Traffic, the lifeblood of the internet retailer
There is a famous business expression that states the key to a successful retail business is “location, location, location”. This can be translated for an internet retail business to “Traffic, Traffic, Traffic”. There is no more important factor for the internet retailer than the quantity and quality of the traffic they receive.
You would be amazed at the number of excellently written professional websites there are, that receive very little traffic and generate no sales. This may seem obvious but you can have the best site in the world with the best products at the most reasonable prices and you won’t sell a thing without good traffic. To make it more complicated there are two types of traffic ‘good’ and ‘indifferent’. Good traffic is generally ‘targeted traffic‘ meaning the visitor is likely to be looking specifically for a product or service that can be found or relates to your website.
The canny shopper is now shopping in a completely different way. They go to the shops and find what they want; they then come home and buy it on the internet for less. In almost every case money can be saved, in my experience I have saved as much as 30%-60% on some of my major purchases. What is clear is that thousands of people already have a very specific idea of what they are looking for before they switch their computer on!
Web masters spend a considerable percentage of their day trying to get people to visit their websites. In fact if my pursuit of traffic is indicative, then as a webmaster you will spend 40-50% of your working day trying to generate it. Over the years, I have paid a lot of money for indifferent traffic. These are clicks that arrive on your site incidentally. Impulse purchases very rarely take place on the internet, if the person arrives on your site and they are not, at that time, looking for your product/ service, your ‘hits to sales’ conversion rates will be very poor and your traffic is virtually worthless.