The standard conversion rate is around half a percent, so you may not be doing as bad as you feel you are. I would focus on getting more traffic, and better rankings. Of course - the site suggestions here are great, and easy enough to implement. But after that, put your focus on the marketing.
I'm curious what the marketing company is doing for you exactly, and what the investment is in that?
For the marketing, to be quite honest, I am not very satisfied with it at all. The story goes a bit like this..
I was selling on ebay and then decided that I would start a website, last september so I did, then this marketing company called me and the offer sounded great, and being new to the world on ecommerce it was all great sounding. So what they gauranteed was that they would get me ranked on the first page of google and others for 10 of my top keywords for traffic in 8 months or I would get my money back.. Also they said they would work on backlinks and other methods to bring targeted traffic for my market. So in March, there were no results for my site, and I could not find my site anywhere for any keywords, etc. etc.
To make a long story short, they charged me an obscene amount of money, of which I am still paying for, as well as a monthly fee. So my options were to let them keep marketing the site, or transfer to another hosting company in which we would start over for other reasons about why my site would not rank.
So I transferred my whole site from highpowersites to hostgator.
So basically, my kids chair world site I market myself and I am already seeing the same amount if not more traffic then the site I paid a marketing company for....
So lesson learned there, so at this point I am kind of stuck working on both sites to get them successful because of the investment. Yes I would prefer to focus on one, but that is not how it is right now.
Unfortunately, no I did not get my money back , the only thing that they would do at the point when I confronted about it, was 6 months, was transfer my site to the other hosting company as I wrote in the post. They said that the reason that my site was not ranking was because of the way the highpowersites software is set up, it is not search engine friendly.
After doing this the contract renewed for another 8 months as if it was a new site. I have not paid anything else to them.....
I was kind of in a hard place , had to make a hard decision.. I do know now though that I will never pay a marketing company again for the things that I can do just as well for free.
Is the guarantee in writing? If they don't return your money maybe the Consumer Protection Division of your State's Attorney general's office can go to bat for you.
The new hosting company is not related to or tied in with them in any way, right? Look over your contract and make sure you're stuck in that renewal. You might get a consultation with a local lawyer (usually free) to see if there is anything there worth working with.
What was it about the original host that wasn't "search engine friendly"? Did they actually change your shopping cart, your URL structure, or anything at all in the host move?
No they are not tied to them in any way at all. Actually , I never got a second contract written, so actually we are still on the orginal contract. I probably could do something about it..
I guess it was that highpowersites is really not set up for ecommerce and it has been from there experience working with them that the sites never ranked well. It really does not make much sense to me.
However I do prefer the platform that I have now rather than the one I had.
Did they choose or recommend that host/platform to you originally?
I would not let this one go... Make a call and let a lawyer look over it. You need to take them up on the guarantee and let go of that company altogether so you can move forward on a more positive note.
Even if you paid a lawyer a percentage of the refund, you'd still have money back in your pocket to use on outsourcing or whatever you need to move forward from here.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks