[Off Topic] Weird Sales Jump And Crash In June And July

[Siamese-Dream.Com]

Sorry for the off topic post but...

Has anybody else had two roller coaster months of sales in June and July???

June 2014 was our best month in terms of sales in about the last two years.

July 2014 was the absolute WORST MONTH EVER.

The bizarre thing about it is we saw a 6% INCREASE IN VISITORS in July when compared to June.

Our products are not necessarily seasonal. There is no reason we would get a lot of sales in one month and not another.

Anyone have any ideas?

One person mentioned that possibly - since traffic has been pretty high by our standards - that the servers aren't handling the load.

I find that hard to believe because I would imagine that the Miva Merchant servers are fully capable of handling over a thousand visitors a day.

Anyone?

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: [Off Topic] Weird Sales Jump And Crash In June And July

Its always hard to find specific reasons for sales patterns, especially online. There are just too many variables and not enough tied data. For example, in your case, July is typically a slow month for non-seasonal shopping. However, the increase in traffic could be from errant redirection (meaning, you are getting a lot of traffic, but its from folks looking for something entirely different). One thing to check that is look at Average Time on Site. If that's dropping as traffic increases, then its likely you are getting hits from folks looking for something else.

As far as sever response, i'd find that hard to be the issue. Even a Code Heavy site should not see a slow down 1K per HOUR. However, do use something like http://www.webpagetest.org/ to check you site's overall speed.

[Siamese-Dream.Com]

Re: [Off Topic] Weird Sales Jump And Crash In June And July

Thanks for the input, Bruce:

And thanks for the suggestion of checking user behavior.

Unfortunately, that just deepens the mystery for me.

My ecommerce pages saw VERY SLIGHT IMPROVEMENTS in July terms of average session duration and pages per session. Bounce rate was improved (meaning it lowered) by 1% as well.

And revenue was down sharply from ALL channels:

google / organic -72% Revenue
(direct) (none) -87% Revenue
yahoo / organic -95% Revenue
bing / organic -64% Revenue

But the traffic for all those channels was nearly the same (within +/-3%)

~~~~~

Maybe somehow I messed up my e-commerce data for google analytics... I haven't double checked against my Miva Sales reports...

[nottheusual1]

Re: [Off Topic] Weird Sales Jump And Crash In June And July

Hey, Mark -- we saw something similar. Record June and a July that was better than last year, but not at the clip this year's increase in sales, month-over-month, would indicate. June isn't even a "season" month for us and this past one was one of our top-10 best months ever.

July was a nervous month. Traffic was there (as July goes) but the conversion rate (Google) dropped almost a half percent from June, when it's normally flat across the summer months. We saw the opposite with MSN/Yahoo, but have been completely reworking all of our campaigns, so we may have just been lucky and trimmed/tweaked in the right spots. The Email specials we did performed as expected, which didn't add any clarity to anything.

Our biggest revenue increase is in the direct/none/bookmarked visitors group.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: [Off Topic] Weird Sales Jump And Crash In June And July

One other thing, that wont bring much in the way of comfort, but, abnormalities in online ecommerce trends tend to be just that...abnormalities and you can't really do much about them or read much into them. That's why its so important that when you try something (like a new email campaign for example), you make sure you can track results specifically and have baseline data as well.