Not One Single Sale

Building websites is much harder than people think it is. Since I’ve been Internet Consulting for almost 10yrs now, I get questions about where to start in this industry. Recently, an artist who does custom oil paintings has asked why they’ve invested hundreds of hours into their eCommerce website, and not made a single sale.

I am a small business operation. I tested the website using Google and Yahoo pay-per-click. I generated quite a bit of traffic, but not one single order. I also published in a magazine with 26,000 sent to homes with a big discount coupon in the add (full page). It also did not produce one single sale.

My prices with the discount I offered was the lowest in the market! I need an experience designer who can know the sales creation aspect of the design. The nuts and bolts of my website are OK. The problem is that I am not getting any business! This is where experience is required.

I have seen other websites with similar type of products and their websites are much nicer. In my very limited knowledge of the matter, I think I need to be able to offer a sort of video tour (flash) of the main art pieces so people can appreciate the quality of the work that we do. Let me know what you think and what kind of concrete suggestions you can make.

First, I will say a nice looking site, will not guarantee you sales. That is where many people stop when having a business. They build a nice site, and expect sales to roll in. But “nice” is no good unless people know about what you do. I’ve made that mistake myself.

It is cheaper in the long run to market anything on website. But promoting anything is the boring and hard work that most people don’t do. At least with a website, you can do a little promotion each day and build up over years of effort. With any other medium, you have to shell out a lot of money up front.

The lesson you should take away from that experience, is to decide if the next client is worth working for. - Jeff Knooren

In my opinion, what you need to change is your method of promotion, and lead generation. For your sales, face-to-face with 10 people who want to buy your product, is better than 26,000 who threw your coupon in the trash. I can’t prove that of course, but you couldn’t do any worse. You mentioned showing people the process of your artwork. Certainly that could be done on a website. For examples, simply Google “How to draw…” and there is no shortage of ways to present a process.

I don’t know if you have special physical needs. However, in doing some research, I spoke to a few people who draw caricatures. They said they make their money at events, street fairs, conventions, etc… Meaning, they rent a booth or something, and people can watch them work. They sit down to have silly picture drawn.

This seems to be what a lot of craft people do, like ice sculptors, wood carvers, etc. The artists I spoke to hand out nice brochures or business cards at these appearances. They use their websites and blogs as a showcase. Much like how a photographer would use a website for a gallery of photographs.

What might work for you is to do something similar to a caricature artist. Except, have those nice oil portraits behind you as you draw these quick sketches. That will give you a chance to talk face-to-face about your business, to people who are already interested in having likenesses of them made. People could watch the process of painting a portrait too. Additionally, you can use the blog, to promote the event you will be at. Have someone take pictures of you working, and that can be posted to the blog.

They will give you a lot of freedom in terms of design, and achieving the final result, as long as you don’t mire them down in the details of how you go about it. You also tend to get additional side projects that this person doesn’t want to deal with. - Jeff Knooren

The Department of Commerce in your town will give you a list of every street faire, home show event, along with contact info, if you ask them for it. I used to book shows, and do live demonstrations, so if you go that route, I have more advice. Anyway, the idea is to cover the cost of renting the space by drawing caricatures, and the real money comes from commissioned portraits, which you do later. Anyone who sits down at your booth is a pre- qualified lead.

• You mentioned “generated quite a bit of traffic”. But just out of curiosity, is that 100, 1000, 2,000,000 visitors a month? And how much did you spend on generating that traffic?
• Photos - They need to be big. You’re selling point is the quality and detail of your work.
• Video - You suggested doing some panning and zooming thing. My warning to you is this could be very expensive to have a developer make it in Flash. I would recommend using Photobucket Slideshow instead. The benefit is you can learn to do it yourself, in just a few minutes, even with no experience in building websites. That is important as you create more portraits, you wouldn’t want to be forced into paying someone like me to update presentations for you. I would also recommend NOT using music. However, if you really want music, Photobucket has something called a “remix” which allows music to be incorporated. Again, something you can do yourself with minimal training.

Recommendations you could probably do yourself:

• Spell-check - Nothing says unprofessional like spelling errors.
• Slideshow - Photobucket Slideshow
• Gallery page, that’s pretty easy, and a good idea.
• What is the name of your business? “Rubens Art” or “Artistic Oil Painting and Frames” or “Artistic Oil Portraits and Frames”? You seem to have three business names.
• You need a blog. A way to talk about yourself, what you do, and how you do it.

Recommendations someone with experience should do:

• Set up, and optimize the blog for you. Then give you the crash course in how to use it. They’re not difficult to figure out on your own. But spending an hour with someone who can show you the tricks and shortcuts, will save you months of discovery.
• Maybe a better shopping cart?
• Changing hosts might be in order. I don’t know enough about your site at this point to say for sure though.

Summary

I won’t pretend to know anything about portrait painting, or your business. So I might have just given you the worst advice possible. Renting booth spaces, street carnivals, all that might be more trouble than it’s worth. But obviously Google ads aren’t working. But either way this business sounds like it’s going to take years of persistence, unless you’ve got a bankroll stashed away to dip into.