Question for Experts at converting sales

Question for Experts at converting sales


86badtips.com is the site in question.

I sell T-shirts to Waiters and waitresses?they wear them outside of work for fun.

I am converting like 1 out of 1,000 unique visitors at best.

This number is over several years of offering online.

I have changed so many things (except theme) and it has never helped?at all.

I know they LOVE the t-shirts because I have personally travelled from Miami to Seattle, Cleveland to L.A. I have walked into thousands of restaurants, and have sold close to 1 million bucks worth.

I sell 1 out of 5 people I show!

In the past I have chosen to believe the reason they were not selling on-line is because waiters and waitresses live day to day and they come to my site, save me to favorites and tell themselves they will get one next week when they have more money, which never comes. So procrastination! Yeah that?s what I thought. It can?t be me and my internet marketing skills!

I now believe that anything of true quality and value will sell online and I?m just doing something wrong.

I know the culture of my potential customers 100% and could answer virtually any question about them.

They are 18-25 (for the most part). They have grown up making purchases online and are not afraid to do so.

They are big into pop culture. Most drink/do drugs and sexual harassment is the norm at work J

Why have I not managed to sell Virtually anything on-line?

Any glaringly obvious mistakes going on here?

I do know of a few things that could be done to make improve a conversion rate like making the ordering process easier, maybe a BBB logo or safe checkout logo, or have a place to enter e-mail and send out e-mails and discounts and the box where they enter their sizes might be easier to find (it?s at the bottom now) and the images could be higher quality/easier to read.

At the end of the day, this stuff will cost me money because my talents are not web design, and the technical no how to do what is needed. I have been very reluctant to make any moves because I always thought they these shirts ONLY sold in person and did not want to invest even a few hundred to make these small changes. So I changed what I could myself and hoped to see any kind of improvement.

but really I am basically selling NONE!!! I can?t speed up a ball that?s not rolling at all L

its not like I am at a horrible .25% conversion rate trying to get to 1%-2% +++

I?m at NO SALES at ALL

I am getting 2,500 unique a month with the average person going to 3.5 pages, staying on site 2 minutes and coming to the site 1.5 times each.

This is pretty consistent over the past 3 years.

All the t shirts I have sold, have the website address on the back, so when they wear it around their server friends they end up coming to my site.

So we are getting consistent traffic naturally!

Stores don?t want me because I offer a product that only 1% of the population is a potential customer and they don?t want to waste shelf space.

I have tried to recruit sales reps and that has not been successful.

For some reason nobody is crazy enough to pack up their car and take off across the country selling t-shirts out of their car for the hopes of making it rich?except me.

I know an obvious question is?Jason, if you have sold 1,000,000 worth, why don?t you just keep going? Because I have a family and I am tired of the travel. They are getting to old to take with, which we have done.

Any and all feedback would be taken seriously?as you can see I am very serious, and have a proven product!

I am humble and willing to learn.

I'm not positioning myself as a guru but I also know your target market well as I was in the trade for 20 odd years, and have been markeing online in one capacity or another since 1999, (there I've just aged myself lol) so I'll just give you my thoughts FWIW.

I think the buying process has a lot to do with it...I click on the big red buy now button and select two shirts, but I don't get any options of where to enter my choice of design or size...I think I'd drop out of the process there and then, because if I only liked one of the designs I wouldn't want getting sent another by mistake. This is VERY VERY easy to fix...you can simply place a button beneath each item with the various options (sizes). There are also a number of (free) WP plugins for ecommerce that make the shopping cart look much more attractive.

On some of your pages (in fact most of them) there are different fonts when there is no need - i.e. the FAQs page. Although the servers might not be looking at the design of the website I think it is important that at least the fonts are uniform for a more professional look. I would also change the footer text that says "Copyright 20010" to " Copyright 2010 to 2012" it makes it look more current and that the site is still in business, rather than a project that may have been abandoned.

I also don't much like the way the back of the T Shirts are shown. I think it would look much better if you could show the fronts and backs like they do on Cafepress. Again, that would be easy, sign up as a seller on CafePress, put your text into the shirts that most like yours, and then just take a screenshot and upload them to your site.

Just my 2 cents - I love the shirts BTW! Good luck with it.

You don't have "buyer experience" over there. The website is the single one which can affect your sales.

How many targeted visitors you have? (daily)

The theme needs a renew, get a simple ecommerce theme or something.

Spelling errors

But yourself in your prospects shoes... wait... do you even know who your prospect is? Think about it...