I’ve been receiving requests lately to critique some of my readers’ online stores so I thought that it would be interesting to post some of my comments online for others to read. If there is interest, I may make this an ongoing section on my blog. Unfortunately I will not be able to feature all of your sites on the blog but I will definitely answer all of your emails.

The store that I’m reviewing today is www.finebuddhastatues.com, an online store that is run by someone who I’ll refer to in this article as E. The webmaster for this site initially asked me the following questions.

Dear Steve,

I’ve been following your blog for almost a year now and I really enjoy reading your blog posts. The resources that you have on this site are tremendously helpful – thank you very much for sharing them with us.

The reason that I’m writing to you is because I need feedback from an experienced and successful e-commerce store owner, such as yourself, on my online store — FineBuddhaStatues.com

I mainly rely on PPC advertising to drive traffic to my website and I get about 500 – 600 visitors a month on average. However, I only get 1 sale a month, which equates to 0.2% conversion rate.

I understand that you are a very busy person, but I would be extremely grateful if you can spare 10 minutes to look at my website and tell me what you think is missing.

Looking forward to hear from you.
E

Other Background Information

After E’s initial question, I immediately asked a few follow up questions and here’s the gist of our email conversation.

  • Besides Adwords, he’s also doing a little On-page SEO. However, off-page SEO has been largely ignored.
  • His main concern is increasing conversion as it is abysmally low (0.2%) and would like to increase this to 1% range or higher. He’s not sure whether his site design that is the problem, or whether his (Unique Selling Proposition) is not strong enough.
  • He’s averaging a 7% CTR with Adwords with only $0.10 average CPC, which makes it still profitable even after only getting 1 sale a month.
  • He’s attracting 250 visitors a month via PPC advertising, which makes up 50% of the total incoming traffic.
  • He currently removes keywords which result in high bounce rates (> 80%) or keywords with low number of clicks.

My Initial Observations

Since most of E’s traffic is coming from Adwords, the source of the problem can be several things. Either the Adwords Ads are not very well targeted, his Adwords keywords are too broad, or there’s a problem with his store design.

First off, E sells buddha statues so I first wanted to get an idea of what his Adwords ads looked like so I typed in a few of his keywords (Don’t worry E, I didn’t actually click on your ads). This is what came up.

Padmasambhava Statue
Extremely fine sculpture of
Guru Rinpoche. View Now!
www.FineBuddhaStatues.com

I immediately see a few problems here. For one thing, the call to action is to “view” the statue. It’s not obvious whether he is selling statues or he just has pretty pictures of statues for people to see. The other problem is that he uses “statue” as a singular in his ad. Does he only carry one statue?

I don’t know anything about buddha statues, but I might want to restructure the Adwords ad to something like the following.

Padmasambhava Statues
High End Gold, Silver And Copper Sculptures
Shop Now And Save On Popular Styles

Take the above example with a grain of salt since I don’t know anything about buddha statues. But from browsing his competitors’ stores, it appears as though E focuses on gold or silver statues which could be considered higher end. In any case, he needs to make his Adwords ads a bit more specific and emphasize that he sells buddha statues with a strong call to action. This will weed out some of the potential non-customers immediately.

My other advice is read my article on how to create a Google Analytics Filter For Your Adwords Ads. You also might want to check out Xurxo’s article on Adwords Reports That Can Increase Your Conversions. By default, Analytics does not display the exact search terms your customers are using to click on your Adwords Ads. E needs to go through all of his search terms and use negative keywords to weed out products he doesn’t actually carry. Just because a particular keyword has a high bounce rate or low conversion rate doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad keyword. In fact, he could be losing out on many potential customers by eliminating keywords based on bounce rates alone.

Conversion Rate

Even though E has some Adwords issues, I believe most of his conversion rate problems have to do with his store. To illustrate, let’s take a look at one of his prime competitors, www.buddhagroove.com. While Buddha Groove isn’t the best store that I’ve ever seen, they are doing several things right.

When I first enter buddhagroove.com, the look and feel of the store is very clean. Across the top and bottom of the page, they offer a lot of extra information on Buddha, the culture and the teachings. In addition, they also run a pretty decent blog about Buddhism.

All of this extra information leads me to believe that the owners of buddhagroove.com are very passionate about their products and their store. As a result if I were in the market for a Buddha Statue, I’d be inclined to make a purchase from them.

The main problem I see with E’s store is that the website is just a listing of buddha statues for sale. Upon entering the page, I don’t really see a compelling reason to buy a statue from finebuddhastatues.com over their competitors. What benefits does E’s store have to offer? What is his value proposition?

Action Items

Based on this feedback, I propose the following action items

  • E offers an ebook on his site that is free with purchase. Instead of offering the ebook as an incentive, I would suggest either giving it away for free or taking the content and making it freely available on the site. Of these two options, I would recommend putting the information on the site for free. For one thing, the verbiage will get indexed in Google which should boost page relevance. Second of all, it will help educate the customer and might influence their purchasing decision.
  • Since E has several competitors, I would pick 2 or 3 differentiating factors and plaster them right on the center of the front page by the large buddha pictures. What sets E’s products from his competitors? Is it quality? Price? As soon as the customer walks in the door, they need to know why his store is special. From my limited research, he seems to specialize in metal statues. He needs to pick a unique aspect to emphasize.
  • E should also focus on writing more content. The site needs more personality, more passion. The content can be in the form of video or text but preferably it should demonstrate some amount of expertise on his products. He needs to show customers that he knows what he’s talking about and that he carries quality products. As Seth Godin would say “He needs to tell a story”.


The good news is that his competitors aren’t incredible. With some hard work, I believe that he can overtake his competition.

Readers: If you have any advice for E, feel free to post your comments below.

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