New site and thanks plus a request

Hi,

Firstly a massive thanks to all the developers of OC, keep up the good work plus thanks to all the extension authors who have helped me (some paid and some free). Those for free I intend to make contribution as soon as revenues start coming in from the site.

This is my first site and I have had to learn everything from scratch. I aren't a dunce but am no php coder either, however with help from the forums I was able to get a site up and running with thousands of products and categories. I was even able to get rid of the dreaded slow down because of categories.

I am now at the stage where one week after getting the site live I have had around 600 visitors but just one sale (from somebody I knew as a friend) so far. Can anyone give me links or advise on how to convert the visitors to sales. My pricing is good. I have compared to the UK's top 2 printer cartridge sites and I am more competitive. The products are the same so there is no difference there. I have a bounce rate of 41% which is what my competitors are having. I am slightly better than them but they have a lot more visitors so that may change. Time on site and page views is improved over my competitors.

www.discount-consumables.co.uk

I am new to online retail and hope somebody has been where I am and can offer advice and directions to improve the convert rates. As a thanks to the community they can purchase on the site and use the discount code "opencart" for a further 10% discount and free shipping in the uk.

Many thanks
Chris

The site looks ok, 600 visits and 1 sale? in a week, the conversion rate is poor, but it is down to the traffic, where are you getting your visits? Id check that first, there are many people with similar sites so your competition is very high and to convert your visitors need to see what they are looking for in the first few seconds, you will find that many people will find looking for cartridges a mind numbing affair and do place sites into their favorites, so Id just let the site run for a while, check your google analytics and webmaster tools for keywords used etc and make marketing decisions based on the info you obtain.

Good Luck

The site loaded pretty quickly all the way here across the pond in TN. You're at about 3 seconds. For me I'm cool with that, but my designer would be freaking:). Seriously not a big deal to me though. For your first opencart store you did a great job. My first store was super simple and was basically me changing colors of the default template which took me weeks:). I think you did a great job.

just a couple of things you could do to tweak:

your logo is an image but you might as well do as html, looks like a basic font. if you are keeping image why is your alt tags for thomas stoner supplies?

surely you bought the url to target discount consumables?

personally i would change the green background for the products, too may colours going on, why not match it to the header colour?

hope you don't mind the comments.

Thanks for the observations and cooments.

I will change the alt tag and appreciate the idea on colours.

Good news is now over 1000 visits and got 11 sales so it slowly getting there although Zuckerberg fortnues may elude mor for a while yet