pagefly.ioThe global eCommerce growth continues to uphold a solid upward trend, with retail eCommerce sales in the U.S. projected to reach $908.76 billion by the end of 2021. The constant rise of ecommerce platforms such as Shopify has made it easier for more people to venture into eCommerce businesses.
But getting your Shopify store off the ground can be a big challenge, especially when generating revenue. I know that you might have already read somewhere else that you should turn to your friends and family or even consider leveraging various eCommerce marketing strategies like Facebook ads to get your first sale on Shopify.
But is this even enough to get you constant sales on Shopify? Or will social media help you get sales? Are some of the questions that might be crossing through your mind.
Before you start working on your email marketing campaign or choose to run both google ads, we’ll be taking you through our list of twenty carefully reviewed tips on how to generate Shopify sales.
We’ve also gone ahead to research and include some of the best Shopify apps that you can use to revamp revenue and optimize your online store accordingly. But before we get to the meat of things, let me first explain why your Shopify store might be getting traffic but making no sales.
I. 4 Reasons Why You Getting Traffic But No Sales
If you’re starting, it’s a common issue for your online store to drive traffic and still get zero orders. Well, if this is what you might be going through, below are four possible reasons to explain why you’re getting more traffic and no sales:
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1. Your Product Descriptions Sound Generic
Most eCommerce stores that often get more online traffic than sales tend to have boring product descriptions. It usually takes time, sweat, and lots of creative juices to curate compelling content for various product pages. Unfortunately, many online store owners often prefer taking a shortcut and using generic descriptions for their products. Yes, doing this saves you time and effort and drives traffic, but it generally won’t excite your visitors. That’s why they always tend to leave shortly after visiting your online store without making any orders.
2. Your Checkout Process is Long and Has Trust Issues
Trust and ease of navigation are core factors that often influence buying decisions, especially in online shopping. According to cart abandonment rate statistics, up to 18% of American online shoppers abandoned a cart due to prolonged and complicated check out processes. In comparison, another 17% didn’t make an order because they weren’t comfortable sharing their credit card information with online stores. Despite getting significant traffic, such complexities can quickly put off your potential buyers.
3. Store Navigation Issues
It painstakingly takes great effort to create and launch the perfect eCommerce store. But this isn’t to discourage you from working on your Shopify store. You might want to put more focus on making your store’s website more navigational. Failure to do so will mean that your customers will have trouble navigating the site. No matter how much traffic you’re getting, if your store’s website has navigation issues, it will negatively affect user experience and result in poor conversions rates.
4. Your Call-to-Actions are Ineffective
A call-to-action (CTA) refers to a small suggestion generally incorporated into your Shopify store design to lead customers towards buying without taking their control away. It’s a powerful inclusion that should automatically help generate more Shopify sales if done correctly. Therefore, if you’re getting traffic and no sales, it could mean that your CTAs are unclear and ineffective to convert your visitors into buyers.
Without much further ado, let’s now dive into the most awaited part of this blog post.
II. Double Your Shopify Sales With These 20 Simple Tips
Now that you’re already aware of some of the main factors that generally impede favorable Shopify conversion rates, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to research and compile 20 different but low-cost tips to increase sales on Shopify. Let’s dive in if you’re finally ready to resolve the “traffic but no sales” trend.
1. Use Customer Testimonials on Home & Product Pages
Did you know that 92% of online buyers hesitated from making an order simply because the product had no customer reviews? A much recent survey revealed that up to 35% of online consumers buy stuff mainly because of customer reviews. With that said, you must encourage buyers to leave honest reviews for you to add to your online store as early as from the first sales.
Apart from simply building trust with other potential buyers, other reports claim that including up to 5 customer reviews for any given product can increase its conversion rate by 270%. Like Proozy, it would be best if you choose to add your customer reviews to high-intent pages that attract read-to-buy customers like your checkout and product pages.
Here is how Bodylastics are generating more sales by adding customer reviews on their product pages:
2. Use Exclusive Discounts to Grow Your Email List
To convert your traffic into Shopify sales, you should consider maximizing value for your visitors. One way to do this is by offering discounts, but the best way to go about it is to grow your email list. Since 39.6% of consumers listed discounts as the primary reason they shop online, you can easily use a discount code in your store to entice your customers to subscribe to your email list. This way, you can build effective email marketing campaigns that will eventually turn all first-time buyers into repeat buyers.
Online shops like Overstock are offering customers exclusive offers of up to 10% in exchange for their email addresses.
GetsiteControl is one of the best Shopify apps that you can use to construct captivating email popups for your online store.
3. Develop Engagement-Driven Email Drip Campaigns
Email marketing is the most scalable and best way to increase traffic and sales on Shopify. Unlike many other marketing and ads platforms whose algorithms usually change, email marketing largely remains usable and inexpensive to run.
It’s the only marketing strategy that gives an average return on interest (ROI) of $44 for every $1 you spend.
Now that you are already using discount codes, coupons, and gift cards to grow your email list, you should plan to segment them appropriately before developing your drip campaigns. Once you’re done, here are examples of engagement-driven email drip campaign sequences for you:
- Welcome emails for first-time users
- Abandon cart reminders for re-engagements
- Post-purchase emails to upsell recommended products
- Periodic newsletters with updates for giveaways, new blog posts, etc.
Remember to personalize your email campaigns and be mindful of how many you send to avoid spamming and annoying your subscribers.
Klaviyo is an excellent Shopify app that you can readily use to develop engagement-driven email drip campaigns and increase sales on Shopify.
4. Send Abandoned Shopping Cart Email
Sending an abandoned cart email is one of the best ways to appeal to consumer desire and recover sales. If done correctly and combined with promotional material that adds value to the customer, your abandoned cart email should give your customer the nudge to finish their “abandoned” purchase.
To do it right, you should send an abandoned cart email campaign as quickly as possible while the desire is still fresh in the customer’s mind. Given the possibility of dealing with multiple abandoned carts, we recommend that you automate this process using email marketing tools like FirePush to increase sales on your Shopify store.
Once you’ve installed it in your store, all you have to do is customize your preferred template for abandoned cart emails and configure when and how to send the campaign. That’s it.
5. Use Push Notifications to Boost Sales
Cart abandonment commonly happens because of complicated checkouts, clunky product pages, unexpected shipping charges, etc. On average, the eCommerce industry documented a whopping 69.80% cart abandonment rate by the end of 2020.
Intimidating as it may seem, you can quickly revert this occurrence in your eCommerce business by sending a push notification. Like the abandon cart abandonment email, a push notification is a simple alert that can be in the form of an on-screen popup that’s sent to help re-engage the customer and encourage them to finish their purchase if they had abandoned the cart.
You can choose to configure your push notifications depending on your preferences and set them to appear shortly after someone new visits your landing page as part of your engagement efforts. This way, you can be sure of boosting your first-time sales, reducing the number of abandoned carts, and increasing conversion rates simultaneously.
In fact, stores such as Headphone Zones reported that using push notifications increased their ROI by 126x.
PushOwl is our best Shopify app recommendation to create effective web push notifications that boost sales through marketing and cart recovery.
6. Use A Customer Loyalty Program
Establishing a good relationship with your customers not only builds trust but also helps build a strong connection. Given that it also influences loyalty, you must start using it as an incentive for retaining customers.
Market insights reveal that it is more expensive to acquire new customers than to retain those you have. It further highlights that the probability of doing business with retained customers is at least three times higher than with a new prospect.
In terms of sales, having a customer loyalty program can help your Shopify store retain up to 77% of your customers and forge better relationships with them. This way, your probability to successfully sell new products to them is 50% compared to acquiring new customers for it.
The best Shopify app that you can use to turn those hard-earned first sales into repeat customers and enthusiastic brand advocates through effective loyalty and reward programs is Smile.
7. Set up Upsell/Cross-Sell at Checkout
Online sales are often driven by interest and desire. That’s actually why many online shoppers tend to buy recommended and complementary products right before checking out. In most cases, they commonly remember that they need something once brought to their attention.
To ensure that we are all on the same page, upselling means that you encourage your customers to buy a comparatively higher-end product relative to the one they’ve chosen, whereas cross-selling recommends that they buy a complementary product to the one in the cart.
No matter how you look at it, it’s generally easy for you to increase your Shopify sales with this strategy. Therefore, consider incorporating your upsell or cross-sell system in your product pages or the checkout process using Bold Upsell.
8. Implement a Customer Referral Program
Customer referral programs often encourage buyers to share and recommend their friends to buy various products from your online store. Since 92% of online shoppers trust product referrals from someone they know, implementing one for your Shopify business can potentially increase your conversion rate by 30% relative to any other traditional marketing channel.
For instance, Casper’s referral program includes a friend discount rate of up to 20% and an advocate gift card offer worth $75.
To make it more interesting, consider attaching a reward system for the one referring to the product. If you frequently deal with large audiences, Shopify apps like ReferralCandy offer custom solutions for you to delight consumers and drive sales.
9. Provide 24/7 Live Chat to Support Customers Worldwide
Live chat is a customer support messaging alternative for getting real-time help. Unlike the other traditional means of communication, live chat considerably offers the quickest way to solve customer grievances and improve sales. Since 60% of consumers expect immediate customer assistance and 51% want round-the-clock availability, live chat is the only means of communication that can help you successfully achieve this.
Keeping in mind that at least 38% of online customers are willing to buy from a store that features live chat, considering providing 24/7 live chat support in your eCommerce store gives you a better chance of increasing sales.
A simple live chat like the one in Heatonist should help increase support efficiency and eventually grow sales.
Check out Tidio to customize your live chat support to boost customer satisfaction and increase sales.
10. Create Kick-Ass CTA (Call-to-Action)
Keeping in mind that CTAs are one of the main reasons why online businesses usually end up in traffic but no sales predicament, it would be best if you plan to create and use kick-ass CTAs in your Shopify store.
In the most basic terms, CTAs primarily refer to marketing terms designed to motivate online shoppers towards a specific response. Think of them as customer baits for growing sales and subscriptions.
With a click-through rate of 3.53% and a conversion rate up to 43.1% on landing pages on average, using CTAs correctly will effectively boost your conversion rates. To do it right, you should consider using personalized languages when creating your CTAs. This way, you can be sure of converting up to 42% of your traffic into Shopify sales.
Well, Bixbipet and Sriracha2go are some of the best places to start if you are looking for inspiration.
Shopify apps like Adoric can quickly help you create kick-ass CTA campaigns that invoke curiosity and increase sales for your convenience and optimization purposes.
11. Offer Personalized Product Recommendations
It’s common for customers to prefer personalized items to generic ones. The love for the personal touch is what makes us human, right? This concept explains why online customers prefer shopping more from stores that address their specific individual needs.
Therefore, offering personalized product recommendations will help your customers discover more products that fit them best. The only caveat is that you will need to study every customer behavior and gather enough data to refine your recommendations.
This can be a little tricky as you continue to grow your customer base. Still, you can use personal recommendation apps like Glood.AI to personalize the customer experience and win more seamless sales.
12. Focus on Your Storefront User Experience
Your store’s website design directly influences your customer’s browsing experience. This means that it similarly shapes their buying decision. That’s why stores with poor storefront user experience often record little to no sales despite getting traffic.
Therefore, you must take time to test and find any design flaws that might cost you more sales. To do this, you can start by searching for navigational problems that might potentially put your customers off. Some common user experience issues with storefronts in Shopify include a general lack of or unclear navigational buttons, an unpleasant interface, and a sophisticated checkout.
Luckily, behavior analytics tools such as Hotjar can help you visually pinpoint most of these issues in a few clicks.
13. Get Referrals From Your Existing Customers
Getting the first sale is considered one of the most demanding milestones by most Shopify store owners. But the moment you get a few first sales on Shopify, it’s time to think of ways of getting more from them.
Before I tell you how, did you know that you are four times likely to buy something that has been referred to you by one of your friends?
Given our vast capacity to trust the judgment of our acquaintances, you can quickly increase your sales by getting more referrals from your first customers. For those who might be starting, consider contacting them personally with a lucrative offer if they refer more buyers to your store. This can range anywhere between a considerable discount and a free trial or item.
Otherwise, Bloop Referrals & Rewards is an excellent Shopify app that will help you make and automate effective referral programs that generate sales.
14. Offer Free Shipping on Order Minimums
One primary reason you could be getting traffic and not sales is that most online shoppers tend to abandon a cart in the middle of a checkout process once they realize they have to pay extra for shipping.
Well, if your store has a minimum order limit and you’re wondering how to get more sales, consider targeting your high-intent traffic with an alluring offer before they abandon the cart. You can offer them free shipping on order minimums to entice them into completing the purchase.
For best results, you can choose to make the offer time-sensitive by using the Appsus Shopify Timer that pops up to create urgency and “force” them to add more products and complete the sale faster to avoid missing out on your exclusive deal.
15. Write Product Description That Sells
As stated earlier in this blog post, generic product descriptions aren’t compelling enough to excite customers into buying your products. It could be the reason why your Shopify store is suffering from traffic but no sales “syndrome”.
To correct this, you must keep in mind that online buyers love creative descriptions that contain a personal touch. Instead of focusing more on product features, you should tweak them around and prioritize showing customers how they can benefit from buying the product.
Throwing in a mini-story will help personalize the description and should increase customer engagement. Since it takes time and effort to curate the best product descriptions, you can use product description generator tools to create hundreds of content descriptions for your online store with more ease. For your inspiration, here is how Pura Vida personalizes their product descriptions in their store.
16. Add subscriptions boxes to your online store
Building an effective retailer-customer relationship can be very tricky, especially if you’re venturing into eCommerce for the first time. It’s often filled with challenges that range from a general lack of know-how from the retailer’s side to high rates of indecisiveness on the consumer’s end.
The good news is that this doesn’t need to be your fate too. You can easily overcome all these challenges by adding creative subscription boxes to your online store. It is a low-cost method that you can quickly use to revamp sales and optimize store growth.
Here is a quick example of how ReCharge, a Shopify app, can help you set up subscription boxes in your store.
17. Add a Pre-Order Option to Your Shopify Store for Out-of-Stock Items
The eCommerce industry is set to continue booming as more people find it easier and convenient to make online purchases. For this reason, it’s common for online stores to run out of certain products that have high demand.
While this indicates that you’re getting more sales on Shopify, it can be a huge turn-off to your customers. If this happens to you, you should consider adding a pre-order option to the products currently out of stock.
This option will creatively help you to continue making sales as it generally gives consumers a chance to pre-order and buy the product once it’s restocked. Those who might find it too technical or don’t have more spare time in their hands should consider using the Pre-Order Manager app to retain and convert customers.
Here’s how it should look like when deployed:
18. Create and Sell Personalizable and Customizable Products
According to McKinsey findings, eCommerce personalization can increase your store’s conversion rates by up to 15% and improve customer satisfaction by 20% online. This already proves that creating and adding personalized and customizable products can help your Shopify store get more sales.
By this, I mean creating and selling products that customers have personally customized to their liking.
As complex as it may sound, you’d be glad to know that Printful can help you create products that customers can add embroidery, prints, or engravings without breaking a sweat. You only have to install it from the Shopify app store and let customers know that they can customize and personalize products however they like.
19. Leverage Buy Now, Pay Later Payment Option
Online buyers love convenience, and what better way to win them over in times of economic downturns than with a Buy Now, Pay Later payment option? This simple financial payment plan enables customers to buy the product they want and pays for it over time.
It’s considered one of the best ways for online businesses to build loyalty and retain customers quickly. In other words, adding it to your checkouts can potentially increase trust levels and automatically convert your first-time customers into repeat buyers.
Consider adding Afterpay Install to your Shopify store and watch your sales increase over time to leverage this option.
20. Automate Your Marketing and Sales Campaigns
Automation will undoubtedly enhance your overall productivity. Automating your store’s sales and marketing processes will generally take care of all repetitive tasks and free more time for you to concentrate on growing your business.
Choose to automate your various campaigns. You can be sure of continually growing your customer base as this provides the best avenue to meet exact customer needs at multiple points at the right time.
Omnisend is a good Shopify app that you can use to automate these processes through SMS, email, Facebook Messenger, and push notification. It’s very versatile, and it comes with pre-built workflows for all of your campaigns. It’s effortless to use, and you can automate both marketing and sales programs in minutes.
III. Final Thoughts
All of the suggestions discussed above offer you low-cost but practical solutions to start getting first sales on your Shopify store. Check them out and only implement the strategies that seem suitably fit your situation and store. All the third-party Shopify apps mentioned are but quick recommendations for those who might not be having sufficient time to do in-depth app research. If you’re wondering how to generate sales on Shopify in the long term, you should consider optimizing your store with PageFly.
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