Our online store had long been listed on shop.bigmir.net, the shopping catalog of Bigmir, one of Ukraine’s big web portals, but at the beginning of June something interesting happened that I’d like to tell you about.
On June 4 I received the following letter from the shop.bigmir.net administration:
From June 14, 2010, the Shop.bigmir.net section will be presented in an updated format, the essence of which is that from now on only one store with its products can be represented in a category/subcategory.
[The rest of the letter, signed by the bigmir.net team, thanks us for our fruitful cooperation, promises the change will make the section more popular, points the stores that won’t get a category to themselves to “a range of alternative options” at http://shop.bigmir.net/join/, guarantees refunds of whatever is left in our accounts, and invites questions at shopadmin@bigmir.net.]
I’ve put the most interesting part in bold.
Bigmir is entitled, of course, to do whatever it likes with its catalog, but…
I always thought the point of a price aggregator for online stores came down to these features:
Both disappear if a category has only one online store.
Oh well. Moving on.
Here are the stats on referrals from Bigmir to our online store:
(Image lost: a chart of referral traffic from Bigmir to our online store.)
The peak days are June 7 and 8.
On those days the traffic from Bigmir was much worse than its six-month average in visit duration, in pages viewed and in bounce rate. But the “nicest” part is that it had zero conversion.
It all looks a lot like what Artur Orudzhaliev described on ain.ua in the article “Traffic and bots on the Ukrainian internet”.
In those two days, a sum that used to last us a month “burned up” on Bigmir. Naturally, with zero conversion that’s money down the drain.
I haven’t topped up the account since. I’m thinking of calling or writing to them first for an explanation. We’ll see what they say.