed and thus will affect your rankings. If you have a sitemap submitted google should work itself out eventually. I changed the permalink structure of my ecommerce site once and it hurt for a little while but my rankings eventually came back.

Your on page SEO for your products is non-existent. For example: You have a product called "Perfect Valentine" That's great and all but Woocommerce uses Product Names as your H1 tag. You're not going to see much in the lines of serp rankings for "Perfect Valentine". Consider changing the product name to "Perfect Valentine Bouquet" or "Perfect Valentine Flower Arrangement" These are terms you should be able to rank for and still receive decent traffic from.

Your descriptions... well... You have the short description in place but scrolling down to the product details, there's nothing there. Write a little 100-200 word description and use your keyword a few times in the description.

Looking at your title and meta descriptions, those need work as well. I would download a SEO Plugin that has a title / meta rewriter and make each title and meta description unique per product. Make sure to use the product name in the title and some descriptive keywords as well.

I don't know if your issue is strictly SEO based or functionality based. If you've tested the checkout process in it's entirety and the functionality is there, look at your traffic, has traffic dropped off? Apply the SEO techniques I listed above. If your traffic is still there but your not getting sales, try playing with the design of your site. Colors matter, it's been proven that consumers take more action (click) on buttons that are red or green. When it comes to optimizing your shop you need to think like a consumer. Most people are lookie-loos and aren't quite ready to take the plunge and commit to buying something. Your job is to change that and make them want to buy.

Quite a long read, hopefully you take something away from it. If you have further questions, I'll do my best to provide you an answer.

 

Thank you for all your comments and suggestions. I will now set about working through implementing them!

 

Not had any in about a month and had three before Christmas.

 

Thanks for the advice - using Google Analytics, not used Piwik - would you recommend?

 

I think Piwik is best regarding this as it will let you know the pages from where users exit. So it help to evaluate or check the problem with that page. Also Stuart - Do some work on SEO & SMM and also i will recommend you to improve your design. If you don't have budget then buy a WP theme as design matters a lot soon user land on website and after that the functionality of website. Please feel free to contact in case of any other question or help you need. Cheers

 

Hi Stuart, Im also in the UK and use wordpress theme 'Bazar' along with Woocommerce. For SEO plugin (which helps me out a lot) use Yoast. Its free and gives you a step by step guide. Im no expert and am having to work to improve my site

 

Get your friends to test out the site and let them comment on every problem and every slow instance of the site. If mobile is important test the process too.

Try to get your site as fast as possible. Programmers can help improve speed.

Try cloudflare if you want to get a little extra boost as well.

 

First, test your order processing and make sure it works (I'm sure you did, just writing that in case...).

Second, make sure your conclusion is statistically valid. 2-5 sales per month on average is not much. February is a dead month in many industries.