I own a small chain of retail stores that is trying to figure out how
to proceed with expanding our services online.  The biggest question
that I have is how to have any idea of how much business to expect. 
Is there a typical percentage of sales that retailers use as a guide? 
Without knowing the sales volume, I don't know how to proceed with
assumptions for all other aspects.  We currently have an informational
site only, and I do have the monthly,weekly, etc. hits that we get on
this site, but I don't know how to estimate how many of these can be
counted on to turn into actual purchasers.

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Request for Question Clarification by siliconsamurai-ga on 02 Jan 2006 16:05 PST

Depending on what you want to sell I can probably give you some useful
information, please clarify by stating what sort of products you have
and what country you are based in.

I won't be able to show what your sales will be but I can probably
provide solid estimates of the amount of online sales of similar
products probably even with some idea of pricing.

I won't waste your money if I can't, but I need to know what you are selling.

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Clarification of Question by ewek1-ga on 04 Jan 2006 06:28 PST

We sell toys and educational goods.  I would like to also make it
clear that I am interessted in trying to determine an estimate of the
kind of traffic we can expect on our site.  Can we expect a certain
percentage of our Brick and Mortar sales?  Put another way, I am not
trying to find out how many of item x was sold on the internet in a
given time, I am trying to find out how many *I* can expect to sell,
and what to base this estimate on.
This is in the US.
TIA!

Hi there. It would be good to know what you are selling or planning to sell...

EWEK1, I will have to leave this to another researcher since I don't
know any possible way of estimating traffic for a site which doesn't
exist yet, at least not without knowing a lot about how you intend to
advertise and how agressive you are about getting your site listed in
search engines.

The traffic you drive to a Web site depends mostly on how agressively
you advertise it and not much else. Design or even the name of the
site isn't important in driving people to the site, although design is
vital in keeping them on the site and selling to them.

I can tell you that there is a good market for toys and especially
educational toys/items online and it isn't too difficult to estimate
the sales you would generate based on site traffic but I've owned
scores of sites (only one is a store) and never learned any way to
measure traffic in advance, you will need to be very agressive in
advertising and exchanging links.

As for how many of your current customers would see changing over to
online purchases, that depends a lot on your demographics.

Good luck and remember that online sales are climbing about 20% per
year so it is probably worth spending a couple hundred dollars for a
URL (I suggest buydomains.com) and a hosting service - do a very
simple design on your own to test the market potential and run a few
ads.

Hello,

I beleive I can help as an internet marketer myself.  First and
foremost what ever you are selling has to have market research done on
it to see if its even in demand. You have to know and have a keyword
for each product and the tools online to do the research.  There are
numerous tools on the net you can use for this.  One good tool you can
use from google is their search term estimator. 
https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox
One that I have used in the past is from worldwidebrands.com called
the market research wizard.  It does come with a price though.  If you
really want to learn about market research check out
www.instantstuff.com/ua It has a whole course outline and more tools
than you can shake a stick at, FREE! I am curently involved with that
one for my internet stores. Check out www.warriorforum.com as well. 
Its where all the top dogs in internet marketing hang out.  Ask
questions freely.  Everyone in there is eager to help.  I hope this
helps and hey its free.  Good luck.

Darrell

I have a pdf which I got from here 

http://advertising.msn.de/WWDocs/User/de-de/Home/execsummary.pdf

I think this will help start to understand the 'convertion ratios' or
surfers who browse and then buy online to those who browse and buy
online.

Its dead simple and layed out well.

:-) 

This advice is free from me - Paul @ www.smithsmedia.co.uk