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Indication of buyers
I have asked for this before but I thought I'd try again to get a few votes.
Can we have an indication of either how many buyers there are, or how many transactions are taking place. This I feel would be a great help to persuade sellers to come on board, and for existing sellers to gauge how much stock and effort should be given to their BO store, as well as help persuade buyers that this isn't just a small "here today - gone tomorrow" site.
Can we have an indication of either how many buyers there are, or how many transactions are taking place. This I feel would be a great help to persuade sellers to come on board, and for existing sellers to gauge how much stock and effort should be given to their BO store, as well as help persuade buyers that this isn't just a small "here today - gone tomorrow" site.
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My store has been closed for almost a week now, and lack of traffic is one of my main concerns it failed or why I gave it too much effort or investment, I would like to be proved otherwise.
Even though I am not reopening, I am still watching the site to gather any information on why my small store failed, and have put up a few statistics on my store page for the benefit of other smaller stores, or maybe they will just make it obvious to others why my store failed.
Just thought I would say this, and hope that the traffic/buyers/transaction figures being published can eliminate one of my concerns, and help others, like Minifigforlife said, to judge how much stock and effort BO is worth giving.
I have the feeling : i am new here !!
I have placed 2 orders, no problem all received. and i have send out feedback.
And i have send out my first order, whithout some feedback boost !!
Yeh and i like this site.
Steekstra
At the moment there are 4019 users. ljames28 is User 1 and "joined" a little over a year ago. However the next User is 80 who joined 4 months ago. I think this is a better indication of how long the site has been active. 4019 users in 4 months is pretty good, that's roughly 1000/mo. Of course it's not linear. Statistics will tell you that this will continue to rise on a curve and then flatten out a little. I don't think it's anywhere near plateauing for a few years. If I was feeling up to it I would write some Python to grab those numbers and create a spreadsheet or a graph. But that would require digging back into the manual and I'm just not into it at the moment.
On the bottom you can see that there are 567 stores. That's an easy one. But only the top 200 stores show on the Stores tab and only 185 have anything in them. 105 stores have 100 or more items. 71 stores have 1,000 or more items, 52 stores have 10,000 or more items and 12 stores have 100,000 or more. That's a pretty decent curve. Amongst all those stores there are almost 5 million items for sale. (Screen scraping for this info, BTW). 567 stores in 4 months is roughly 140 per month.
As far as orders go, I can only go off of what I know. The order numbers are issued randomly based off of a pick table so you can't just see that we're up to such and such an order as you can on BL. But in 3 months I've received 25 orders with increasing frequency. But since most of my buyers signed up and placed an order that day (maybe referred from ReBrickable) that the amount of orders thus far could be somewhere on the order of the number of users, maybe higher.
While these numbers may (or may not be) fascinating, it would be more fascinating to see this in some sort of chronological chart similar to our store metrics. This would just be the tip of the iceberg (or perhaps the foothills) in potential for the site. I would attribute a lot of the activity to the SEO that Lawrence has put into here.
FWIW,
Brian
Since the changes started on the 28th of September I have had 13 orders. Prior to that from 8/24 to 9/27 I had 39 orders. This to me is alarming. I know things will be radical for a while but between these numbers and the headaches of syncing manually one way, I am not liking what I am seeing at the moment.
PP
Could be better, but I think that's great for a new site.
Frank
Obviously it is difficult to compare one store to another due to the many variants such as their type of stock, lot quantities, location e.t.c e.t.c.
It would be nice to see a few more figures from different stores from all aspects of the scale from any stores who are willing to publish these, then if such information mentioned earlier is not in the site's interest to disclose, then maybe we can learn off of each other and see if there are/have been any trends.
Hopefully my dead store stats may help somebody out:
BoxerBricks Stats:
My goal was 6000 items in 2000 lots which I was running at around these figures until peaking at 6690 items in 2480 lots before I closed.
I had 13 orders since opening on 25 Aug which I was hoping would grow, included in these 13 sales were 4 sales around the 28 Sep and 1 sale on 1 Oct then no sales until I closed on 8 Oct.
As unhelpful as the current store page views counter can be in some situations, my store worked out at 461 hits to 1 sale.
Although I was advised recently that a small inventory like mine would not work, I was always playing my lot variation card and considered that just as important as growing stock levels.
My stock in order of popularity lowest to highest with approximate item sales-
Minifigures (1 item sold)
Polybags (4 items sold)
New and Used parts (350 items sold)
Hopefully somebody can take away some of this information and use it to their benefit.
With each store being fairly unique I don't know what number I could give that would best encourage others, my basic stats I am keeping track of on my home page.
That I will probably get to 20000 page hits today, 3 or 4 hundred a day so far this month with basically a 1% order to hit ratio, tells me there is no lack of real traffic here. On one side that can seem small, for me anything bigger and I would need slowdown strategies or employees.
With the size of store you had I would expect to see a lot of variability in sales and having a slow week and a half is not long enough to see a trend. I would suggest you put your items back on sale to see what kind of sales you get with the inventory you have. If you do not list any new items you will not invest any more time or money in your store.
2000 lots is not a huge variety and if it consisted of parts from recent sets there are probably several other stores that have most of the same items for sale in larger quantities in addition to many other items.
Now I am still a hobby store and am not looking (yet) to make a living...
since moving from England in April and opening both stores (re-open BL in July, BrickOwl in August) I have since closed on BL - before that I had twice as many orders on BrickOwl, at about the same $ value as the smaller # on BL, however it was the number of unique orders that made it obvious where to go, if I had to choose one.
However, the big decider for me was the new BL tos - attempting to stomp on the "little guy" - me no like!!
That said, even if that wasn't the case I would have moved here, I don't have that BL "loyalty" - which I think is the only thing keeping BL going now.
I was ready to quit anyway - just out of fed-up-ness with all the aggravation of "trying" to use a broken site, when one of the best (and big) sellers I knew "quit" I was ready to do a "job lot" and quit too...
Then along came BrickOwl - this place seems to be picking up steadily and nicely, it is stable and user friendly...
Frank
21 Orders waiting to be shipped (its a postal holiday in the US today)
Stats
Total Orders
313
Store Page Views
78,636
Active Carts
37
Total Orders
190
Store Page Views
45,091
Active Carts
28
68 order occurred after Sept 28th
Total orders: 6
Recent quotes: 2
Store page views: 5,562
Active carts: 2
Only about 15% of my orders have been domestic with the vast majority being no quote first international. I think if you took the time to set up some sort of international shipping methods you could harness more of the potential here.
I just wanted to add to the stats for though who wanted to know.
Chris
Store Page Views 2,757
Active Carts 3
A slow start, but I know this is due to my store size. I decided to have split inventories from the start as I suspected BL's behaviour to a competitor prior to it happening. So I have been transferring stock from there bit by bit to here. I did my first set part out on here yesterday and the process was painless so I will do more.
Andy
Total Orders 27
Store Page Views 7,319
Active Carts 3
Noted that Jason has about as many orders pending to be shipped as I have had orders period.
Oh, and we're up to user 4145 as of this second. That's 126 new accounts in 2 days (assuming they're all legit).
Brian
I just wanted to add to the stats for though who wanted to know.
Chris
Edit: I modify the quote at all and the blue box goes away it seems
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Good for context no doubt.
I was pondering this today and how not being able to set up regional divisions in Canada probably is slowing that side down for me in a similar way as I am working a quote or refund system here for parcels.
I figure if I do need to slow down things for a time overall, changing to a quote system internationally may be a gentle way of doing that.
Have fun with organizing,
Joe