I've recently (Dec 20, 2004) launched my new ecommerce site Hookah Hub (www.hookahhub.com) with moderate success.

Within this first month I'm averaging 1-2 sales/day, but I'm now up to 200 unique visitors/day. This is only a .5-1% conversion rate; which I'm very unhappy with.

Please review my site for suggestions as to how I may improve my conversion rates; and items I may be missing or can improve upon. Thank you for any help/advice you can provide.

After flying through the site blindly, as some surfers do, it took me about 7 clicks before I could get to entering my name for the purchase. From enterance to cash out... seems like alot of clicks to me for such a specialty item...


Just my 2 cents

Cheers

WC

You site is pretty darn nice; I am impressed. I dont think it's the site.

Conversion rates alone don't say much. Some products just convert at lower rates.

Some reason why you might have a low conversion rate:

1- Not enough data to warrant a conversion rate stat.

2- Might be employing marketing from networks with fraud clicks

3- Your prices might be too high (this is a big one). If your margin is higher than 25 percent, reevaluate your pricing (I noticed you have some competition: smoking-hookah.com. This site probably gets about 2500 visitors a day.)

4- Your visitor stats might be inaccurate.

5- Some portals just give less targeted traffic (there visitors are less prone to purchasing.)

200 visitors is not much. Keep conducting marketing tests, get more reliabledata. trial and error. Your site should dominate the competition; it's very nice. One more thing, you might want to add a more vibrant, happy color scheme to your site (get people in the mood to buy!) Your competition I named above has a happier color scheme.

Good Luck,
Web Guy

Okay you should start testing PPC advertising which is a good way to get fast traffic to the site.
You should also start building inbound links... one way to add links would be to add some articles about the industry etc. and get people to link to those.
Also submit the site to as many directories as you can find that have anything close to your areas.... DMOZ is important (though not as much as it once was)...
There is a list of places to submit to in one of the threads in the directories forum.

Hey nice site! Don't be discouraged about the 1-2 orders per day. It'll take some time. I noticed you're not in the top 10 for google yet. Maybe you can work on that and you'll get more traffic. The conversion of .5 % is pretty good, but you have to focus on getting 2000 hits a day. There's another problem, you have a lot of competition I noticed. There's a new site I noticed on MSN. There's a lot of [/url]Hookah sites. This nice designed one for example is a (http://www.customhookahs.com)Hookah and Shiska site that looks all nice, but prices are kind of expensive. There's definitely more and more competition, but I definitely know more and more people who own their own Hookah and these people keep spending money on Tobacco, Charcoal, Hoses and even new [url="http://www.customhookahs.com"]Hookahs.

A few suggestions might be to move the news from the top center of the page down below the products. Have the products first and fore-front with a clear description of what they are. It took me quite a while and few clicks to really even understand what you're offer was. The site looks great though...just give a little more info on the products and simplify the purchase process and you're about as good as you're going to get on that end.