How to increase online sales

Advice  •  Fri 17 Feb 2017

Here are some of the hard truths about running an online shop and what you can do to boost sales.

Selling online is hard. 

Most online shops don't make it past their first year.

Why? Because, most new online shop owners don't know how to manage their shop, drive visitors to it and convert them into buyers. Your typical online shop has been established by a person who is passionate about their products, but knows very little about how to market them. Sound familiar?

When it comes to running an online shop there are three areas you want to focus on:

1. Promoting your online shop
2. The shopping experience
3. Converting more visitors into buyers

Promoting your online shop

When it comes to promoting your website for the purpose of selling a service, your best platform is probably Google Adwords. With Google Adwords, you specify what keywords and phrases to target and what to ignore. So therefore, your ad is only shown to people who are actively searching for something like the service you are selling. 

If you're selling a product however, you're typically better of with Facebook ads, because then you can use pictures, videos, slides, or even the all-powerful Facebook canvas. 

The shopping experience 

If your online shop looks like it was built by an amateur, your products also look amateurish. If you're not prepared to invest in your website, how can you expect your customers to invest in you?

Here are some tips on improving your overall shopping experience:

• Hire a designer to go through your website and improve the branding, the logo, the graphics.
• Use only professional photography
• Update your copy, spelling and grammar

Good photography sells products, poor photography does not! 

Many of the online shops I build are for businesses selling clothes and, if you want to sell clothes, you need attractive models to wear them. You also need a hair stylist, a make up artist, and above all, a professional photographer.

It's not cheap, but in the long run, good photography pays for itself. Trust me. Plus, it's not just your website that will benefit from the professional photography. Think about all of your Facebook ads and brochures that will benefit from it too.

Typing is easy, writing great content is not.

Hire a professional copywriter who can make your content more engaging. 

A common mistake I see many small businesses make is writing too much or too little content. Balancing the length of your content is a crucial component to a successful website and requires that you go over your content more than once. 

Think about your ideal customer and write your website content as if it were for them only. 

Converting more visitors into buyers

If only 2% of the people who clicked on your ad become sales, you're actually doing a really good job. Statistically, travel websites convert the highest number of visitors into buyers, roughly 7%. Most new online shops only covert around 0.1% making advertising a far more costly endeavour than it should be.

Start by adding up every step that a customer needs to take to browse, add to cart, and check out. Each of these steps is a potential drop off point, a point where your buyer could change their mind. Obvious then, that the fewer the steps, the better.

The moment a buyer sees a product they want to buy and the exact number of steps required to buy it should be 3:

1. Add item to cart
2. View cart
3. Checkout and pay

Consider each step in more detail. If adding items to the cart is clumsy, shipping is puzzling, or worst of all, you require that your customers login before they can pay, you're only damaging your own chances of making a sale.

Thankfully, with the help of Google Analytics you can now measure how well each of these 3 steps perform individually.

Within your Google Analytics reporting page, under the behaviour heading is an option labelled Behaviour Flow. This feature provides detailed insight on how visitors move through the pages of your website and importantly, where they drop off. Armed with this data you can easily target the step(s) requiring the most attention.

Summing up

Having passion in your products alone is simply not enough to run a successful online shop. There are many unique areas that you need to consider and this article only touches on some. Hopefully though, there's enough here to help you to get started in the right direction.

Good luck!

As always, if you have any questions regarding the content of this article, feel free to contact me.