MaoMuse case study: 1,281 search clicks a month and almost no sales

• ECPay (綠界) and NewebPay (藍新) are local payment gateways that small Taiwanese web shops apply to for card, bank-transfer and convenience-store payments. Both review your website before you can collect money. We applied to both; between them they sent back 8 items to fix.
• LINE is Taiwan's default messaging app. Our order center, notifications and customer-service bot run inside a LINE Official Account.
• Prices are in New Taiwan dollars. We convert at 31 TWD per USD, the fixed rate used in RedClaw's reporting.

1. The traffic grew in the wrong place

• What happened: September brought 1,281 organic clicks, 4.3 times August. Most went to a pet-name generator and to guides on euthanasia costs and pet anniversaries. The page where you actually order a portrait got 28 clicks in four weeks.
• Cost: around 400,000 characters of content built a nice traffic curve, and no new paid orders after 29 July.
• Fix: from 21 September we sell digital files only and put affiliate offers on the informational pages that do get traffic, for example a cat-litter group buy on the cat-cost page. Partner slots on the end-of-life pages are built; we're still looking for the right partner.

2. Payment reviews check that the site matches the merchant records

• What happened: ECPay returned 5 items: product category didn't match the registration, no pricing information on the site, contact email didn't match, and they wanted photos of the business premises and of stock. NewebPay asked for 3: a published refund policy, matching customer-service details, and contract and supporting documents.
• Cost: on 14 July ECPay still wasn't active, and NewebPay only confirmed live payments on 9 August.
• Fix: worked through each item. A custom product has no stock to photograph, so we sent finished-product photos plus the print partner's shipping records instead.

3. We set prices before getting the supplier's quote

• What happened: at the original prices, the 40×60 cm canvas and the framed version would have lost money.
• Cost: a site-wide price change once the print partner's quote came back (14 July).
• Fix: repriced from the real quote. Now the order is cost first, then price.

4. The site promised a generation time we couldn't hit

• What happened: the site said "ready in 30 seconds". Real runs took 150–265 seconds.
• Cost: customers waited more than five times longer than the page said.
• Fix: changed every mention to the measured time.

5. Bugs that only show up in production

• What happened: the serverless runtime had no Chinese-capable fonts, so the watermark text on previews rendered as empty boxes online. Locally it looked fine.
• Cost: until the fix, every real customer saw a broken watermark on their preview.
• Fix: the watermark is now pre-rendered as an image, so production doesn't need fonts at all. On a related note, new pages weren't picked up by Google on their own. The 9 pages we submitted by hand were all recrawled within 13 minutes, and one moved from position 94–98 to 30.6. The control group we didn't submit didn't move.

1. Before writing anything, ask whether someone searching that phrase would buy from you next. We wrote 62 articles and 12 tools and passed 1,000 clicks a month, but very few of those visitors wanted a portrait. When we plan content for a client, we first map each keyword's distance to the purchase page. See our e-commerce coaching service.
2. Before a payment review, check your pricing, refund policy and contact email against your merchant records. Our two gateways sent back 8 items between them, mostly about what the site disclosed. ECPay publishes its review criteria, the documents you need and its fees (Chinese only). Our other store, Taolilife, ran into the same kind of problem.
3. Agree on a stop-loss for ads before you start. We stopped in week two because spend and orders were too far apart; there was no need to wait four months to know. All three stores are covered in our e-commerce hub.

Is your traffic growing while orders aren't? Send us your URL on Telegram: https://t.me/eric16888999