Sometimes going for the most advanced solution just because you have the skills to implement it doesn’t necessarily pay off, especially when it comes to small ecommerce sites.

I learned a valuable lesson over the last couple of weeks.  Over the past few years I have developed certain skills, including working with pretty much an open source script out there.  So naturally when I decided to build a small ecommerce dropshipping site (for my 13 year old son) I jumped right in and started looking at suitable e-commerce solutions.

Because the store would only have about 30 products, I immediately ruled out the giants of Open Source Ecommerce, like Oscommerce and Magento.  Instead I settled on a farily new kids on the block and began to experiment with Presta Shop (which I love, by the way!)

After working frequently with Magento for offline ecommerce jobs, Presta Shop was a light relief and I had the store up and running in a day, completely styled, stocked and ready to take orders.  It looked great.

The Problem

Off I went and set up my PPC campaign.  Then we sat back and checked our email every five minutes for new orders …. as you do when you are 13, right?  Here’s where we realised we has a problem.  After 4 days we had 2 sales. Kinda dissapointing as we had over 500 visitors to the site! Looking into the admin further, we discoverd 8 shopping carts had been filled but not checked out. There was a whole lot of lost earning sitting there staring us in the face.

I figured there could be a couple of explanations. This could be normal. People fill carts and don’t bother checking out, maybe they are quickly totting up totals. But this didn’t seem right because they had all gotten as far as the registration, which is the second step in the checkout process.   I also figured that the checkout process may just have been too long.  The market for these products average 22 years of age.  Most of the other sites selling the same items have a one click checkout via paypal.  Our site required moving through 6 steps to checkout.

The Solution

I took the hit on my time creating the first site, immediately registered a new domain and set up a content management system (CMS Made Simple). I loaded it with all the same products, and created a paypal shopping cart (very tediuos when you are used to being spoiled by easy to use e-commerce scripts). So that was another days work! And I’m  thinking through every painful paypla button cut and paste that this better work!

And did it? I have no way of checking how many people load paypal carts on the new domain and don’t checkout but I do know that for similar traffic the conversions are way up and my son’s small two-step checkout online store now averages 3 sales a day, roughly a 3 - 4% conversation.

One final point, Presta Shop, as the new kid on the block is an excellent ecommerce solution and I would definitely use it again and plan to very soon.  The problem here was not the solution failed but that it was not right for the ‘click speed’ generation, teenage to 20-something gamers (the market for our products).  They wanted the fastest and easist checkout possible.

Photo: Ricardo P Max