Independent Nurseries and Garden Centers (the sellers) sign up and can instantly upload their items for sale directly to customers expanding their sales region of their niche products from just their neighbored to the entire USA. Since its niche customers who are looking for specific items customers find the site fairly easy through search.
The site is now doing about $2,000 total revenue per month. I'm taking a proportion of each sale. For now, I'm mostly covering cost, but hoping to work on some automated marketing tools to increase revenue.
As others have mentioned, my best performing referrers in terms of sales completed are often Forums (as opposed to AdWords, organic search etc).
The site does marketing via emails and some top products Google Ad Words, Facebook, and hopefully Titter soon. I'm using Google Analytics with the e-commerce plugin to build Adwords remarketing campaigns and plan to do Facebook rmarketing campaigns soon.
It's not totally passive as there's some support request, but I'm hoping to bring on an on-demand virtual assistant for support requests as discussed by the Internet Business Mastery guys: http://www.internetbusinessmastery.com/ibm-218-work-less-mak...
You mention being easy to search, but I cant seem to find your site on google or duckduckgo (in case it was my historical disinterest for plants affecting google searches). I tried some combination of the keywords garden, nursery, seeds, plants but never saw doleaf on the first page of results. Am I using the wrong keywords?
"rainbow eucalyptus for sale" Google #22 / DuckDuckGo #6
Apparently I need to start using DuckDuckGo!!! These results are great!
From the attracting perspective sellers (nurseries), the "Buy Plants Online" search has a lot of competing bidders on Google so I'm going to have to get creative there.
Great to see via Google Analytics there there are 6 active users from Hacker News viewing the site right!! Hopefully the Google Analytics E-Commerce Sales Report will show several sales attributed to users coming from Hacker News ;-)
Important rule of ecommerce order conversions - never require an account signup / login before getting to the checkout screen from cart. And allow guest checkout. I'd take a guess you are hemorrhaging sales because of this
rwhitman thanks for the tip! I don't require the login / signup until the user checkout. You can view all listings, add to cart, view cart, etc. It's only when you click checkout that you are required to login.
Can you let me know how you reached the required login page so I can fixe that?
Yea exactly as you described - add to cart etc, then click checkout it asks for signup. Don't make people sign up to buy something, allow them to check out as a guest and then ask them to create an account after the transaction. Requiring authentication before the purchase is made is a huge abandonment trigger
Independent Nurseries and Garden Centers (the sellers) sign up and can instantly upload their items for sale directly to customers expanding their sales region of their niche products from just their neighbored to the entire USA. Since its niche customers who are looking for specific items customers find the site fairly easy through search.
The site is now doing about $2,000 total revenue per month. I'm taking a proportion of each sale. For now, I'm mostly covering cost, but hoping to work on some automated marketing tools to increase revenue.
As others have mentioned, my best performing referrers in terms of sales completed are often Forums (as opposed to AdWords, organic search etc).
The site does marketing via emails and some top products Google Ad Words, Facebook, and hopefully Titter soon. I'm using Google Analytics with the e-commerce plugin to build Adwords remarketing campaigns and plan to do Facebook rmarketing campaigns soon.
It's not totally passive as there's some support request, but I'm hoping to bring on an on-demand virtual assistant for support requests as discussed by the Internet Business Mastery guys: http://www.internetbusinessmastery.com/ibm-218-work-less-mak...