Hello everyone, I have a question related to the actual sales, not the script itself...
Here we go:
I have setup a PT website, very niche, original design, well categorized and all, and got a few great merchants - the problem is that the site is 3 month old, and with that age (considering that I am NOT a pro CEO) it is hard to compete since most of the competition in my niche was there for years (most sites are over 10 years old).
But I was not born yesterday either ;) - I have a pretty old site and I do sell similar items on that site, but I use eBay instead.
This site B that I have is a pretty well known resource (site even have been mentioned a few times in the biggest magazine covering this niche), I have a steady traffic, good rank and some well promoted pages that are made specifically to sell related products.
My thought was that since I have a few pages from site B in top 10 SERPS I can use searchExternal mod to list the same products from my PT site (simply replacing where the products come from [eBay results replaced with PT results]). - I wanted to do that to start at least some sales on my new PT site.
So I took 10 pages from the site B and converted them from eBay results to PT results - The design of the pages stayed exactly the same, most of the 10 of the pages are in top 10 in G and those 10 pages were bringing me anywhere from $20 to $200 a week with ebay.
The problem is that right after I converted them to show PT results instead of the eBay results I had only one sale in the first day after the conversion, and nothing after that for a month!
I even thought that there is a problem with the affiliate cookie and I went and made a purchase my self, - no problem with the affiliate cookie, I got the commission from that sale in my report, half an hour later :)
Also the prices of the products are about the same, and the only thing that is different is that the product images are much nicer with PT compared to ebay, and I did not have product describtions with ebal, and now I have the short description with the products.
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OK to the question:
Any idea what is wrong?
Why people stopped buying if the same pages have brought me money before?
PS: the SERPS for those pages are the same - they even have become a little better actually...
Any ideas are really appreciated.
Thanks a lot!
Paul
David, thank you very much for your reply...
And you are right, - rereading my previous post, it does sound like that! - I will try to correct it in a minute.
Actually "by not related" I meant they are not interlinked... Truth is, both the Site A (PT) and Site B (eBay) are in the same niche, although site B is a community website that has a few pages listing products related to the niche, and Site A is simply a PT site that has a tone of products related to the same niche.
More than that -> the products specific niche and brand on the "converted pages" did not change!
As an example lets say the page from Site B was selling Black&Decker power drills listed on ebay, and had a steady sales for over 2 years.
Now the same page sells Black&Decker power drills (results coming from my PT site) from some major merchants specializing in power tools.
I also made sure (as much as I can) that the products prices would be as close to what they were before as possible.
Lets say I was selling Power Drills with prices between $40 and $250 - now the page lists items with similar prices...
Thanks again. - it is MUCH appreciated!
Paul
Hi Paul,
You mentioned that Site B (that does well with eBay) is not related to your new Price Tapestry site; so could the reason be as simple as that? Presumably your eBay results are showing product related to your site's content, and therefore your position in the search results for related queries, but it sounds from your description as if the products brought in by searchExternal.php are not related to the same topic... I may have mis-understood but that could be all it is...
Cheers,
David.