My store generated great initial results ( few dozen sales in a week). But then slowed.

[duckllife]

Hi! 

( website ; www.ducklife.ca )

Im just looking for experienced Shopify users to take a look at my store, and provide general feedback.

A little background :

I attempted a dropshipping model store a few years back, failed miserably; and ultimately convinced myself the business model is impossible and gave up. Well, iv recently had some time on my hands, saw the 3 months of Shopify for $3 promo, and decided to give it another crack. Im a university marketing major and genuinely find the advertising, and drawing potential customers to my store addicting. My first week blew my expectations, and I now have a lot more customers and orders than I expected.

The problem i'm facing is that my growth has not been exactly consistent, and with paying for online ad space, im finding it difficult to constituently generate revenues relative to my ad spend.

Potential obvious solutions;

Now I know obvious solutions are to quit payed ads and go 100% down the organic route. Id like to add I'm grinding organic content, while also running payed advertising.

A second solution would be to raise my margins to make up for the difference, I however find there's a significant hurdle in selling most my products for more than the $15-$20/unit price point.

Website;

I think before I completely change my advertising approach, id like to see what community members think I could do on a website level to increase conversion. Because the actual driving of traffic hasn't been much of an issue, just keeping people on the site, and ultimately converting has been more difficult.

Final Point ;

I chose to go down the animal accessory niche, I'm not 100% convinced I can continue growth when not in a peak shopping season, if you have any thoughts on my products, feel free to let me know!

Thanks so much,

* Edit * : Id also like to ask if it's justifiable to operate at a daily loss in the near term to create long term brand awareness under the drop shipping model? 

[duckllife]

@Adebim98 I do, my customers are emailed when they abandoned their cart.

[duckllife]

I plan on ramping up email marketing soon. I just don't think I have enough subscribed emails to justify it just yet. I have about 7 subscribed, and think once I have a few dozen emails, then it would be more worth while. At the moment I'm focusing on driving traffic through paid ( currently at a loss) and organic content. Once iv established a solid pool of customers, then blasting them with repeat business campaigns. 

Correct me if im wrong, but allocating my energy to creating content for socials, in building the brand/social following and a pool of first time customers, should take priority over creating email campaigns targeted at the small pool of customers iv already converted on ( and haven't received delivery of their first order yet)

Don't get me wrong,I do see the importance of email marketing, I just think its much more valuable and worth while later on. 

[QuickCEP-]

hi @duckllife ,

This is QuickCEP-software that can help you increase your income.

Congratulations, your website has achieved good results. I visited your website, and there are still some content on your website that needs to be optimized. After that, we will continue to consider the issue for customer acquisition.

Your website is very beautiful, and the basic construction has been finished, but your website lacks user retention and consultation portals. Most of your current conversion rate is due to the accurate advertising of your website.

It is recommended that you add some conversion functions to the website, including the pop-up function of attracting user to fill email address and the chat module for user consultation. These contents can effectively increase the probability of users leaving emails.

With the customer’s email, you can push marketing advertisements to facilitate later conversion. The cost of using this type of software is not too high, and there are even some free products that can be used.

In this pop-up window, you can add some information to attract users, for example, fill in the email address to get a 20% coupon, so as to increase the probability of the user leaving the email address.

Besides, our product QuickCEP, a really cost-effective, useful marketing app. It helps you do all-round marketing automation with professional advice, build your customer data platform , and it also has chatbot function, which means you don't need to pay for Tidio, Omnisend, Klaviyo any more. Fill in the invitation code with '10KE' when registering, you'll get 1-year free trial, and 10,000 free emails for free! I hope this answer could help you out!

You have already obtained part of the traffic through advertising, and when you increase the advertising budget, you can expand the user group, which unfortunately will lead to the problem of inaccurate user groups. It is recommended that you do not increase the additional advertising budget. If your advertising model has been verified successfully, You can transplant this content to other platforms to increase the conversion rate of users.

Then, you can consider getting users in the community and social media through content to ensure the conversion rate of users.

If you find this answer helpful, please give us a Like and Accept the solution.

Best Regards,

QuickCEP

[SAN_MSWEB]

Hi @duckllife!

I hope you are doing good and welcome to the Shopify Community!

This is MS Web Designer (Top Rated Shopify Certified Experts and eCommerce Consultant from Singapore).

Thank you for sharing your store URL as this allowed me to go through your website. You have a beautiful store!

Mentioning a few pointers that I think will be useful:

- Keep a Hero Banner on Home page that showcases your most premium product with a CTA button.

- Create a Customer profile icon and wishlist icon next to the cart icon.

- Make the 'more payment options' button bold so customers don't miss it.

- Speed Optimization is recommended for your website as its scoring 47 on mobiles and 76 on desktops. A fast website scores 90+. This affects your search engine ranking.

As for sales:

- How many customers visit you daily?

- How many of them are adding products to Cart?

- How many of them are abandoning cart?

- Is your product priced competitively?

Do let me know about these pointers.

That's about all I could notice from a glance at your store.

Feel free to DM us for a detailed website audit which will help you figure what else is required for your website!
 

We'd love to assist you in any way possible!

Best of luck and Regards!

MS Web Designer

[duckllife]

Hi! 

Quickly to answer your questions ; 

1. My daily visits range depending on my daily ad spend, but usually 250-500

2. My data is a little skewed as I accidentally spent budget on advertising to -18 users, which resulted in a low cpm; but very low conversion activity. I would say based on my observation that true add to cart conversion is actually pretty good.

3. Through my customers that initiate a checkout, a surprisingly large % complete checkout.

4. I tried to price my product at a psychologically comfortable price. Let me explain this; I did product research and looked around, my product can be purchased for marginally cheaper if you look around. Going back to the psychological aspect, I figured if I sold a product with some viral appeal, that was priced in the ~$15-$20 range; customers wouldn't even bother to price check competition, to potentially save a few dollars. I know this to be true based on discount code usage. My customers seem to be tolerant of the pricing.

Question for you;

What are some quick ways I can speed up my site?

You recommend a hero banner over how I just have my product page preview in my homepage?