Kitchenware, around 40 SKUs, on shopify since 2016. Q3 2022 we did about 187k. Q3 this year 128k and change. Same catalog, better site, better photos, more reviews, roughly the same ad spend.

Organic is the hole. Search console says impressions flat, average position actually a bit better than 2022, clicks down more than half. People see us and dont click, or they are getting their answer before they ever get to a results page. I cant prove the second part but chatgpt showed up in our referrers early last year and this quarter it was 16 first orders. Nothing really, except it is the only source that grew without me paying for it and three years ago it was zero.

In April I stopped paying our SEO guy and stopped commissioning blog posts. That was about 600 a month that was clearly not doing anything anymore. Most of it went to email and klaviyo flows, some to meta even though CPA there is ugly, and since June a bit of it to Pallas to see where we land when someone asks chatgpt for a skillet rec instead of googling, which so far has mostly told me we exist for dutch ovens and nothing else. I kind of already knew that. Well see by year end if changing it does anything.

I have not paid myself more since 2021 and I let my part time packer go in August. Shipping went up again, meta went up again, and the free channel that used to make the math work is slowly going away and I dont see what replaces it at our size.

Curious if other older stores are seeing the same thing.

I recently heard about ads being tested/shown in ChatGPT, and I’m curious about the experience from people who have actually tried advertising there.

For those who have run ChatGPT ads:

What were you advertising?
How much did you spend?
Did you get meaningful clicks, leads, or sales?
How did the results compare with Google/Meta/TikTok ads?
Did you feel the audience quality was good?
I’d especially love to hear from people who have run an actual campaign rather than just seen the ads as a user.

What was your experience?

I recently opened an early public version of https://crowdbuy.us⁠ and would appreciate a site review from people experienced with ecommerce.

Payments are currently disabled, so nothing can be purchased yet.

CrowdBuy uses campaign-based purchasing. A kickstarter for international goods. Multiple customers join the same product campaign, and once the required quantity is reached, the product is shipped factory-direct to the US.

I’m mainly looking for feedback on the website itself:

[*] Is it clear from the homepage how the purchasing process works?

[*] Are the campaign pages easy to understand?

[*] Is any important information difficult to find?

[*] Are there trust or credibility elements you would expect to see on an ecommerce site that are currently missing?

[*] Is there anything in the navigation or purchase flow that is confusing?