How to Kill Sales During the Top Week of the Season

by Scott Jangro on 15 October 2007

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I can’t believe what I’m seeing. I was prompted to check out a merchant’s site by a precipitous drop in conversion rates today. I can’t be certain as we send most traffic to product pages, but this might explain at least some of the problem.

Here’s the homepage…

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They put a customer service manifesto inside a Javascript alert box. It’s so big in Firefox that it goes off the bottom of my very large screen. I can’t even see the ok button to clear it. (sure, I can hit enter, but I had to think about that one.)

Usability aside, can you think of a scarier message to display?
And this is the top selling week of the entire year for Halloween costumes.

I don’t like to make an example of a small merchant like this, but it well illustrates the point that it is a good idea for affiliates to visit your merchants sites once in a while to see what your customers are seeing.

Or maybe this merchant has thrown in the towel for the season, in which case, an email to affiliates would be a good thing.

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  • This is a first for me. I've never seen anything so vile!
  • Wow, that is pretty scary- I agree with your advice on affiliates checking up on vendors/merchants sites to make sure that nothing has gone wrong. In fact, I probably ought to check a few of the sites that I may still be promoting in various links; it's been a while since I have run through them all.
  • Some people should never get their hands on anything that has to do with a website especially the code.
  • Good example. I am also reluctant to pick on small sites. However when a huge company does similarly lame stuff I am not hesitant. This is two years old but still - Gap closed their entire site for days.
  • Well, hope it doesn't annoy people with that. Sometimes it's really interesting to know what people would do just to get attention.
  • It really amazes me that website owners do not check the results of tweaks and additions to websites. Especially leading up to the most important times of the year! I wonder what they did for xmas!! This would have had me leaving instantly!
  • i dont understand how people could think that this is a good idea.. plsss.. give me your reasoning....
  • I wonder how long they left their site in that condition. Checking your site in different browsers is very important. I check my pages with browsershots.org to see how they look on different platforms.
  • Haha, nice. I heard a better one the other day though. Some decided the 2nd week in December was the right time to move his domain registrar for his only eCommerce site, one that is very much in the Xmas boom market.

    Shouldn't be a problem right? Indeed it wasn't. Everything went smoothly.... except one thing: Google decided to ditch him from the index. For whatever reason, I don't know, but his 1000+ pages got de-indexed faster than you can say "Transfer Out" and obviously just about all his organic traffic dried up.

    This is this guys only income source and he was on target for his best ever month this month. Not any more obviously. I have no idea what possessed him to make a change like that 2 weeks before Xmas, it was utter madness.
  • I just love the title, which at first glance looks like -
    PLEASE BEWARE
    I know people spend lots of time trying to push people away from their site but this must be the most effective.
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