It's always hard to give people blind advice, but in my experience the best thing to do if you have a retail/store site that is getting traffic but not converting any sales at all is to try looking at your sales pages with a shopper's eyes.
Are you giving them a reason to buy from you? Is it a good deal you're offering? You don't have to be the cheapest for a product, but you do have to give them some reason to buy from you rather than somewhere else. This can be a better price, or free shipping, or even just because you made them 'feel special' on your sales pages...you just have to make a positive impression and stand out.
Also, are you giving them a reason to trust their purchase through you? This is crucial. The average person who is willing to shop for toys, clothing and etc. online is also aware of the need to be careful where they enter their credit card information, and even if your checkout pages are as secure as Fort Knox, if you haven't established a bond of trust with the visitor on your sales pages they'll never get that far.
It's really all about making visitors believe that they're not on a cookie-cutter site or some scammer's honeypot.
Some basic tips that I see a lot of store sites and product pages get wrong:
- Your action button or link should say "Add To Cart", or "Add To Shopping Cart" ("Add To Shopping Basket" also works if your primary customers are women), if your order button/link says anything else you will lose sales
- Product pages should have a nice image of the product, and to the right of that image should be the details and description, followed by the "Add To Cart" button (just like product pages on Amazon are setup), if your product pages are setup any other way you will lose sales
- If you offer related item suggestions on your product pages, they should begin with a title that says either "Other customers who purchased this also bought these..." or "Your Personal Shopping Assistant Also Recommends:", that second way works for everybody but especially well with women because it implies that the store is treating them special with the phrase "Your Personal Shopping Assistant", so it leads to establishing a bond which leads to trust and increased sales
- Regardless of who you use for processing checkouts, a merchant account or service like PayPal, get your checkout page to look as similar to your actual site as you possibly can, even if it's just using the header image from your site, the point is once someone trusts you enough to buy from you the worst thing you can do is shake them up by sending them to a checkout page that is obviously not connected to you at all. I tested this with a partner a couple years ago and we noticed about 35% more people bounced from us at the checkout page without the extra effort to style it similar to our sales pages. That's a lot of lost sales at the closing step for sites that don't do it.
These tips won't help you get more traffic, but the first step is to learn how to get the most out of the traffic you already have, make sure you're really ready to convert targeted visitors before you begin chasing after them.
Hope some of it's helpful to you.
