Views but no sales

[palluconi33]

My store, Third Eye Books, has been open about 3 weeks and I’ve had almost 500 visitors but only 3 sales. Is there something I’m doing wrong? 

[PageFly-Victor]

Hi  @palluconi33,

This is PageFly - a Free Shopify Landing Page Builder. I would love to share my thoughts for your store based on 5 years of providing solutions for over 100.000 active Shopify merchants.

Congratulations on your store! After looking at your website, I have some feedback for your Collection page and hope that they can help you increase sales.

1. Plus point:

• Have diversity Collection so customer have wide range of choices
• Unique store name and Icon make customers remember your brand easier

2. Recommendations:

2.1. Add Favicon 

Having Favicon will help customers remember and recognize your store easier. It also shows your professionalism.

2.2. Homepage 

• The Navigation bar should be sticky

A Sticky menu bar will help people explore a webpage in a comfortable and controlled manner. Moreover, the content of the menu bar should be less complicated so customers can easily find the main information.

• Add Testimonials section

Combine customer Testimonials with other effective marketing tactics then suddenly your message is being amplified in the best possible way.

• Always highlight Core Products 

Having product detail on the Homepage is very good. It’s important to highlight key product features in order to entice users to explore the site further, the homepage shouldn’t become a “product page lite”, as including too much specific product information would overwhelm some users. Therefore, it’s important to focus on the 2–5 core product attributes that most users would be interested in.

2.3. Collection Page

• Make product collection pages easy to navigate

It's important to keep in mind that collection pages hold great promise as long as you make them easy to use. No matter how well you showcase your products, it won’t matter if your website visitors need to take numerous unnecessary steps to browse the rest of your website. This is why your navigation menu needs to be clear, concise, and designed with exceptional user experience in mind. If you prefer something a bit less minimalistic, you can use a navigation sidebar such as the ones found on websites mentioned earlier in this article.

• Use transparent background to make sure all text can be seen

Text-overlaid images often lower scannability and legibility, as the typical white or light-colored web page background is replaced with an image containing an array of colors and patterns changing throughout the image. During testing, this was observed to not only make the text more difficult to read for subjects, but it also led some subjects to wonder whether the site even wanted them to read the text or look at the image. Thus the solution is to either do manual design and verification so the chosen text wording, color, position, font, and size are customized to the exact image it is to overlay, or use an overlay semi transparent background color to position the text on.

Next one, I will take on of your collection as an example: https://thirdeyebag.com/collections/black-childrens-books

• Use “Load more” instead of pagination 

“Pagination” is by far the most popular way of loading new items in the product list — 88% of our benchmarked sites use this loading schema. However, testing has shown that subjects had significant difficulty with the “Pagination” loading schema on both desktop and mobile. 

“Load More” proved to be the loading schema that worked best across desktop and mobile devices, for both category-based product lists and search results. A “Load More” button enables users to decide whether they need to see more products, and also to have all products viewed in one page - allowing easier comparison between items. 

• Display products in grid view

In a “List View” there’s more room for including category-specific product attributes, reducing the need for the user to pogo-stick between the product list and product pages when trying to determine which products are of relevance and which aren’t. However, there are only titles besides your product, the products should be displayed in grid view. By using a “Grid View”, your store will be able to make the product thumbnails large enough so that the test subjects can accurately evaluate the products’ aesthetics directly from the product list, leading to exceptionally few product page detours.

• Include both the user rating average and number of rating

Many users rely on ratings and reviews to select products but the star average by itself provides insufficient information especially with books. 

A Shopify page builder app will be a powerful tool to help you customize your pages to the fullest. You can consider using PageFly- Advanced Builder App, FREE plan is available with full functions and features, and our Live Chat Support 24/7 is always here at your disposal. 

Above is my recommendation for your store. If you find it helpful, please let me know by giving it a like or marking it as a solution. Thank you!

[UpPromote-old]

Hi @palluconi33,

This is UpPromote: Affiliate Marketing - We are the no.1 Affiliate marketing on Shopify app store. I am happy here to share some experience and suggestions for your online store. And I truly hope that they are useful and helpful for you in improving your sales performance. 

I totally you are just starting your business. Firstly, congratulation for your first step. It would be hard at the beginning. Most other business would be same as you when beginning, and now they are successful. So be patient!

1. Your online store

I have just taken a quick look at your website. The plus points are:

• You selling products are very niche and interesting
• You also divide your products into different categories. So customers easily find different types/ colors of the products they are looking for.

If you need some suggestions you can consider to improve, I think the comments from Pagefly are useful and valuable for you to follow. They are an expert in this factor, so their suggestions will be good advices to you in improving your website.

Furthermore, you should try to sell your products to different social channels such as Facebook or Instagram and link them to your website. The more place your products existed, the more customer will know you.

Regarding marketing strategy, I think you should spend first priority to find the methods which brings positive results with no risky and low cost. It much better for you at this time.

1. Run Facebook ads

Running ads such as Facebook ads, or Instagram ads, even Google ads are popular methods to viral your products faster. You can get more knowledge and experience here: Facebook Ads for beginners. With Google Ads, you can easily attract target customers that are looking for the products you are selling. You can set your ads with different keywords, or banner as well. However, you should consider it because it is not really a potential choice for starters. The reason is that you might cost a lost of money to run for long term. In some specific case, if it don't bring positive traffics for you, you also need to pay fee to maintain them. We know it because we know many customers get same issues. 

2. SEO

One of the most important functions of SEO is increasing visibility, which means making it easier for prospects to find you when they search for something you have to offer. Visibility is directly related to your ranking. The ultimate reason SEO is essential is that it can help you achieve many of your business goals. SEO can help you drive more people to your site, give you an edge over the competition, and increase conversions, which means more sales, more loyal customers, and more growth for your business. You can use SEO apps from Shopify app store such as SEO Booster ‑ SEO Marketing to support you in developing SEO marketing campaign.

3. Using affiliate marketing

My recommendation is that you should think about another safer and suitable methods for your business. Affiliate marketing could be a good option for your.  Affiliate marketing is a marketing model which allows you to connect with various affiliates, and then they will use their advertising sources such as social media channels, websites, blogs, etc, to promote your products. You only need to pay affiliate commission whenever a customer makes a purchase via the unique link or coupon associated with their recommendation.

How to publish your affiliate registration on your menu bar?

You can add the affiliate registration form on the shop menu, so any visitors who visit your site can easily approach your affiliate campaign.

Your affiliate can create an account and log in right in your shop, which is really simple and convenient. However, your should redesign your navigation menu. This needs to be clear and concise.

The advantages of affiliate Marketing compared with other methods

1. 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. 

2. 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. 

3. Brand Awareness

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. 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.

4. SEO Value

Publishers (the affiliates) link to your website to send traffic your way. Provided they aren’t spammy, these links are usually beneficial for your off-page SEO efforts, since inbound links are a huge factor in Google’s ranking algorithm.

5. Customer Data

UpPromote: Affiliate Marketing provides you valuable data and insight into how, where and why your customers are buying, which you can then use to make smarter marketing decisions in the future across other channels.

Here are our recommendation to push your sales with affiliate marketing:

1. Offer a competitive commission

When setting the commission rules, make sure that it is compatible with your market (not too low or too high in comparison with your competitors).

You can setup your commission structure for each commission program. for example you can pay your affiliate percentage of sale, flat rate per order, or flat rate per item.

Via UpPromote: Affiliate Marketing, beside setting program commission, you can also set special commission rules for specific products that might be useful for promoting products with higher/lower price or higher/lower profit margins. Merchant can make use of this feature by offering a higher commission rate for the product you want to drive more sales.

2. Generate coupon code:

A lot of shoppers search for coupons to see if it's a chance they can save some money upon purchasing. Thus, assigning a coupon code for your affiliates can both bring benefits to the customers and help your members to convince the consumers to buy from them.

Moreover, a discount coupon can be easily shared and remembered, which is useful for social media promotion. Also, you can freely set a coupon rule, not limited by just percentage discount, it can be fixed amount discount, Free shipping, Buy X get Y,...

Plus, you have an option to assign multiple coupons for each affiliate, which helps them with numerous options to support your brand. Coupon code within UpPromote: Affiliate Marketing can be assigned manually or automatically.

3. Offer higher commission rate for outstanding affiliates

On the other hand, you can motivate your team by moving them to a different program once they reach a proper level (such as referring 1000 orders successfully). As affiliates sell more, they earn more. It is a simple but very effective way to encourage affiliates to promote your products or services.

A clear tier system will encourage the affiliate to drive more conversion to your brand, a tier model could look like this:

• 0 – 1000 referrals = 20% commission

• 1000– 2000 referrals = 25% commission

• 2000– 5000 referrals = 30% commission

• 5000+ referrals = 35% commission

You can use UpPromote: Affiliate Marketing to build your own auto-tier commission rule easily.

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I hope my recommendation will be helpful for you. If you are still looking for a marketing tool to boost your sales greatly, I hope you can try our product: UpPromote: Affiliate Marketing 

If these feedbacks are valuable and helpful, kindly give us a "Like" or mark it as a solution. Be patient with your business and good luck!

All the bests,

UpPromote: Affiliate Marketing

Build. Manage. Succeed with Affiliate Marketing

[Raphaell_Vein]

Send your store URL for review

[Lilith]

Hi, @palluconi33. Congrats on launching your store! Getting visitors is a tough thing to do for some new business owners and sounds like you're doing something right.

That said, there are a few areas that are very vague in your post. You'll receive a lot of generalized tips and advice, but to get a better more tailored solution to your question you'll need to share more information.

Some things that will help us all with your post are as follows:

• Share your URL
  • Without this, we can't advise the most optimized type of strategies that would work for your unique specific business and aspects of it.
• How are you getting traffic?
  • Sharing this will let us know what you already are doing and if there is a funnel step that you may be missing that is causing your low conversions.
  • This also helps us determine your level of experience and understanding of marketing strategy and advise you based on your current level.

To be successful in your business you'll need to have a well-defined goal as well as clear details of how to reach that. For this I always recommend all business owners create at least a one-page marketing plan so that there is a "GPS" that you can follow to get to your goal.

Additionally, it sounds like there may be some development in your sales funnel. I suggest taking a look at our buyer persona guide so you can have a clear idea of who your customer is and that will help you determine how to market and convert those visitors into long-term buyers.

Of course, this isn't the specifically tailored advice you might need, but this will help you in general terms in the meantime.

Feel free to reply with more information on your business and we can take a look at more specific suggestions for you.