Most people new to eCommerce think that traffic is everything. They spend most of their time pursuing various sources of traffic but they ignore the conversion on the store. They put together a store of amateur looks, don't care about the best practices and conventions or what buyers expect and respond to - because they don't now these things, and they firmly believe that if you can get people to store then they will buy. Unfortunately people also leave stores for various reasons. Sales = traffic x conversion, and improving conversion is usually a lower hanging fruit. It is much easier to double or triple conversion of a poorly designed store than it is to achieve same numbers on traffic. However result is the same.
Another downside of neglecting conversion with store that is poorly designed is that many store visitors will leave the store simply because it doesn't look right or trustworthy. These first time visitors will most likely never come back. Thus investing in traffic but not taking care of the store is throwing your money away. Not only you don't get all the sales that you could but you also loose many people for good. Take care of your store before you invest thousands of dollars in traffic. You will see a much better return on your investment.
In this blog I wrote many posts about conversion alone, but I felt that I also need to emphasize it in relation to traffic for those folks who skip those posts and go straight to the marketing section looking for yet another traffic source to pursue.
