For certain high value products... 350 visitors may not be enough traffic to determine your conversion rate, especially if your products are expensive.

Are you ranking for anything specific in google? Getting keyword specific traffic is very important. If you get 350 clicks now... compared to 3,000 clicks when you are ranking well for leather products makes all the difference in the world when it comes to sales, it is a numbers game.

Just like any niche, you need to find out where your potential customers are and put your site in front of them.

Do you know who your potential customers are? Who is looking for the product you sell? Why are they looking for the product you sell?

Once you get a better grasp of WHO your customers are and WHERE they congregate you will start to see sales. Traffic is one thing, but targeted traffic is completely different.

Don't underestimate the cost of advertising, the big players can offer various discounted loss leaders to secure new customers who won't show an actual profit until they make additional purchases. Eventually you will know the value of a new customer, which you can use in your advertising cost analysis. Properly targeted paid advertisement traffic might give a better conversion rate than some, you might aim to break even at first while bringing in extra traffic to speed conversion testing.
Setting up an affiliate program is another possibility, physical products commonly payout 5% to 20% of the sale. There is software out there that will allow you to manage your own affiliate program, big services like Commission Junction have I think a $10,000 admission price.

You might consider selling through Amazon, it provides an instant audience and some additional credibility and may well be worth the cost of their cut.

Speaking of credibility, your checkout page doesn't provide secure checkout (no https: address) I routinely advice people to not enter their personal info into such pages, consider using a shopping cart service like 1shoppingcart. Using the paypal icon that shows credit cards would probably help conversion a tad.
Another factor people check is the contact page, a physical store address or at least a live person contact phone number improves the trust factor. A U.S. post office service address would be worth the monthly charge, use suit or unit# for the box# in the address.
Finally your site design is a bit too generic for such high end products, to distinguish it from the 1000s of Chinese scam sites you probably need a custom logo and site design, as well as more positive indications of a trustworthy site, leather textures may be cliche but the first that comes to my mind.

Hello Wgeiger,

Are you selling retail or wholesale? If retail, why would your local boutiques make a competitive product available to their customers ? ... they want the customer's $$ so will try to substitute what they have for what the customer wants ... in the nicest possible way, of course. Anyway, I hope you have a "just in time" supplier and are not carrying inventory. Inventory will kill you, especially as fashion changes.

You need to increase your traffic or find a way to get highly targeted traffic.

Seek out some relevant "long tail" keywords in Google that have low competition and reasonable traffic. You need keywords that are detailed and specific ... these are the people closer to buying.

Write some article about leather products using these keywords.

Find some fashion forums with relevant content and post, post, post.

If you don't already, you need to understand the market for these high end items. When, why, and where do people buy? Is there a way you can inject knowledge about your online store into any parts of this chain?

What is you unique selling proposition. Unique design, lower price for high quality, or what? Slap my face with it when I hit your site. Why should I keep looking at your site?

Run some auctions on EBay. Don't lose money on them. There are high end items sold there. It will may you visible if you do it right.

See if a site called etsy.com will be of any use to you. It is mostly women running it, and some of them must be making good money there ...

Do some research on using FaceBook ads because you can target them quite
well, and they are much cheaper than Adwords. Also get a FaceBook fan page going for your store. Figure out a way to go viral on FaceBook.

Hope this helps you a bit, Gren.

Thanks all for the great responses. I am new to this, so this is just as much about learning as it is trying to turn a profit.

@Shanem686 –I think most of all I am being impatient, because I have the bad habit of tinkering with my ads while they are running. I have let a few ads just run, I will try to be more patient. I am trying to use long tail keywords for my products—my current keyword lists are 650 and 600 respectively and I am trying to extend them.

@bloggingpro –I am not sure if high SES females is a narrow enough niche, but that is what it is for my handbags. I also thought to focus on young professionals/students/recent graduates for my laptop bags. Plus, with laptop bags they will also be in demand. I have also talked to my manufacturer about tablet/Ipad/ebook covers and they said that they are considering making them.

@webapex –Good point on both counts. I’ll check out potentially creating an affiliate program. Amazon actually won’t accept fashion/accessories anymore, so I am going to put some of my “sale” products on ebay. My ad will have a link to direct folks to my site for all my other products. Also thanks for the suggestion on 1shoppingcart. My payment is not super fluid, and I am imagining some of the people who visit the site are turned off by that. Right now, (since this is my first bigger project and because of finances) I am going to keep my website, but I will see what a logo would run. The one I have is just something I threw together.

@patobryan –that is a great idea! I also wanted to include the rich heritage of leather in Tuscany and really appeal to people that way. Good point about developing relationships with customers. I think a lot of newbies (myself included) just thought when I “opened my doors” the customers and dollars would be rolling in. In this, I will also put up a facebook and twitter.

@clever7 –Yes, I don’t think I am using enough of web 3.0. A video on taking care of leather and the functionality of my products would be pretty cool. Is there any payment service that offers the option of installments?

@Gren –one boutique I was going to do this with was a jewelry boutique—that’s all they do. The other is a high end baby boutique. So both places, women with disposable income. And no, aside from some samples I use for testimonials and such, I am not carrying anything . I have about 650 and 600 keywords and am looking to expand my lists to over 1,000. I also have some articles in mind now, that would work wonderfully. Thanks for the other ideas—I was full of them until I kind of “hit the wall” and was unsure of what to do next.

Thanks all for the great responses. This seems like a great community and I can’t wait to contribute. You all gave me some great ideas, and I am going to write out a strategy of getting this stuff done (and probably bookmark this thread).

Thanks again!

Will

I would consider building more of an offline presence first. You had a good idea in going to high end boutiques and what not. If you can get them to become regular customers, there is your first source of income. Get them to give some great testimonials. Then you are ready to start making an online push, by finding the right traffic. When your offer is put in front of the right people, and they see the respected brands that buy leather from you, sales will explode!

Are you tracking your traffic sources?

I can see that you are using the estore theme (nice theme by the way). The site looks clean from what I've observed. The main thing I can suggest is to start collecting their emails.

The quickest ways to expand your business is to have repeat buyers. You don't want to churn and burn for new traffic every day.

If you know alot about the fashion industry, consider sending out a mini newsletter on the latest trends in the industry. Maybe even find photos (with permission of course) of celebrities wearing the same outfits you are selling. (People in general like to be a part of a trend).

You can also consider looking at what your competition is selling and the prices they are offering. If you aren't a bigger brand than your competition at the moment, you will have to prove yourself by offering more VALUE for the money.

Example: Sell the same shirt as your competition, same price, but offer a complimentary handbag for free. (Think long term. Once you get them to buy now and they like what you are offering, they will continue coming back to your site over and over again for more purchases)

When they buy, try and capture their email so that you can inform them of future sales like (easter, mothers day, 4th of july, etc) you can also use your knowledge in the fashion industry to give them the latest tips and suggestions so that they don't feel like they're being sold to over and over again.

I liked the fact that you do have sales items available on your site. The way you can improve on this is by putting a timer on the sale. At the moment it looks like the items are on sale forever. Thus, no sense of urgency to buy now.

Put a 72 hour timer or 24 hour timer on the items that are on sale. (creates urgency for your visitors).

Once you start collecting that email list and you begin getting regular sales. You will see that its more profitable to make $1,000+ from your repeat buyers (they will refer friends as well) than to make $200 from a one time sale and you lose the visitor forever.

Seo wise the permalink structure is not very friendly. ?p=321 .....consider something more appealing like /prato-laptop-bag

Your store name is appealing, and if you have an offline store it would help with buyer trust by having a picture of your store on your website with images of people buying from you.

Live video testimonials from customers and uploading using youtube will help as well.

The key here is making your customers feel like he/she isn't the ONLY one buying. People like to be a part of something. They like being a part of trends. If they can see with their own eyes that others are buying from you, they will be more open to purchase as well.

Hope that helped.

Hi,

First off -- it's a nice looking website, nice job! I admit, it looks very professional.

Second - 350 visitors is 'nothing'. I have some sites where I get 1,000 visitors before I might make a sale, and that is for a lower ticket item (i.e., $20-$50).

Your question is a really broad one, and it sounds like you are kind of flying by the seat of your pants. (It worked 10 years ago, much harder to pull of nowadays online). I'd recommend putting together a business plan, projected earnings, etc -- and a plan how you will be 'selling'. 'Online sales' are not the magic carpet ride they once used to be. If this is what you want to do (soley online), then you need to do SEO, advertising, JV's, partnerships, etc, etc. Test, track, do more of what produces results. Reinvest profits in outsourcing routine tasks so you can focus on 'growing' your business instead of living 'within' it, and go from there.

John

Hi,

I am about to start selling premium real meat dog treats online, so I will come up against many of the questions you have. I come from a marketing background so I understand that understanding your customer needs is very important - perhaps you can do online surveys to find out.

But one of the main things I think people trust is testimonials, and articles that show that you are somehow an expert or your products are genuine high quality.

For my products the prices are relatively low, relatively bulky, relatively high postage cost, so I cant put much margin on the products I buy at wholesale. So what am I really offering? Convenience, choice and chance to buy in bulk (hence cheaper).

What is it that selling someone leather that they can see and smell and touch in a store. They cant do these things with your product, so if the price is the same as what they could buy locally, what are you selling them? Convenience? Probably not as its a luxury item. You are selling them quality, money back guarantee, something that gives you the edge.

Once you have really figured that out and promoted it properly on your site, then all the funnels you have used to get people to your site are more likely to work.