Why would my E-commerce conversion rate have dropped by half?

[Benj25]

I run a website selling used books. Our e-commerce conversion rate is on average around 1.40%. Over the last four days this has dropped to just 0.25%! Any ideas why? We haven't made any changes, apart from uploading a new pricing strategy - obviously you'd look at this first but the price of our whole inventory has gone DOWN by £5000 and our average product price has decreased from £3.43 to £3.09!

Everything else has stayed almost exactly the same, hits have decreased slightly, so has referral traffic.

[GardenBeet]

I have had a few problems like this and it has been due to bugs in the cart.

Start checking G Analytics -  has there been a drop in sales for one type of user. (ie internet explorer vs chrome)....in my case my add to basket buttons were not performing properly in IE....hopefully you find your answer

[Benj25]

Checked! No drop in internet explorer vs firefox or chrome, slight drop in Safari but no technical errors in Safari

[RyanKent]

A few questions / ideas:

• How many visitors are we talking about? If the sample size is small then it can always be a normal fluctuation.

• Have you recently written an article or added any new content? It's possible you have a new source of traffic which is bringing in new traffic that does not convert well.

• Has your traffic numbers for the last 4 days been consistent with what you expect? Has there been any significant increase or decrease?

• Is it possible any other changes might have happened during the price change? GA tags removed, tax or shipping changed, etc

If none of the above turns up anything interesting, go through your store and buy one of your books. Examine the whole process and see if anything seems odd.

[Benj25]

Hi Ryan,

Your first point is probably a good one, we're getting around 50-100 less visitors a day. Down from 420-450 to 350-380.

We haven't added any new content.

No changes as far as I'm aware regarding prices.

This time last week we got a good link from a famous authors blog/facebook so we got a lot of hits but our average conversion rate is 1.52% and we are down to almost 0.25% over the last few days. Comparing Jul 1 - Jul 4 conversion rate=1.52%, Jul 8 - Jul 11 conversion rate=0.83%.

Only change I can see between then and now is active inventory, down from 12696 SKU's to 12350 SKU's now. And referral traffic down from 15.24% to 5.59%

[RyanKent]

I hate to offer a "wait and see" response but at this point it seems we have too little data to work with for any other reply. There are so many factors that can influence a bump in the short term. Paydays, seasonal changes, news, etc. can all be a factor.

[Benj25]

Yeah I think you are right Ryan, I'm not convinced that it is anything we have done. The average book price has gone down from £3.43 to £3.09 in our inventory which should only encourage sales! But we will definitely just wait it out - hopefully just a blip.

[Highland]

One suggestion is that, in this wild and crazy time of Panda, your keyword rankings changed. One of our sites experienced a spike in some keywords while dropping in others, which produced some oddball metrics for that site. So, let's say that "blue widgets" is a great converter (we'll say 2%) and gives you 250 hits a day, while all other keywords combined give you another 150 and drag that back to a modest 1.25% overall. Suddenly Panda eats your "blue widgets" keyword but likes you a LOT more for "fuchsia storm widgets", which only converts at 0.25%. So your traffic wobbles in your overall number but your traffic sources have drastically changed and, thus, your conversion rate has suffered. I've seen several of our sites experience this, where a short but good keyphrase dropped but several long tails came up sharply and offset the traffic drop.

Have you looked at how people are finding your site? Did keyword traffic change?

[Benj25]

That's exactly what I thought at first. Comparing the 11th/12th July to the 4th/5th July:

Our traffic for our brand name was down 3%. Our search traffic for 'cheap books' was up 8%. In fact our search traffic for our branded terms generally / brand name generally is down and our search traffic for 'cheap books', 'bargain books' and 'second hand books' is up slightly, maybe this, plus less traffic overall and less referrals from Facebook could explain the drop.

[DavidKonigsberg]

first you need to compare search terms to see if your e-commerce conversion rate fell for your top terms.