How to Get More Sales on Your Shopify Store Quickly

Creating a successful eCommerce business requires work – that’s pretty much a no-brainer, and setting up a Shopify store is one of the most fundamental steps towards it. However, while the setting-up part may be easy, the real challenge lies in getting it off the ground. Creating a stellar product line, finding the right tools to support your work, and driving traffic to a new brand – all require solid planning. This blog digs deep into all the tried and tested strategies that will answer the question most sellers wonder about – how to get more sales on Shopify, and fast!

Before we start the steps, it is important to know why so many businesses fail to hit the desired mark despite investing considerable time and effort. In an alarmingly large number of cases, the biggest reason is either misdirected planning or having no plans at all.

If we go through the top Shopify stores, what they have in common are almost always the software they use, the quality of their designs, their dedication to the customer experience, and most importantly – a winning strategy executed with utmost perfection.

While we have pinpointed a broad spectrum of reasons behind their success, it is also necessary to know what exactly is going wrong with stores that have not yet reached that peak.

Let’s dive in!

Top 10 Reasons Why You Are Getting Traffic, but Not Sales

Businesses often find themselves in a peculiar predicament – the traffic may be coming in just fine, but there are no sales. In that case, you need to put yourself in your shoppers’ shoes (quite literally at times, if you are a shoe-store owner) to find out what attracts them to your brand but doesn’t entice them enough to actually purchase.

Listed below are the top 10 reasons why this might be happening to you:

• Poor Navigation – As soon as a user lands on your homepage, their first intent is to find the product they are looking for, and fast. According to Hubspot, 38% of visitors stop engaging with a website if the navigation ease is poor. If your website looks cluttered with a barely searchable menu, it may be one of the prime deterrents to a sale from happening.
• Lack of trust – With a new eCommerce website popping up every day, it gets hard for shoppers to determine their trustworthiness. To get your customers to rely on your brand, you must establish your dedication to their security as a priority and create trust by including social proof like ratings & reviews.
• Inadequate Product Description – For an undetermined customer, product descriptions play a monumental role in getting them to stick around. If your product specifications lack adequate information and evocativeness, the product is likely to go unnoticed as well.
• Not Mobile Friendly – According to Salescycle, 56% of online sales in 2021 happened on mobile devices. If your Shopify store isn’t mobile-optimized, you are going to lose a large chunk of your sales for this reason alone.
• Niche and Targeted Audience – Selling products in a niche with a limited search volume, highly competitive, or lacking profitable keywords can lower your sales, especially as a beginner. It is better to start with one broad category and go on scaling it instead. Additionally, you must know your target audience well and bid on keywords that are specific to your product only, not the whole category.
• The Store Product Pages Need Work – If the latest surveys and studies are to be believed, then the average conversion rate of an eCommerce store stands at a meager 2.86% now. The number gets even lower with an unoptimized web page. Design your website as CRO-oriented as possible with product pics, keyword-rich titles, product descriptions, reviews, and CTAs at opportune positions.
• Directing All the Traffic to a Single Page – If you are sending all your visitors to just your homepage, you could be potentially lose out on conversions. Instead, know your audience and their positions on the sales funnel and make pages with information beneficial to that position more visible.
• Difficult Checkout Process – Checkout is the last stage of the conversion process, and about 70 percent of shoppers abandon their carts right here without completing the purchase. If you are facing an abnormally high cart abandonment rate, your website’s checkout page may suffer from any of these issues –

1. A technical glitch that’s clogging the payment gateway, cluttered UI, no social proof or similar elements to inspire trustworthiness, mandatory signup before paying, etc.
2. Optimizing your checkout page to remove these problems will help you increase your sales.

• Store Design – With more competitors, creeps more identicalness. The fight to stand out is real, and you must win if you don’t want your visitors to forget your store as soon as they browse through another similar-looking one, or a hundred! Make your store design as unique and on-brand as possible to remain unforgettable, and definitely make it look like you!
• Low-Quality Images – Product images are the closest representation of the actual product that your customers can see before they purchase it. Just like your descriptions, they are the final stage of product marketing you can possibly make on your website and are thus incredibly important. You must ensure your images are of the highest quality so that your shoppers can really get a feel of what you sell.

15+ Tips and Strategies to Drive More Sales on Shopify

Now that you know all about the “don’ts” of selling on Shopify, let’s focus on the “do’s”!

Reduce shopping cart abandonment

Cart abandonment occurs when a visitor adds something to their cart but doesn’t go through with the purchase ultimately. It’s a huge hindrance to your sales, and you might have a hard time running your store long-term if you don’t resolve the issue quickly.

Here are some of the ways you can adopt to reduce your cart abandonment rate:

• Use exit intent popups to give visitors discounts on the products they intended to purchase; you can also make them timed to create a sense of urgency.
• Communicate with customers via emails or mini pop-up surveys to know what made them leave.

Read More: How to use Exit Popups, Overlays & Surveys for Conversion Rate Optimization

• Provide multiple payment options to let them choose the easiest one and check out quickly.
• Offer free shipping and packaging.

Pro Tip: With Picreel, you get the option to create & customize your popups to match your preferred looks, as well as the ability to leverage its unmatchable exit-intent sensing technology. Feel free to signup for the free trial to check it out!

Make your store load fast

If there were a list of all the things that drive customers away, a website that takes an eternity to load would probably be close to the top. If you have a slow-loading website, your visitors will simply look for another alternative. So, what can you do to ensure your Shopify store loads faster? Here are a few tips that may help you!

• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN); similar to how compressing images makes transmission faster, CDN compresses the whole flurry of data to achieve lower latencies and, by extension, higher loading speed.
• Compress your page’s media as much as possible while keeping the quality intact.
• Minimize JAVA and CSS script wherever possible.
• Reduce redirects and broken links.

Pro tip: Analyze your site’s loading speed for both mobile and desktop devices using Google Analytics for the most accurate results.

Leverage chatBots and LiveChats for basic queries

Chatbots work great for resolving generic doubts that a visitor usually has while browsing through the store or making a purchase. Using a chatbot kills two birds with one stone –

• You don’t have to engage resources for basic, repetitive queries.
• The customer doesn’t leave with unresolved queries.

But remember, don’t make your visitors chat with a robot forever. If a query goes beyond the scope of a chatbot, arrange for a conversation with an agent, or better yet, transition the chat seamlessly to one from the ongoing thread.

Pro tip: Use apps like ProProfs Chat that offer automated support through chatbots and live agents both. The interaction is coordinated in a way that allows the agent to take over after a certain point without you having to set up a meeting, email, or chat link separately.

Offer free shipping to increase sales

One of the most common reasons why customers balk at buying an item is high shipping costs. Even if it’s reasonable enough, most customers expect their orders to be shipped for free. While offering free shipping will make your store more lucrative than your competitors, how sustainable is it for a business, especially smaller or low-margin ones?

If it’s not possible to waive the fee entirely, there are two things you can do to attract customers as well as keep up the illusion without incurring a loss –

• You can offer free shipping for a minimum order value.
• You can raise your product price to cover the shipping fees and then offer free shipping.

The latter solution is recommended only if you are giving out a unique product with little to no competitors, or your customers will just divert to stores selling the same thing at a cheaper price.

Pro tip: To calculate minimum order value, consider factors like gross profit margin, the average order value of your Shopify store, average shipping cost, etc.

Develop email marketing campaigns that convert

Once you effectively capture fresh leads, you can focus on developing email marketing campaigns to keep your brand relevant and fresh on their minds. You first need to develop a strategy that relies on segmentation and drip email sequences to utilize your mailing list to its best. 

Start off by segmenting your emails according to –

• Audience: Target first-time users, regular customers, browse abandonment users, cart abandonment users, etc.
• Email workflows: Create workflows with transactional (like order and shipping confirmations), promotional (sales and special offers), and lifecycle marketing emails (cart abandonment, re-engagement, welcome series).

Segmentation allows you to spread the exact message each of your audience groups needs to hear and increases the likelihood of conversion that way. 

Pro tip: Email drip campaigns you can develop for your Shopify store include welcome emails, website abandonment reminders, post-purchase emails, cart abandonment reminders, product launches, and company updates.

Use SMS and push notifications for better engagement

While promoting your products to new or existing customers, SMS and push notifications can add the much-needed oomph to your marketing attempts. Here are all the reasons why messages may work for you really well –

• SMS and push notifications have about 30-40% open and click-through rates, which is a considerable figure compared to other marketing channels.
• SMS and push notifications marketing are cost-effective and do not take up much of your budget to implement.
• By using it to target cart abandoners, you can boost your revenue in no time.
• Push notifications are great avenues to send reminders to customers who haven’t bought anything in a while

Pro tip: You can integrate SMS and push notifications with the tracking details of a product the customer has purchased.

Get customer opt-ins to nurture future sales

Unsolicited marketing emails often end up in the junk folder of your intended audiences’ inboxes. Aside from the fact that your time, effort, and money – all go to waste, being repeatedly marked as spam can be detrimental to your brand, especially in its nascent stages. One way to circumvent the issue and still carry out your marketing attempts is by using opt-in emails. Opt-in emails provide your subscribers with a choice on whether they are willing to receive any communication from you and, in turn, make for a cleaner mailing list with people much more likely to convert.

Here are all the ways you can get your visitors to willingly subscribe –

• Create lead magnets through a free service, product, tour, or more in lieu of signing up to give your customers an incentive to be a part of your contacts.
• Offer an immediate benefit of subscribing, such as free shipping, exclusive insights, ebooks, or more.
• Remember, what you offer does not have to be a tangible item all the time – you can also offer fresh news, how-to guides, immediate notifications of an upcoming sale, etc., to attract your visitors.

Pro tip: Use exit-intent popups to retain your customer with lucrative offers, coupons, or services in exchange for their email addresses. It helps reduce cart abandonment and grow your email contact list at the same time.

Build organic traffic with great SEO

Every website’s dream is to garner free footfalls. This is where SEO comes in – as a way to turn the dream into a reality without using paid promotions. All you need is the initial effort of making your store SEO-optimized, and you are good to reap its benefits for days to come. Shopify, fortunately, makes the process even easier.

• The built-in settings of Shopify let you create SEO-friendly pages with editable meta fields for title, description, and URL slug, autogenerated sitemaps, 301 redirects, and canonical URLs.
• As a result, your homepage, product pages, collections pages, and other significant areas are properly indexed and easily searchable on all search engines. 
• When your strategies lack something, there are powerful Shopify apps that can detect the slack, call out issues as they arise, and make the necessary suggestions for updates.

Pro tip: Aside from the standard eCommerce store pages, you can also create a content marketing strategy by writing a blog and targeting the most relevant keywords in the particular industry to make your website trend.

Create dedicated and high-converting landing pages

A landing page is your store’s first opportunity to make an impression on a visitor, and we all know how the saying goes, right? While it may not be the absolute last impression either, a poorly-crafted landing page has some detrimental effects. Here are some pointers on how you can create a landing page that converts –

• Cut down on all fluff and state only on-point information about what the visitors want to know.
• Include a clear, concise Call to Action; you can also creatively incorporate a benefit in the CTA to compel your visitors to take action.
• Images are an integral part of all landing pages – make sure yours are powerful, relevant, and have an impact on the visitor.
• Conduct A/B tests to check out different variations of the same theme to measure the highest-performing ones.
• Make your page easily navigable and mobile optimized to widen your visitor scope.

Pro tip: Remove the menu and all other navigational features from the landing page if you’re bringing in visitors through ad campaigns. This way, customers will focus solely on what’s immediately visible on the page.

Optimize your marketing with A/B Testing

A/B testing is a technique that will help you retain your customers in the long run. If you don’t provide your customers with an experience that improves with time, it’s only a matter of time until they find something that caters to their needs better.

A/B testing is not just tweaking colors and CTAs. Sure, they are a part of it, but it goes much deeper as a whole. A/B tests reveal which designs are liked the best by visitors, which elements are effective in what places, what’s the most suitable layout for a better user experience, and much more.

Here are some of the best practices to keep in mind while A/B testing your website –

• Start with an element that can potentially affect your conversion rate the most, but remember to test one element at a time to get a clear test result.
• Make sure to divide your audience equally wherever you have to manually segment them into two or more groups. (Example – A/B testing your email campaigns). 
• Fix an expected percentage that you wish the variant to hit for it to be a winner; in most cases, try keeping a confidence level of 95%

Pro tip: Depending on the complexity and importance of the A/B tests, set aside a particular time as it is an important parameter and defining factor of your results.

Use powerful text, images, and videos to showcase your products

Shoppers these days are flocking to online stores more than offline ones and have no way to examine their desired items for themselves. That’s exactly why it is more necessary now than ever to display your product in the best light – literally and figuratively – from every angle possible. While you cannot turn the products over in their hands to let them inspect the particularities of your wares in person, you can create a product page experience that replicates the process to a considerable extent.

Here are all the ways you can build the perfect advertising companions for your store –

• Communicate the details of your product through zoomed-out shots and close-ups, both.
• Be true to the dimension and try not to make the images seem magnified.
• Videos are a powerful tool in showing your product in use and can clarify a lot of doubts.
• Use 3D images to get your customers a real feel of the item they are buying even before they get their hands on it.
• Ensure that the accompanying text matches your images and videos. Make them as detailed and evocative as possible while focusing on the benefits and functionalities.

Pro tip: Include vital product specifications as well as a powerful story about the product. Remember, eCommerce is as much about the product as it is about great storytelling.

Build trust with great social proof

We are affected by our peers’ opinions – there’s no getting around this truth. So, how does that relate to eCommerce? Here’s a statistic to clarify: in a study, about 93% of consumers worldwide said that their purchase decision had been influenced by a positive review about the brand, service, or product. Leveraging social proof is a great way to build your brand image as a reputable, trustworthy one. 

Here are some ideas on how you can utilize it for your website:

• Always add the reviewer’s name and image alongside their testimonial whenever you post it on your website – anonymous reviews do not inspire much trust!
• Show the number of people who bought your product.
• Add a “like” button next to the product that allows a user to show their appreciation as well as see how many already have.
• Display positive reviews right underneath the product and product description.
• Highlight your bestselling product as the best choice or the product of the month.

Pro tip: You can use social proof to cross-sell or upsell your products by showing the items under a header like “People also bought this.”

Influencer marketing can be a powerful way to increase sales

If you are just starting out with your Shopify store and having a hard time getting sales, influencers might just be your answer. Hiring micro-influencers to promote your products can get you high ROIs, especially in niches like food, energy drinks, sports, and beauty.

Why do influencer promotions work well?

• Influencers are famous people; they already have a loyal fanbase to whom you can advertise your product.
• With an established internet figure vouching for your brand, the trust factor rises up exponentially and gets you more conversions.

Pro tip: You can use reviews from influencers as social proof as well.

Personalize the shopping experience

According to Think with Google, people are will spend up to 40% more than what they had initially planned if the store feels tailor-made for them.

Here are a few ways you can personalize your visitors’ browsing experience –

• Personalize your emails and messages as much as possible
• Offer discounts or coupon codes on products that customers have shown interest in or already bought.
• Create videos showcasing their customer journey and incorporate them in newsletters for better personalization and engagement
• Use popups to display personalized messages based on analyzing their behavior.

Pro tip: A great way to use personalization is by displaying product recommendations that relate to items your visitors have viewed and suggesting product bundles to increase average order value.

Use a wishlist to drive the further purchase

When a visitor isn’t ready to buy anything right then, or the product is unavailable, a wishlist helps stow the items away for the future. Other than letting customers save a favorite item for later reference, wishlists also help store owners track which products are in demand and need to be restocked.

Giving customers the option to add products to their wishlists also gets them to subscribe for email updates and lets you have a readymade mailing list that you can use for your campaigns going forward.

You can use wishlists to –

• Retarget visitors who have shown an interest in your store to convert them into buyers.
• Upsell and cross-sell products based on their liked items.
• Remind visitors whenever a product is available again through emails and promote relevant items alongside.

Pro tip: To make the experience more personalized, allow your visitors to name their wishlists and create multiple ones for various product categories.

Leverage paid advertising to increase sales

Organic traffic is great but not easy. Social media platforms are consistently trying to up the game by personalizing advertisements based on the user’s browsing habits. It’s a great marketing tactic, and it’s paid.

Here are all the ways you can successfully leverage paid advertising for your business – 

• Design catchy, aesthetically pleasing ad graphics that draw the audience’s eyes.
• Integrate your store with Facebook pixel to track important KPIs such as clicks, open rates, conversion rates, etc.
• Run your offers as ads on Facebook to boost conversions.
• Use trigger words like “limited time only,” “hurry,” and “buy now” to create a sense of urgency.
• Embed an email subscription link in your Facebook ad and pair it up with an incentive.
• Show products that are better explained by seeing them in action via videos.

Pro tip: Use Facebook ads for seasonal sales like Halloween, Christmas, etc., as SEO is not likely to yield much with keywords that are relevant for only a certain period of time.

Retarget your visitors

Once a customer shows interest in your store, with your retargeting strategies in place, you can bring them back. Your intended customers can be people who merely visited your website, browsed through it, or signed up but didn’t make a purchase. Retargeting also increases the chances of conversion as the ads are tailored to specific customer behaviors.

Facebook retargeting has proven to be an incredibly effective strategy in personalized retargeting, and here are the two ways you can implement them –

• Autopilot Service: You can automate the process and employ some of the best Shopify marketing apps like Socioh and Adroll to run the campaigns for you.
• Manage Yourself: Launch and manage your retargeting campaigns manually using Facebook ads manager.

Pro tip: The best way to utilize Facebook retargeting is by displaying retargeted ads to visitors who proceeded to the checkout stage but abandoned the cart.

Use Geo-Targeted marketing

Geo-targeted marketing is a part of the personalized marketing approach. Here, you target visitors browsing from particular a particular location or country with products whose purchase is likely to be influenced by these factors. This technique is the most useful when advertising to local prospects. Geo-targeting doesn’t always have to be for the current location, you can also show ads based on places they have recently visited or looked for online.

These ads differ from the usual ad copies in the following ways –

• Language
• Currency
• Visual elements
• Offers

Geo-targeted ads allow you to be locally relevant and hide your new strategies from being found out by competitors (although it must also be combined with IP exclusion to fully work). One of the best ways to deploy them is using Picreel popup builder, as it has this option as a built-in feature of the “Personalization” panel.

Pro tip: When using geo-targeted ads, remember to keep the local culture and norms in mind. For example, if you use a color that the folks of a particular region believe unlucky, it may affect your sales!

Another effective way to boost sales on Shopify is by offering discounts and deals. For example, you could run a promotion that offers a discount when customers purchase multiple items together. And with Shopify product bundles apps, you can encourage customers to buy multiple items at once, making it even easier for them to take advantage of these offers. By creating product bundles that offer value to your customers, you can increase your average order value and generate more sales

Wrapping Up

When you want to build a successful Shopify business, using just one strategy and ignoring the rest won’t do you much good. For example, to achieve more conversions, you need to bring in more traffic with SEO practices, retarget cart abandoners with ads, and utilize email marketing to promote your store. It is the combined effort of all three that brings forth the result you desire for your business.

Similar to eCommerce strategies, you can have separate strategies for design, promotions, and more.

The adage “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” applies not just in folktales, but in your Shopify store too.

Don’t just rely on one strategy to get you started on the path of booming conversions – use them all.

Godspeed!