If you’re maintaining a separate website and ecommerce store, you’re losing money.
Views x Conversion = Money
We’ve worked with thousands of artists, creators, media companies, and brands here at Single. One trend we see consistently (that breaks our hearts) is people maintaining a separate website and ecommerce store.
And when that happens – creators make less money. Way less money.
Here’s why:
It’s a known fact among digital folks that there are only two good ways to increase revenue through a website:
1. Increase conversion rate (the amount of people that come to your site and actually purchase)
2. Increase traffic (the amount of people that come to your site and could purchase)
Option 1: Increase conversion rate
Unfortunately, here’s some bad news…Option 1 (increasing conversion rate) is incredibly challenging. Digital marketers get paid a ton of money working to reduce site load times, write more compelling copy, A/B test images etc.
Worse news – even when they perfectly execute, those tactics only drive a marginal improvement on conversion rate.
Option 2: Increase traffic
Good news – Option 2 is a much easier problem to solve. Put simply, fans don’t like creators because of their merch… they like them because of the content they create.
So, if you can merge the content with the commerce, you will inherently increase sales.
Let’s talk specifics:
We recently did some analysis for one of our clients.
They're a popular singer songwriter that has:
- A primary website where they post videos, tour dates, blogs, etc.
- A separate ecommerce website where they sell merchandise – t-shirts, albums, posters etc.
Here’s their site traffic over a recent 30-day period:
You’re reading that correctly… their primary website gets nearly 2,500% more traffic than their ecommerce website.
If they consolidated those two sites (they're in the process of doing so, by the way), they would be driving an additional 115,000 people to the place where those people can actually give them money.
Let’s do some math on how that would play out:
- If 1% of those people spend $10 each – they make an additional $11,500
- If 5% of those people spend $10 each – they make an additional $57,500
- If 10% of those people spend $10 each – they make an additional $115,000
- If 20% of those people spend $10 each – they make an additional $230,000
You get the picture… we’re talking about a lot of money being left on the table.
Ok, but are those 1, 5, 10, 20% of people actually going to buy something?
There is certainly an argument to be made that conversion rates are high on ecommerce sites because people come there with the intent to buy something.
What that doesn’t account for though are the people that would buy something if they just saw it in front of them. While they may never click the store link on your website navigation, they will click the 'videos' link. And when they do, they should see a collection of t-shirts, posters, or albums directly below those videos.
It’s the same reason grocery stores put impulse purchase items like magazines and candy near the cash register… they know if people see those items, they’re far more likely to purchase them.
Ok – I'm sold, but what do I do about it?
There’s a reason sites and stores were separate for so long. Ecommerce sites were terrible. They had super basic functionality for selling products and nothing else. Those days are gone.
Shopify, the leading global ecommerce platform, has built the functionality for you to have a fully customized and branded website that also solves your ecommerce needs.
And with Single plugged into Shopify, you can:
- Host videos with products listed directly below them
- Run livestreams with a full merch table on the same page
- Bundle digital content (livestream tickets, video rentals, digital albums) with your products
- And even launch a full-on membership program where participants buy in then come back to your ecommerce site to access all the exclusive perks of the program
Ready to increase your site traffic (cough…sales… cough)?
Call us! Whether it’s guiding your team on how to make “the great consolidation” or us just doing it for you – we can help. Get in touch and let’s talk.
