Keep the site or try to sell?

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Hi everyone,

Last year, we finished building an e-commerce site. The site was very difficult to build because it has a visual configurator and pricing tool. This year, we have focused on SEO and building organic traffic. Despite our efforts, only about 1/2% of those that visit the site check out with our cart. They want to call us to discuss when buying. We have made a lot of changes to fix this with no success. It's most likely due to the fact that the average sale is about $1500.00.

I have an offline company in the same niche, but the process of making a sale and fulfilling orders is very different. My staff is doing a poor job with these calls, and it seems to be distracting from our offline sales.

Right now, I rank 2nd for a very targeted and valuable keyword, as well as other super targeted keywords. In this niche, I'm getting around 5,000 Organic vistors a month.

I'm thinking of selling the site, but not sure how difficult that will be because I have 6 figures invested. I could hang on to the site and just profit from those that check out online, but it seems like a real waste.
#sell #site
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  • Profile picture of the author dave_hermansen
    In most cases, a site is only going to sell for, at most, two times the annual profit (not gross, but actual profit). Many sites only sell for 1.5 times or even one year's annual profit.

    If you can't let it go for that price, you better hold onto it and see if there is some way to better teach your staff or get better staff.

    It is quite normal to get a lot of calls when you reach a higher price point like you have. I've never seen a product niche that didn't convert at least 50% of all calls into a sale - many sites convert close to 100% of calls into sales, so you actually do want the phone calls.

    You should also try to put together very detailed product buyer's guides on your site and link prominently to those buyer's guides from all appropriate pages. This usually results in not only cutting down the number of calls, but it makes people much more confident that they are buying the right thing, resulting in much better conversion rates.
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