Sellery January Signup Conversion Rate Review

January was a significant month. We managed to attract the highest number of new Sellery signups to date. This was, at least in part, thanks to the SellerCentral ad campaign (about 1/3 of the new signups), but it would have been a great month even without those.

The good news stops here, unfortunately. It appears that we were unable to convert most of these new signups to paying customers. Take a look:

In fact, this has been the lowest conversion rate (%) since 2012 — > 21.28%! That’s half of our average conversion rate for 2014, which was 41%.

I was tempted to believe that this is simply due to the extra volume. More signups means fewer resources dedicated to each dealer which equals a lower conversion rate…but are things really that simple?

Last year in May we had a similar number of signups, but the conversion rate didn’t take a hit. In fact, it increased compared to the previous month:

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to tell why all of these potential opportunities did not convert. Here are the sugar reasons:

Even after reviewing each of these signups, with help from Iulia, I still couldn’t get a conclusive answer to the question: why did we really lose all of these people?

We thought perhaps we attracted a higher % of small dealers than usual (dealers for whom Sellery doesn’t make sense). However that’s not really the case. We attracted roughly the same mix of people that we always do:

…and the same goes for inventory size, though I won’t include that chart here for the sake of brevity.

So, to sum things up (tl;dr):

• We lost the majority of dealers who signed up in January.
• It’s hard to tell why because the sugar reasons aren’t helpful. We should review them.
• We also need to start “qualifying” leads (more on this in a later article), because their “estimated invoice size” is not a sufficient attribute for spotting the good ones.