Copper-tone Crap

Today (and in fact for most of this week) my work is going to filed under “Turd Polishing”. In other words, no matter how shiny and nice something may look, underneath it’s still just shit.

One of the main sites- and in fact the main revenue earner for the company at the moment – has a conversion rate (i.e. users who actually, like, buy stuff) of 0.05%. Yes, for every 10,000 people who visit the site, 5 people buy something. Or, if you like it another way – 99.95% of people who visit the site bugger off without buying anything.

And to be honest, I can’t blame ’em. The site is utter shit. It’s user-hostile, and breaks just about every rule of e-commerce. And last month the takings on it dropped by about half. No real reason for it, just people weren’t buying the stuff the site attempts to sell. But the powers-that-be don’t (yet) want to admit failure, raze it to the ground, and start again from scratch with something that actually works, and fulfils most of the user’s requirements. Oh no, that’d be too much like common sense. Instead, they want to do some bug-fixes and add in a competition that’ll (in theory) drive more users to the site.

Of course, more users on the site – particularly ones who aren’t even interested in what the site’s got to sell – means that that conversion figure is going to drop even lower – but somehow that little fact seems to have been missed by our board of genii.

So anyway, yes, I’m doing this competition stuff in a truly titanic piece of turd-polishing. *sigh*