Monday, July 13, 2009

the pandacub experiment - results and next steps

So, I finally updated the charts with the tracking for the 2 days where I relisted hourly (well, hourly during my waking hours).

Here are some results:
- I relisted or renewed 30 times between 9 am on Wednesday morning and 11 pm Thursday night
- Total item views increased from 11,488 to 11,014 during the experiment period (526 new views)
- Total shop hears increased from 675 to 690 during the experiment period (15 new shop hearts)
- I sold one item (which sold within an hour of being renewed)

Because I had also posted to the forums when I started the experiment, there were some views/hearts that came from fellow sellers who were interested in watching the experiment, which may have skewed the numbers slightly.

In order to really get a good picture of how useful renewing/relisting so often is and to be able to do a good comparison, I'm going to conduct 2 other trials. Again, I will take a period of two days (and will use the same weekdays, Wednesday and Thursday) but:
1. For the second trial I will again post every hour during the 48 hour period (again, only the hours where I'm awake) but will not be announced until after the trial has run so I shouldn't get any extra traffic from forum/twitter/blog interest
2. For the third trial I will not renew/relist anything during the 48 hour period

After the next 2 trials, I will then do a full analysis of my results and, because of the different situations, we should get a good picture of how successful renewing/relisting so often is for me shop.

Again, everyone gets different results with different marketing methods, so please don't think that this is the only method or that this will be the same for everyone. :)

What did you think of my results? Were you surprised? Not surprised? I did get a lot of great comments from other sellers regarding their own experiences with relisting/renewing and I think most of us agree that whenever you take any action with your shop, it always brings in some new browsers and potential buyers.

7 comments:

Gretchen said...

I am a little suprised at your sales numbers! I would have thought that renewing so much would get you more sales! I wonder why you didnt sell more?

Thank you for posting this and I look forward to seeing your results from the other trials!
-Gretchen

Celtic Cat said...

Thanks for sharing the stats with us!

Amy V. said...

Thanks for sharing! Will be very interested to see how things turn out. I may try this sometime too.

Giftbearer said...

This is very interesting but I'm not surprised at the low sales because I did three showcases on the same day and only got 1 customer from that. Just as you did I got more views and more hearts, but it didn't seem to translate into more sales overall.

You should try listing/relisting on different days of the week for one experiment, and do another one in which you only list at a certain time of day on each day, or try listing one versus multiple listings and see if that gets different results.

My hunch is that the time of day would make more of a difference and probably also listing multiple items at once using several tabs.

mistyridge said...

This is very interesting info. Thank you so much for sharing it with us. I am really impressed that views/hearts increased that much. I am excited about seeing the results of the next two experiments for comparison. Congrats on the sale BTW and in my opinion any traffic is good traffic so best of luck

Suziesaurus said...

i need some sort of chart data. LOL

novella said...

you have a new blog follower out of it (me!) thanks for sharing your efforts!