Anyone noticed a big increase in sales?

[GordonH]

Hello
Obviously it was very quiet over the Christmas holidays, but the past few days sales have been well above average.
On Friday we tirned over more than any other day in our company's history.
I was very concerned and went through as many of the transactions as I could in case it was fraud but there is no sign of it other than the usual ones we had picked up during processing.

Yesterday was our highest grossing Saturday for many months.

Its new web hosting sign ups that have increased.
We have even been selling dedicated servers, whch we don't normally sell many of.
I had to bring several new servers for resellers on line this week.

My guess is that people had put projects on hold over Christmas and with Christmas and new year at weekends they had taken the time between christmas and new year as holidays, so whatwe are getting is the outflow of all the projects that they want to get on with now they are back at work.

Whatever it is, its total madness.
On Friday I went to the Gym first thing and when I got back spent the next three hours working solid processing orders.
It was 3pm before I could go through the morning post.

Its nice to have the cash, but if this kept up we would need more staff.
We could cope on the support side, but the customer service side would need at least one, probably two more people.

I am sure it won't last.
The money is nice, but the workload and supporting all those new customer sin their first week is giving us all a greater addicton to coffee.

[GordonH]

It is showing no sign of letting up.

Already today we have taken double what we would normally have taken on a Sunday by this point.

The big increase is reseller hosting and the budget hosting side.

Another trend from last month was that our domain registrations were up by over 50% in com/net/org/biz (excluding .info which we were giving away free).
Registrations in .uk were down 30% (and we do high volumes in those through our UK sites).
Registrations in the weird TLD's (.vg .cc etc) slumped to practically zero.

Something is definitely in the air.

[Bloory]

Gordon,

Well done!

I really must get the site and ordering tidied up - I am certain that is why signups are slow, however like you, I have seen a big increase in activity from clients wanting to settle their accounts and even upgrade.

Now if the signups get too much for you, you know where to send them :lmao:

[ldcdc]

While I'm not a host, I do get money out of referred sales. December was the worst month in a long time, but January (so far) promises to be one of the best. I guess it just evens out in the end, but it's still cool. :)

[wisehosting]

decmeber was good - january so far 0
:cry:

[GordonH]

Yes, December was very poor for hosting sign ups.
Abnormally good for domain sames but hosting was well down on previous months.
Oddly our advertising spend is down.
One of my fears was that our Overture account had gone out of control but the spend is actually lower than normal.
Whatever is going on is very nice but I wish I knew why so I could replicate it.

[nsusa]

Congrats on the sales. :) That is excellent news.

Christoph

[Lubby]

I think the biggest thing is people worry in December about having money to buy gifts and all those things and now they are regrouping and if they find they still have the money they are using it, which explains the low december numbers and high January. It is sometimes weird how it goes in cycles. You can do the same thing for 3 months straight and all of a sudden 1 week your sales triple for no apparent reason, then they go back to normal. It's a hosting phenomenon (sp?).

[datums]

Might want to check your server logs, see where they are coming from.



Good luck.

[GordonH]

Might want to check your server logs, see where they are coming from.



Good luck.

That was the first thing I suspected but they are all genuine (or at least no more frauds than we would expect).
It has not subsided.
Turnover is on average up by 50%.

[Cow]

We have a lot of international orders. December was a very good month for us, however simply because we target a lot of non-Christian countries during this time of year (Oct - Dec). However, our Overture account looks very interesting these days.

[GH-Mark]

Wow you seem to be doing well

[GordonH]

It has slowed down a bit now.
On Friday we took more than on any other day in our history, but that was aprtly due to an article in the Times Newspaper that mentioned our services.

[Taylor]

It has slowed down a bit now.
On Friday we took more than on any other day in our history, but that was aprtly due to an article in the Times Newspaper that mentioned our services.

Wow nice, how'd you get that mention? :)

We have seen a nice increase in sales the last couple of months, continuing into January as well.

[nsusa]

Free publicity of this kind is always the best. Make sure you can maintain contact with whomever wrote the article. Can come in handy at a later time to get something similar accomplished.

Christoph

[GordonH]

One of our customers happens to be a Journalist for the newspaper.
There is nothing you can really do to make that sort of thing happen.
We have had articles in computer magazines and newspapers before but generally i have been asked to write them.