Once upon a time, our online wedding linens store had a very fierce competitor. They received a ton of web traffic every month, ranked in the top 5 for the same or similar search terms that my wife and I were targeting for our own store and I’m fairly certain that they made a good amount of cash. In fact, they were so popular that I would often see brides and other patrons talk about their store in the wedding forums.

Photo By Ian Hamption

Their only weakness (that I could tell) was that their site wasn’t very attractive and that it was built on an antiquated shopping cart engine. But nonetheless, it served its purpose. Customers could easily find their store online and they sold quality product. (Early on, my wife and I made a few purchases from their store just to check out their offerings).

But something strange …

Early on when you first launch your online store, one thing is certain. You will not be receiving many visitors and customers will have a hard time finding your website. But rather than view the lack of traffic as a negative, this is the perfect time to do some targeted conversion testing using Google Adwords and Google Analytics. Why? Because you have so little web traffic, there is less data to interpret which makes sifting through your Google Analytics reports much easier without having to create complex filters out of the box.

Below I’m going to describe how my wife and I tweaked the conversion rate and diagnosed the early problems with our online store website using Adwords and Google’s free web analytics tool. Incidentally, if you have not signed up for Google Analytics, you should do so right now. It’s an extremely powerful tool …

I receive many questions about how to open an online store every single day. But lately, I’ve been noticing a disturbing trend. It seems that several of you are looking for the easiest and cheapest solution possible and making detrimental business decisions along the way. You are searching for a single magic bullet that will solve all of your problems, a bullet that doesn’t exist. Now I can understand being risk averse and not wanting to invest a large sum of money into a business before you know it will make money, but at some point you need to realize that it takes some amount of monetary risk to succeed.

Photo By Eric Gjerde

For example, the other day I received an email from a young man who just graduated from college wanting to learn how to find products to sell online. And he prefaced his question …

A lot of online business owners focus so much on getting traffic from the search engines and optimizing for Google that they completely neglect the search functions for their own website! After running our online store for several years now, I’ve found that many customers who visit our store don’t browse the categories to find the item they want to buy. Instead, they jump straight to the search toolbar and look for exactly what they want. And guess what happens if they yield the big donut from the search results? Over 95% leave the store immediately. The frustrating thing is that it doesn’t matter if they can’t spell. It doesn’t matter if they enter in an incorrect search query. One bad search and a customer will leave. Period.

Photo By Bramus

The reality is that most out of the box …