Product Restructuring
Sat, 28 October, 2006 – 10:45 pm
I've finally made a start on restructuring one of our busiest sites and the way the products are offered for sale. At present there are 11 digital products and each product groups 4-7 items, however despite the visitor numbers we've had to the site, the sales have been exceptionally poor, less than 1% even. So I had a rethink and concluded that either it was down to the UK market being cautious with online buying from an unknown seller, or that the idea of having to pay for 4+ items when you only wanted one of the items wasn't worth it to people, regardless of cost.nnI'm hoping it's the latter reason. I met a friend of a client about 6 months ago. An American guy who used to be in marketing, mass marketing. My client has a web site where he sells a yearly subscription for access to 4 items, and his friend was explaining that people could be put off by having to pay for a subscription to all 4 items when they only want access to one. It made sense to me. How many times do you rethink purchasing an item in say a supermarket because despite it being a good deal you only want one or two items from it.nnSo I've made a start on the job at hand, planning the way to set up the shop to give easy navigation and hopefully ensure to get people buying. Of course the prices are also being decided upon. The large product group is priced at £8.99 so I figured that I could offer each individual item at £2.50. The downside to this is that the product group isn't priced highly. The price itself is/was set by the original producer of the product so I don't feel I can increase the group price to make the individual prices more worthwhile. In light of the small amount each item will make I'm going to build in the Paypal IPN system to set up the entire process to be automated, emailing the item purchased as soon as Paypal has confirmed the payment. Of course there is always the risk of suddenly having a chargeback for whatever reason but from what I've seen with these and from what I've read on a couple of blogs from people who deal with Paypal payments on a daily basis, these can be avoided (when possible) by having the right wording and terms and conditions available to the purchaser.nnSo that's where I am so far. I've designed the layout for the products, I've set up the database structure and now I just have to find an easy way to import about 90 items into it! With the pressure starting to ease a little (finally) in my business, I'm hoping to work on this in the evenings and get it all finished off over the next couple of weeks, possibly in time to use the spare £50 Google AdWords voucher we have, in time for Christmas.nnI know the single item price to a few people out there may sound low however even 1% a day on sales would net us around £10 a day which would be nice (and be a good boost to hit my daily target) 
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