Hi
I was curious to here peoples thoughts on what you think a good sales conversion rate should be for a new site in a competive keyword field. The site i'm designing is going to be large 3000+ products 150 categorys all related.

For the main keywords you are looking at around 750 000+ search's a month. There is a lot of competion but really only 3 that i'm going to worry about as the rest aren't well optimized and are mommas and pappas stores that have a website as they think it will help etc... and I have about a 50% chance (according to seochats link somthing or other lol) of ranking for my main keyword.

I will be offering quite a bit more in terms of information severcies related to my products than any of my other competiters. AS in RSS feeds, forum, 4 news letters, 3 blogs and a customer rating system. Also my title pages are well optimzied along with on page factors.

I already have 500 links that I no I can get when i'm ready to start my link building.

Downside:

number of competing sites, even though most are not optimized they still get some traffic.

The top 3 have a lot return bussiness which I may not be able to break into.

I would say that they is around 300 000+ search terms that are competable against the others.

PPC is quiet high

So I now it's all down to factors outside my control and possible impossible to guess but it'll be intressting to here peoples thoughts on what else I can do I have built my site with the user in mind however not finished at the mo.

Thanks in advance.

Also i forgot to mention I will be offering my website in 4 other languages something of which my competitors do not do.

I also will be stocking 5 specialized categories that none of my competitors offer or if they do nowhere near the degree i will be. Which i do expect a lot of traffic from as these are hard to find in the uk and 2 ranges are impossible to find on the net from within the uk from my resaerch.

Any thoughts a ball park estimate would do. Buy more importantly anything else I can do to increase conversions. My copy writting is done by self and is unique to my site (not the standard manufactuer blur that all the other sites have.)

All products have unquie title, description and keyword tags. H1 tags top of page, mod rewrite. No duplicate content as duplicate content is/will be excluded via robot.txt.
Keywords spread thoughout the site and each page is concentrated on a particular keyword phrase. Hx tags used sparingly other on page factors aswell. No black hat. site structure small 3 dir deep. html optimized - little whitespace css based, css all in legal limits. As i say i'm more intressted in what else i can do to acheive higher conversions, ROI or useability fators etc.. etc.. that i have not yet already thought of.

Thanks in advance