The site I posted about in my previous post hasnt made a single sale all day today, despite me sending 30 clicks to them. I thought I would check that everything was working correctly, website is up and working correctly, the links are working, the merchants site is working, ahhh, OUT OF STOCK!!!
No wonder the clicks arent converting! Luckily for me there is another merchant which sells the same product but for 20% more! As the item costs more, obviously the conversion rate isnt going to be as high, but it will be a hell of a lot better than the 0% I will get from an “OUT OF STOCK” page.
Rather than manually changing all the links on the site which would have taken 10 minutes I decided to create a small PHP script which will check the merchants site, see if the product is in stock and then update the file to point to the correct site and display the correct price. The script will now automatically check the site every hour and display links to whichever merchant has the item in stock.
So rather than monitoring what difference the voucher code makes to the conversion rate, I will be seeing what difference a 20% increase in price. I have also noticed that the merchant which has the items in stock also has a 10% conversion rate and an average EPC of 31p compared to a 4% conversion rate and an EPC 12p! Looks like it might not be a bad thing that my links have changed!
I’ll update in a couple of days once I have a few days of stats.