Otterly Different: A store with a good purpose - getting page views but hardly any sales

[Otterlydifferen]

Hi 

Please find my store: www.OtterlyDifferent.shop

It's a clothing store based on Print on Demand with Printful - and it has a clear purpose: helping spread awareness for and fight against 'lesser known' animals that are going extinct.

The value pitch is: 
- Wearing the clothing brings awareness for these animals and their difficult situation.
- We donate half the profit to a specific charity that helps that specific animal in need. 
- We have two collections: Iconic (minimalistic embroid logo) and Otterly (more artistic design and printed).

The purpose is to start with Print on Demand to test the concept and if proven that there is a market for people wanting to help these animals - switch to an 'actual clothing brand' with my own labels, packaging, etc. 

Some info:

- Store has been live for a small 3 weeks
- Before launching my webshop - I built out an Instagram page with 1.5K Active followers - Animal lovers / Not specifically fashion lovers. 
- I have about 900 EUR (17 Orders) in sales but mostly from family and friends (only 3 people that I didn't know or I don't know through a shared connection)
- I have 1.3K store visitors - 1.2K Unique visitors. 
- I have been running multiple FB ads (mostly photo or carrousel ads) - cost per click is hovering around 0,3 EUR to about 0,5 EUR. People are actively clicking on the ads. 
- Average stay of people coming from Insta/FB is about half a minute. 

My Worry or issue: 
- I'm afraid that I'm getting views and people on my website but no real conversions. (next to my friends / Connections)
- I'm wondering what I can do better to get more real conversions and sales. 

Thanks for your expertise and I'm ready to learn.

Cheers, 
Cedric

[NikkiElizDeMere]

Hi Cedric!

Love the concept of your store! I'm a fan of it in general. 

Here's some feedback.

Homepage

• Great job on the value proposition! Here's a resource about value propositions in case you ever revisit your language.
  
  “A value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered. It’s the primary reason a prospect should buy from you. It’s also the #1 thing that determines whether people will bother reading more about your product or hit the back button. On your site, your value proposition is the main thing you need to test—if you get it right, it will be a huge boost.”

Resources for value prop design

Value proposition worksheet
Value Proposition Design book

• Move the main call-to-action ("Discover our impact") above the fold. 
  
  
• Add a live chat functionality.
  
  
• Love that you've included a video about your mission, that shoppers can browse by animal ('surprise me' is totally fun!), and that you have a splash section for your blog.

Product pages

• Add copy to each product page in the form of storytelling (in addition to the product description). This is good practice for both SEO and conversions.
  
  On some pages, you have a sentence or two, but you definitely want to have at least a paragraph. 

Joanna Wiebe and Alaura Weaver share 11 storytelling elements:

A relatable protagonist/hero (your target customer)
A world (the emotional motivators)
A call to adventure (goal or problem to solve)
The stakes/refusal of the call (nightmare scenario)
A helper (your brand)
A magical item (your offer)
Crossing the first threshold (CTA)
The belly of the whale (onboarding/lead nurturing)
Road of trials (split-testing)
The happily ever after (future pacing)
The return (testimonials & brand advocacy)

• Gather and share more social proof in the form of product video reviews written reviews, and photos from customers.

More than 50% of shoppers say online video has helped them decide which brand or product to buy (Google).
67% of shoppers turn to video at least once before making a purchase (Moz).

• Consider offering free shipping on all products and just work shipping into product pricing. Once you offer free shipping, provide details about it immediately beneath the Add to Cart button.

In a survey by Walker Sands Communications, 90% of people said that having an order ship for free is the biggest incentive to add more to their cart, while another survey found up to 74% of shoppers will abandon their cart if delivery fees are too high. More on that here.

• Ensure that you don't display any products that are sold out unless customers can share their e-mail address to be notified when the item will be back in stock.

• Ensure all photographs of products are in high-resolution. According to Justuno, 93% of consumers consider visual content to be the key deciding factor in a purchasing decision. 

“About Us” page: 

• Your "About Us" page is great!! In case you want to double check it, Talia Wolf shares 4 rules for creating a high-converting "About Us" page that I recommend double checking for your page:
• Make it about the customer
• Talk to your customer, not at them
• Tell the story
• Don’t just say it, show it

Social media

• If you haven't: create a unique hashtag and encourage customers to use it and tag your store on Instagram, etc.

SEO

• Ensure that your website meets the standards on Google Search Central.
• For on-page SEO, add original, creative content to your home page and product pages.
• For off-page SEO, get backlinks via partnerships, guest blogging, communities, social media.

Moz details Google SEO tips for 2021: 

• Favicon optimization
• Breadcrumb optimization
• Meta descriptions
• Numbers in titles
• <title> boilerplate
• FAQ and how-to schema
• Relaunch top content
• Increase internal linking
• Update old content with new links
• Remove unnecessary links
• Mobile link parity audit
• Invest in long-form content
• Use more headers
• Leverage topic clusters
• Bring content out of tabs
• Core Web Vitals
• Limit sitemaps to 10,000
• Leverage dynamic sitemaps
• Passive link acquisition
• Page-level link intersect
• Be the last click

Also, I shared 21 e-commerce trends for 2021 in the Shopify community in case you also want to check that out.

[Otterlydifferen]

Hi, 

this is some great stuff to work with! Thanks a lot 🙂

Have a great day

[AiTrillion]

Hello @Otterlydifferen, I hope you are doing well! Every eCommerce seller faces this sooner or later. Another catch-22 situation arises when you end up spending a bomb on advertising for your store. 

Sachin here, from the AiTrillion-an All-in-one Marketing Platform on Shopify. Thanks for posting! I've taken a look at your store, and see that your store's overall appearance is visually appealing, and must say you worked hard to make it live. However, here are some inputs from my side:

- The viewport is too small. Make it large.

- There is a blank space in the header. Also, add a call to action button on the banner image in the first fold of the homepage. 

- Add reviews. When assessing a site, we want to know what others have thought of the products they sell and the service provided. That is where customer reviews come in, they are an indicator that other people have shopped on the site and enjoyed their purchase.

Add these customer engagement tools to your store to drive conversion by engaging the traffic coming to your store and make them want to purchase:

- Setup Newsletter Subscription with automatic emails with thankyou and discount coupon. Add newsletter subscription box in the footer. 

- You should add a loyalty rewards program to your store. You can give loyalty points to your customers on activities like on signing up, leaving a review, allowing for push notification, visiting a store, on birthdays, on first purchase, follow/ share on social media. This will help you to entice customers and will increase the number of push subscribers, email subscribers. This will also help you in collecting the review. You can send an in-email review form to your customers. This can be sent automatically.

Integration of loyalty rewards program with web push notification, review, email marketing, and with full automation results in wonders for the eCommerce stores. It will help you in increasing conversions and sales on your store and retain the customers for the long term.

- Add a web push notification. It turns visitors into subscribers and subscribers into customers. It can be sent even when customers are not in your store and bring back the lost customer to your store. You can also send an abandoned cart push notification, it helps to reduce the abandoned cart rate.

Moreover, if you would like to implement the above customer engagement features/ marketing tools in your store I suggest you to install the 'All in one' Shopify app AiTrillion, a full-fledged marketing solution. It will help you to capture visitors coming to your store and will help in getting more conversions.

Hope this helps!

[Arunesh]

Hey @Otterlydifferen 

Hope you are doing well.

Your store looks quite alluring and professional. I've gone through your store thoroughly and I must say I found the user experience very rich and friendly. The website has been designed very meticulously and I am sure, it will be a hit in no time. 

There are very few stores like yours on the internet having such a beautiful concept. But I think even a website such elegant as yours need some marketing. Marketing and promotion are the second most important jobs to be done, once you've launched your website.

Most of the points have already been covered in the above replies. However my suggestion:

• No matter how much you advertise, it won't matter until and unless your advertisement receives a suitable audience. So I'd highly suggest you to use Google analytics and make decisions accordingly.

You have such a large product collection, which I am sure consumes a lot of your valuable time. And in the future, it will affect your strategies when you'll plan to expand your business. 

We at Descrii, help startups like yours in their early stage and help them grow.

We generate Compelling Product Descriptions, generate Facebook Ad Copies, generate Google Search Ads, generate Instagram Captions, Brainstorm Growth Ideas. 

You get all these in one single place saving you a lot of valuable time. The time which you can invest in expanding your business. We will be more than happy to help you out with your queries. Kindly contact us if you need further assistance.

Well wishes!

Arunesh Kumar

Marketing Officer, Descrii 

Visit Our Website-  https://descrii.tech/

Find us on Shopify store-  https://apps.shopify.com/descrii-smart-descriptions

Contact-  hello@descrii.tech