Have a business but I'm not making ends meet, improve existing business or start new one?

Here's some basic business advice that many people either don't understand or lose sight of in the heat of battle.

There are only three ways to improve your profits:

1) Sell to more people. (Increase the number of orders)

2) Sell more to each person. (Increase the average order size)

3) Sell to each person more often. (Increase order frequency)

If you can do all three, you will see exponential growth in your revenues.

In your case, I would focus on 1 and 2.

For #1, you've seen influxes of orders when someone posts on a deal site. This suggests that you work on finding more deal sites. Not all of them require that customers post the deals. I haven't looked, but I'm guessing that there are also Facebook groups that function the same way.

Does your shopping cart offer coupon capability? Offering coupons opens up a whole other realm of deal-type sites (sites like CouponMom come to mind).

For #2, look at your pricing. It's complicated, with all the different quantity prices and odd numbers. I get into that more below.

You might also add a simple link to a page offering wholesale pricing for bulk orders.

Since you are making sales, I wouldn't get too crazy about the design. Adding some graphics or color elements to highlight sections might be all you need.

One thing I didn't notice was shipping information. Are you offering free shipping? That's a selling point you should exploit. If you don't, that's a good place to explain why buyers need to acquire the alcohol on their own.

[Correction: I just noticed that you do offer free shipping to the US and Canada. This is one of those things that should be obvious, but isn't.]

Your search filters are not necessary. You only offer one product, so sorting by product is useless. Each scent only has one product, so filtering by scent is useless. They're all the same price, and there's no benefit from new products vs. old products, so that category is useless.

I would lose this version of the search filters altogether.

I would think about doing a how-to video showing how to mix your product with the drug store alcohol. This also gives you a chance to explain why you package your product the way you do (weight, hazardous material, etc.). Post the video on YouTube and Facebook, and embed it on your site.

Finally, it's good that you have an opt-in form. What's less good is that there's no real reason to opt in. It might be obvious to you, but it won't be to someone hitting your site for the first time.

It's a way to keep things simple. When people are faced with too many choices, they often opt for the simplest one, which is to not choose at all.

I would create a separate product item for single products and multi-packs. Since your average order is 3 packs, I'd keep that as one of the options. Then I would pick one more option, maybe 4. Comparing an order of 3@$18.75 to a 4 pack @$22.50 for a full year's worth might help you raise your average order size.

Change your search filters to sort by package size (1, 3, 4 or whatever).

He essentially means - cross sell. find other things your customers want and need and sell it to them. With 200 unique orders per month you are leaving a lot of money on the table by just selling what you do. People pay good money and even LOSE money selling items just so they can acquire customers they sell other things to (besides the initial sale)

Thats where your site redesign comes in and is critical because at the moment you cannot cross sell or create any kind of upsell funnel. The answer is pretty clear to me. Stick with this business not switch to something else. Add to it. In any given month your past and present customers are probably spending thousands for other related things (grooming, appearance frugality) and thats dollars you can have.


I'd leave that until you have other things to promote. A lot of people do not realize it but Adwords is best used for acquiring customers not just direct sales. People in some niches wonder how others can afford to pay some of those PPC bids but its chiefly because the advertiser is factoring in the value of acquiring the customer over time.


You are being more than a little short sighted there. I could see you saying you will never hire anyone for SEO again but to mark off getting organic traffic from one of the largest supplier of traffic and sales on the internet is not logical.

In your case I would pay someone to optimize your site (when you redesign it) for SEO and do everything else myself (link building which brings traffic is perfectly legit for SEO too).

truthfully in SEO (and I speak as a SEO) theres no reason to pay monthly fees unless your site is always changing. link building is a monthly thing but though content marketing you can do that yourself.

but again to mark off getting traffic from Google and Bing through Seo (and you are not the only one I see doing that) to me makes little sense.

P.S. you are getting the feed page when you click the link to come here. Its mostly for mobile but the powers that be already know many don't like it and its still the same and probably won't change.