Case studyReverse case study, the road from 300,000 to 100,000 monthly sales – consumer electronics/appliance industry

This time we are not bragging or presenting a success story, but showing what can happen when the industry grows very rapidly and the competition grows, while operating and spending the budget sub-optimally. About what kind of losses these are and how they can negatively affect business. At the outset, it should be noted how we have such information since we did not start the cooperation – we are in constant contact with the client, we follow his development with our analytical tools. We also had several meetings during two years of eCommerce development discussions.

Chronology, or when there were 300,000 monthly sales

The story of this would-be collaboration begins in May 2020.

The peak of pandemic, the peak of eCommerce and great sales results, despite relatively low organic traffic for industry standards and the size of the online store (6000-8000 rotating products). Entries from organic traffic were around 3,000 per month.

The store drew traffic primarily from Google Ads and comparison sites such as ceneo.pl.

The average monthly turnover was around PLN 300,000.

Initial assumptions of cooperation

The talks lasted several weeks, during which we presented a comprehensive plan of annual changes to be implemented, taking into account quarterly and monthly schedules. It included, among other things, suggestions for UX changes in the store and the selection of categories that we should prioritize for optimization, saturate with keywords and sub-linking.

As part of the cooperation, we also wanted to secure an additional success fee in the form of a few percent on exceeding a certain turnover threshold – as we customarily do in the case of cooperation within the scope of online store sales development.

After the initial acceptance of the terms of cooperation, the contractor decided to cooperate with another company in the area of the overall redevelopment of the online store to increase conversions and to hire people for the internal marketing department.

Implementation of the online store – status after 9 months

In our opinion, the transfer of the store to a new engine and a significant improvement in UX were the right solutions, except that this work could be carried out in two ways – as we suggested. On the one hand, external linking to the homepage and expanding the content into categories, and on the other hand, building a new store. However, the contractor decided otherwise, and after about 9 months implemented the new online store, suggesting some of our UX recommendations. And it seemed that everything was ok. Turnover was stable, although we were on a very big upward wave for eCommerce. The amount of traffic wasn’t increasing, but remained at a similar level. After the store migration, we could assume a traffic increase of 500-600%, which we thought was realistic. Here, however, problems began, as the transfer of products from the old store was very slow, causing the store to lose URLs and thus SEO power. Added to this was the lack of 301 redirects to the new URLs and the store began to slowly lose traffic and thus sales.

Added to this was the lack of support from strong external links from sponsored articles or thematic portals. The store’s turnover soon after the migration of the store dropped to about 200,000 PLN per month.

Follow-up – status after 24 months

The next several months did not bring a breakthrough. Organic traffic within the store has dropped to a few hundred hits per month, instead of being at the level of several thousand. Turnover in the store dropped from 300,000 to 120,000. We have been in talks over cooperation for several weeks. What’s noteworthy is that the overall eCommerce market is growing 22% year-on-year. The industry has been experiencing a gigantic boom recently and is growing at a very fast pace. Taking this into account, the process of rebuilding the position of the online store will require a significant budget, exceeding the assumptions of a few months ago. The reason for this is the dynamic growth of competition and the struggle for positions, as well as a certain inertia that we observe when it comes to Google – that is, several months during which there are significant changes in positions.