6 Strategies to Overcome the ‘No Sales on Shopify’ Phase
Glory-Anna Oshafi
Build a website, they said.
“You need to sell your products online!” “The ROI on online sales is great!” So you took the big step, yielding to digital marketing trends and advice, and started listing products on your Shopify website.
But months have passed, and you still haven’t recorded a sale. Does this sound familiar?
Where are all the customers you were promised? Why is your website gathering dust with crickets chirping on the product pages?
For a new store owner, the no sales on Shopify phase can be a bit daunting and discouraging, sometimes leading many e-commerce businesses to shut down their online operations.
But you don’t have to. Not with the proven strategies you’ll learn from this article if you keep reading.
Many new business owners struggle to achieve their first sales on Shopify.
If you visit the Shopify app store, you’ll find many apps offering to help website owners boost their conversion rate, reduce cart abandonment, and automate their marketing strategies. This points to the fact that many other store owners have similar issues with making sales.
Baymard Institute’s 2023 data also highlights that the average global cart abandonment rate sits at a whopping 68.8%. So, it’s not that customers don’t visit your stores; it’s just that two out of three simply don’t make their purchase. Why?
Many reasons.
- Your website could have been difficult to navigate, slow to load, or not mobile-friendly—mobile users are the highest cart abandoners (85.65%).
- A different store may have caught their attention. Shopify has over four million stores, many of which offer the same products or services you may be offering. A competitor can quickly snatch them up.
- Perhaps your prices were too high, or your product doesn’t meet as many needs as you thought. In simpler terms, not many people need your product.
- It may also be because your brand messaging wasn’t strong enough to convert the visitor into a buyer. Your advertisements or awareness strategies didn’t resonate with them enough to get into their pockets.
Truthfully, there are many reasons your store hasn’t made its first sales or has struggled with a few sales since its inception.
Applying the six proven strategies below will empower you to change your narrative quickly.
Enhancing Product Visibility
Improving product visibility means making your products more visible to your ideal customers wherever they shop the most. If your customers can’t see your products, how do you expect them to buy them? Try these tips to improve visibility:
Optimize Your Store for SEO
Search engine optimization is a surefire way of directing potential customers to your store and ramping up your sales. Shopify provides built-in SEO settings that you can use to boost your rankings on search engine result pages.
These include infusing relevant keywords into your title tags, meta descriptions, blog post URLs, webpages, product descriptions, and image alt text.
Building your online reputation as a small business can take some time. However, you can improve your short-term SEO needs by optimizing your store’s content using Shopify’s SEO features. This way, search engines will recognize your store as relevant when a user makes a search query that relates to your products or services.
Leverage Social Media Marketing
Between 2022 and 2023, the number of social shoppers in the United States grew from 97 million to 107 million. Knowing that most of your customers are on social media, can you afford to live out social media marketing from your e-commerce strategies?
Sites like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, which provide powerful marketing tools for easy shopping, are helpful in showcasing your products. By constantly posting and building followers on these platforms, you can easily direct traffic from social media to your Shopify store and even build brand awareness on the social scene.
Like the Stanley brand does above, maximize your social feed to intimating followers with your product’s authenticity, quality, and usefulness. This way, once they visit your site, they’re already ready to swipe their card.
Building Trust with Your Audience
Customers who trust your products and offerings are likelier to buy from you. Check out these stats from PwC:
- 71% of consumers say they’re unlikely to buy from a company if they no longer trust them;
- 91% of consumers say they’re more likely to buy from a company they trust;
- 83% of consumers will defend your brand if they trust you; 88% will even recommend you to others.
All the above data strongly indicate that brand trust significantly affects consumers’ dispositions towards your products online. If you’re wondering how you can foster trust in your brand, do this:
Showcase Customer Reviews and Testimonials
It’s normal for brands to hype their products and offers as part of their marketing strategies—even if the products are not as they claim. That’s why 98% of consumers prefer to check out customer reviews before deciding if buying a product is worth it.
Reviews and testimonials can change the game for your customers’ first impressions of your products. They give customers vital information about the quality of the product and tell them whether it’ll meet their expectations.
Don’t be shy about asking customers for reviews and testimonials and showcasing them visibly on product pages, website pages, and even social media!
Improving User Experience
Wouldn’t it be heartbreaking if, after all your marketing strategies worked together to drive traffic to your page, your checkout process made the visitors bounce? When visitors find their way to your site, make it easy for them to complete a purchase.
Design your site easily navigable. Customers don’t want to waste time searching for what they need on your page, so make it easily accessible. Include a detailed and well-titled navigation bar that redirects consumers to hotspots on your website.
See Sephora’s site, for instance. It contains a primary navigation bar that separates products into different collections. Right below the bar is another category of collections based on common unifying factors. These simple website designs help customers find what they need quickly.
After simplifying the navigation process, create a simplified checkout process without friction. Reduce distractions like irrelevant pop-up banners, link redirects, unnecessary sign-up requests, etc. Include a clear CTA button that is impossible to miss, optimize your checkout page for mobile users, and enhance the page’s speed.
Utilizing Email Marketing
With close to 4.5 billion email users globally in 2024, email marketing is vital to your content marketing toolbox. A successful email campaign can improve brand awareness and boost sales and customer loyalty.
Engage Customers with Targeted Email Campaigns
If you want to improve your email marketing strategy for your campaigns, there are a few ways to achieve this.
Make your emails personalized, addressing customers with their first names, directly addressing their needs, and providing your offers as a solution. Ensure the emails are timely and relevant to the recipient. For instance, you can send an abandoned cart reminder email a few hours after they leave your website like Nomad does below:
Drive email engagement with compelling subject lines. The more targeted and convincing your subject line is, the higher the chances of boosting your email open rates. If they don’t open your email, it’s difficult for them to see the rest of your marketing, so make your subject lines enticing and clickable.
Maximize audience segmentation to ensure the right audience gets the correct emails. Segmenting your audience based on their interests, age, preferences, and stages in the customer journey improves targeting significantly.
Offering Promotions and Discounts
Slickdeals conducted a survey and found that over 87% of shoppers preferred to wait until brands were offering promotions and discounts before shopping. If you’re looking for a quick way to clean up your shelves and get more people to buy from you, running sales and offering discounts is a powerful strategy.
Here’s how you can do it:
Create Urgency and Encourage Purchases
Slapping “10% off” on customer purchases is not all there is to woo them to buy from you. Make your discounts and promotions more compelling by doing the following:
- Showcase how much they’re saving when they apply the discount. [E.g., Get 25% off, save $35]
- Include a “limited-time offer” or “flash sale” phrase to create a sense of urgency. You can even showcase how many items are left in stock to create a fear of missing out.
- Add countdown timers and strong CTAs to encourage them to take immediate action.
You can also offer exclusive discounts to first-time customers to encourage them to try your products. You can easily implement your discounts and promotions technique from your Discounts tab on Shopify.
Leveraging AI for Enhanced Customer Engagement
Did you know many customers drop off your website because they couldn’t find access to support or help while shopping on the site? Adding a live chat option on your checkout page can increase your conversion rate by up to 40%, according to LTVplus. Here’s a tool that can help you achieve this:
Introducing Juphy AI to Boost Sales on Shopify
Juphy AI is your go-to Shopify sales assistant for customer engagement, which helps you overcome the no sales on Shopify stage. Integrating the Juphy AI-powered chatbot into your website helps you deliver a personalized shopping experience that turns visitors into buyers. Plus, it can be easily managed directly from the Shopify dashboard, thanks to its ‘Built for Shopify’ badge.
It’s an AI-driven shopping assistant that works round-the-clock, even while you sleep, attending to shoppers at any hour. It helps increase your revenue and conversions by up to 5x by answering their questions and recommending products tailored to their interests and shopping behaviors.
With Juphy AI on your website, your customer response time becomes lightning-fast and automated, saving you tons of time and boosting the customers’ shopping experiences, eventually leading to increased sales. You can even integrate it into your Instagram DMs for faster and more personalized responses on your social page!
Juphy AI works independently of human input, drastically reducing the manual challenge of responding to customers and tracking orders, deliveries, and returns.
Let Juphy AI help you boost your sales up to 10x and save significant time that you can use to grow your business. Your first 14 days are on us; get started for free!
Conclusion
Overcoming the no sales on Shopify phase is not as difficult as you think; you just need to know the proper techniques and strategies to break out of it.
For starters, you can focus on boosting your product visibility, building trust with your audience, and improving their overall user experience. Nurture customers with targeted email marketing that hits the mark every time, and then offer promotions and discounts to clear out your shelves quickly. Remember to leverage urgency and FOMO tactics for the best results when offering promotions.
Also, maximize AI chatbots on your page to assist customers where needed and reduce cart abandonment rates. We recommend Juphy AI to help you achieve this in no time!
Key Takeaways
- Customers may not shop from you because of website navigation difficulty, finding better offers, weak brand messaging, slow loading times, unclear descriptions, and lack of mobile-friendliness.
- To boost your sales, you can leverage a few proven strategies. Begin by enhancing product visibility through SEO and social media marketing.
- Next, build audience trust and improve your user experience. Leverage email marketing, offer discounts, and use AI chatbots like Juphy AI for enhanced customer support.
- Juphy AI is an AI-powered chatbot that helps you handle customer inquiries 24/7. It provides customers with tailored recommendations and details about orders, boosting the overall shopping experience.