online sales conversion rates

[tim_s]

i've started up a website which will sell certain products (can't really say what it is at the moment) and i need some advice as to what a good sales conversion figure would be to use when estimating sales etc? no other website sells what we sell and all traffic comes from google,yahoo etc from people search for very specific products. at the moment i'm getting 50 hits per day but that number should increase ten fold when we get #1 positions in the search engines (which i'm working on at the moment). would thinking 3% of people who visit the site will actually buy something be optimistic?

[Mark.S]

If your selling something that specific, which nobody else sells and which the buyer has specifically searched for I'd imagine you could be looking at much higher conversion rates.

I'd strongly reccomend you consider buying one of the more advanced stats packages (Webtrends for example) so you can more closely track:

- where people arrive from
- when they leave the site (after how long and from where)
- how many people later return to make a purchase, despite abandoning the first time
- where those return purchasers originated from

[tim_s]

hi,

thanks for the reply.

yeah i've got webtrends - what an excellent product!