New product not selling. WTF?

Discussions
#1

You may remember I decided to rebrand my Word Cleaner product to Doc Converter Pro.

The new product has all the same features as the old one but it supports more file formats and it is easier to use. The site for the new product is fast, the buying process is super easy. Just one problem people are not buying it :frowning: In fact more users have bought copies of the old version!

Here is the old site:
https://wordcleaner.com/

Here is the new site: https://documentconverter.pro/

I really don’t understand what the issue is.

The only thing i can think of is maybe people like the idea of a specialist converter? Word Cleaner was Word to HTML, Doc Converter Pro can do Word and PDF to HTML, Word to PDF etc. Seems odd users would like less features?

I have a few options:
Keep both products alive but concentrate on marketing the new one. This is an option but it is a bit messy.

Kill the new brand and go back to the old one?

Persevere and see if things get better? New product has been on the market since November but sales are woeful.

Would appreciate any advice and I really don’t understand what is going on.

#2

November, December, and January are very often slow sales months for B2B and business-focused software products.

Looking back to prior years sales, do you notice a pattern of seasonality YoY?

How is November and December 2017, as compared to 2016, and as compared to 2015?

#3

I assume, you mean “more per visit”, right? Your new site must have a lower traffic still.

#4

It’s possible. Too many features is confusing.

You can test that hypothesis, I believe. You can create a landing page per most important conversion pairs - e.g. Word to PDF, etc. Do not mention any other document format on those pages, and channel it to the same new download. If you see more conversion via the specialized landing pages, then yes, you’ve overdone it with features.

Special landing pages can help you with SEO too, BTW.

#5

Why don’t you email the latest customers and ask them why they bought the Word Cleaner instead of the Doc Converter Pro?

#6

Good idea. I was starting to do that for PDF will get on it.

#7

To be fair the customers who bought the old product were existing users who just needed extra licenses.

#8

Checked out the new website, the main page looks pretty fine.

Next I’ve tried to navigate through the main menu and was immediately overwhelmed by other domains like docconverter.pro, api.docconverter.pro. What’s the difference? Where I am and why? The bad thing is that main menu gets swapped with other sites’ menus so I really cannot grasp what’s going on in terms of navigation. My first instinct is “wtf?! immediately hit the back button”. I guess that most of your visitors may feel the same.

Other than that, please note that it may be considerably easier to build an offering around a single domain than to spread it between multiple ones. Easier for your, easier for search engine and and, the most important point, it would be easier to grasp for your customers.

Just my 2 cents.

#9

Basically, there is also a web app version of the product and we host this on the other domain. We used it have it on a subdomain but thought it would be simpler to have it on its own domain.

Maybe I need to explain the different versions better.

#10

The problem might be because of:

customer: I need to have a nice word to html conversion.

you: use documentconverter

customer: Thanks, I’d rather use the specialist wordcleaner. A general documentconverter would not be as good.

#11

Where were your buyers coming from earlier ? Is it possible that people are still looking for your old brand name and do not know that if has been rebranded?