Almost 3 months and no sales since launching shoe brand

[RuiOliveira]

Hello there,

I've been running facebook/instagram ads for almost 3 months and still no sales. I have little traffic, over 50 people a day, but no one buys. And very little organic traffic... 1 or 2 people a day.

The ads budget has been 250-350€ per month.

I also have SEO done and some ads from google merchant app. The website was done by a company and now I manage the store.

I am not sure what else I can do to improve or the reason for failling. Can I get some advice? 

Feel free to check out the store: https://www.autentikaconcept.com

I also share Instagram and Facebook, if it helps.

Thanks!

[David262]

Hello there friend314

How are you doing, I saw your post and I really understand what you are going through, but say no more I have the perfect solution, would be glad to share you some info ಠ‿ಠ

[Sales12]

Wow the store is really awesome and nicely done with a great customization and style but there's a lot of trendy functionality that you need to add to your store before you start doing marketing implementation there that's i can't found there which is hindering getting sales into your website. 

[Vvel]

Seo is gonna take a long time. On page and off page. Backlinks are no longer as strong as before and repeating keywords to be relevant either. Seo is more work now. Constantly keeping up with relevant keywords and such. Blogging, linking, guest posting. As for Google ads you have to spend over 1000 per month and it will go over your daily budget that u set it on. So your better with social media or perfecting seo.

[millimetricai]

• You should find your key product and just promote it on Instagram since you have a limited budget. Do not spend your money on Facebook. 
  
  
• You can use promoted posts ad to drive users to your instagram profile instead of driving them to the website. Also, it will increase your followers.
   
• It is very hard to compete on organic results if you are selling non-brand products. So you can specify your products based on their spesifications like "Goat leather brownt sneaker" instead of "Hope sneaker". It would bring you long tail traffic. 
  
  
• Pinterest would be a good and free option for promoting your products. You can specify your products and share them on Pinterest. 
  
  
• Find free local magazines or newspapers and have a PR. It could bring you some backlinks. 

I hope these helps 

[PageFly-Richard]

Hi @RuiOliveira, 

There are two main reasons (and most common) that sales went stale in spite of traffic: 

• You're targeting the wrong audience, and your ads kept showing up to people who're not your ideal customers. The best way to see if you're having this problem is to go back to the drawing board, draw a more detailed customer persona, (maybe do some qualitative and quantitative customer research), then test your ads with different groups of audience to verify your customer persona. 
• Your store design might not be good enough. But this might not be applicable since you already have an amazing store with lots of customized elements. So what I'd suggest is that you try other low-cost marketing approaches: TikTok and Pinterest Marketing would be perfect for a fashion-ish store like yours. 

that's my two cents 

Let's me know if my answer is of any help with a thumb up or like 😄 

Cheerio

[PaolaCastano]

Heyyy Rui! Congrats on your store!

What can you do to increase our online sales? These are some of our recommendations: 

1. Don’t lose sight of your SEO strategy.
2. Make a careful, calculated SEM (paid traffic) strategy with a daily and/or weekly budget. You can start running your advertising campaigns with a free Google ads and shoping app for Shopify. 
3. Study your audience in-depth and make targeted ads, i.e. more personalized. This is known as targeting. Knowing your target audience is essential!
4. Get good at branding. An unknown brand will not attract people to your website! Work on branding, it will give you long-term benefits like SEO – they are worthwhile! 
5. Study the sources of acquisition for your website and promote the most profitable ones. Organic traffic, direct traffic, referred traffic, paid traffic and social traffic are the most common sources that you should not lose sight of.
6. Which devices do your users usually buy on? If you notice that it’s from their cell phones, your website has to be responsive or have an AMP design! Making the purchase process from mobile will be easier and more comfortable for your users.

If you need more details, we have a blog post about how to sell shoes online.

[UpPromote-old]

Hi @RuiOliveira,

We have look your store. It's nice. In fact, we totally understand that the beginning time could be harder for every businesses. The point is that you need to choose your marketing strategy wisely. However, not many businesses they have a huge budget to invest running marketing campaign. Facebook ads, Instagram ad, even Google ads are popular methods to viral your products faster. However, it is not really a potential choice for starters. Because you might cost you lost of money to run for long term. Even if it don't bring positive results for you, you also need to pay fee to maintain them. We know it because we know many customers get same issues as you. 

My recommendation is that you should change your marketing strategy. Affiliate marketing could be a good option for your, especially at this time. Affiliate marketing is known as a marketing strategy where merchants can push up their profit margin via the global affiliate network. More specifically, this marketing campaign allows products/ services to be approached to target audiences through blog contents, social media channels, or websites of the affiliates. The affiliates earn a commission each time when a customer makes a purchase via the unique link or coupon associated with their recommendation. With this method, you have no risky. You only need to pay for your affiliates as long as they bring sales for you.

Here are some benefits  of affiliate marketing:

1. Make extra income

The main advantage of affiliate marketing is that the income is entirely performance-based. This is because affiliates are only paid a commission when a purchase has taken place. That means if the affiliates have an ineffective campaign, it won’t affect your budget. 

The affiliates understand that driving huge traffic of potential customers will help to increase sales conversion. For this reason, the affiliates will spend much effort to build effective social platforms, promotion or boosting posts of your products in a better way to attract customers. The more efficiently they work, the more commission they generate, and the more sales you earn. 

Another instance, if you want to drive specific products which have low profit, you can use UpPromote: Affiliate Marketing to set the best special commission rule such as offering a higher commission rate for each specific product. That will create affiliate motivation to work harder.

2. Expand your target audiences

The plus of affiliate marketing is to expand out into new markets that you haven't explored, giving your brand a much stronger online presence. By working with affiliates, you not only get your products reach to new audiences, but also create an awareness that could have the potential to extend beyond a single-product promotion.

3. Low investment but high cost effective

In fact, affiliate marketing does not need a huge amount to build a customer service team, or running advertising. This campaign helps to mitigate any risks that drive traffic or run social ads with little or no result for your Shopify business, while also ensuring that merchants achieve what they pay for.

In fact, whereas a poor marketing campaign that sends you low quality results will still need to be paid for, even if you make no sales. However, affiliate marketing ensures your marketing is cost effective and helps to reduce the risk of “leaking out” money for an uncertain market. 

4. Promote business brand name

By partnering with trusted ambassadors, you can further your reputation significantly. In fact, in the research phase of an online purchase, customers will spend their priority for retailers they are familiar with. They have a certain level of trust in websites they frequently visit for finding product recommendations. As a result, when these reliable partners champion your products, that will further solidify consumer confidence in your Shopify business. 

A research reported that 92% of customers trust the recommendations of people, companies or influencers they know. For this reason, working directly with affiliate marketers who then promote your products to their established audience, brings more opportunities and more direct sales.

Here are some recommendations when you start affiliate marketing with low cost:

1. Create affiliate program - FREE

UpPrmote: Affiliate Marketing classifies affiliates per program so you can easily manage each affiliate group. Each program has one commission rate (offer). So to start working with Affiliate marketing using our app, you (the merchant) need to have an affiliate program. In the program, you need to set a commission rule and a special product commission rule (if any)

2. Create affiliate registration form

3. Find your affiliates by listing your offers on UpPromote Marketplace - FREE

UpPromote Marketplace includes top Shopify offers that are open to any affiliate to join and apply. Also, affiliates have an option to filter offers by categories, payment method, commission structure and even lifetime commission, offer format applies to all profiles, so the more information is provided, the more possibility it is that affiliates are interested in yours.

Choosing your correct category and having a competitive commission rate is a key factor to increase the chance your offer will be more noticeable than the others.

Plus, on your description, be noted to focus on how your products stand out from the rest on the market, as well as highlight some beneficial points when becoming your brand ambassadors.

Once the viewers want to know more about your brand, they will have an option to visit your website, it's halfway there to turn them into your members.

4. Share your affiliate program on your shop menu - FREE

Think about some ways that affiliate can approach your campaign: they are scanning their social feed and see a post of your affiliate campaign, they accidentally see your product and find it could be a lucrative item to promote, they are researching some shop in the niche and find yours,...

There are many ways to catch affiliate's eye proactively or passively, but make sure whenever they enter your main site, your campaign is transparently shown, the best practice is to put your program on Shop menu or footer or pin the project on your social profiles. UpPromote: Afiliate Marketing will support you to do it by one click

Also, if you are new to the affiliate model, one recommendation is that you should try as many channels to approach affiliates as possible, after testing all the options, you might find the one that actually works for your brand.

5. Find your affiliate through social channels - FREE

The most popular social channels are Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

You can search on the search bar of those tool with keywords of your niche market, especially, search with hashtags of your business to see who’ve posted about your brand or look up the relevant suggested keyword to find influencers that post about your industry.

6. Create affiliate link - FREE

Affiliate link is generated automatically by UpPrmote: Affiliate Marketing when they get activated. Affiliate will use that link to promote the merchant shop and any order made through that link will become a referral order.

Affiliate coupon: has the same purpose with affiliate link, affiliate coupon is another option for affiliates to promote the merchant's site.

7. Track referral orders and affiliate performance - FREE

Any referral order made by customers thanks to affiliate will be counted as a referral order.  UpPrmote: Affiliate Marketing will help you track automatically via the real-time tracking system.

Affiliate performance:  Through referral orders made from affiliate link and coupon, UpPrmote: Affiliate Marketing will monitor and report affiliate performance with details of  clicks/ sales

Here is a real story of a success business using affiliate marketing: Armin Reischer: How we monitor all affiliates and boost our sales – Blog Uppromote

I hope my recommendation is helpful for you! Good luck with your business!

All the bests,

UpPrmote: Affiliate Marketing

[RishAtMason]

Hey @RuiOliveira!

Have you run remarketing ads to try to narrow down why people are not buying your products? I'm sure you have theories around why—price point, product options, etc. or maybe even just being indecisive.

I think you should have 2 types of ads:

1- Bringing in more "new" traffic. 50 is a great start, but you should definitely be aiming for higher!

and,

2- Retargeting people who've visited your website with a customized offer, product reminder, or test out any solution to other reasons people may not be making the purchase!

PS: Consider adding a "Sale" section to your navigation bar and see if that helps?

[MariAdrenalead]

Hi @RuiOliveira 

Good job !!! 

I was browsing your website and I think it's very well designed. It has a very good UX and the products are very attractive and creative.

I will advise you to activate Web Push Notifications by Adrenalead on your eCommerce website and start to maximize your conversions.

You can find Retargeting and Remarketing solutions to turn your visitors into qualified leads. 

More details here: https://adrenalead.com/en/remarketing-web-push-notification-nouvel-eldorado/

[vinods]

Hi 

I see you have 2 stores

https://datsuzokudecor.com/

And the other one 

https://www.autentikaconcept.com/

Which store do you want the feedback for? 

Thank you

[KimberlyB]

Hi @RuiOliveira,

I suggest you try affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing makes your brand more reliable to potential customers. A brand will always say good things about its products and buyers rarely believe them. They will only trust your brand if they hear good things about your brand from other sources, like their favorite blogger, or the YouTube channel they always follow. To learn more about it you can always visit our blog.

We also offer an app that can help you generate codes, track and monitor ambassador's sales. If you want to give it a try, install it for free here.