Not Getting Enough Online Store Sales? Here Are 25 Ways To Fix It!

Wouldn’t you like your order count to be a bit bigger? What do you do? Here are 25 tips on how to raise your online store sales.

First, remember that all great businesses start small. Steve Jobs and his partners started in a garage. Same goes for Amazon. Franklin Mars, the creator of world renowned Snickers and Milky Way, used to sell candies at a small shop.

Any successful business you know of had to be manually developed, and your online store is no exception. Use the following ideas to increase sales!

1. Improve the design of your online store

Design issues are a common problem, especially among newbies. Any website owner wants to make it look good. However, beautiful doesn’t mean simple. And simplicity is what customers expect from your online store.

In a good online store, nothing distracts visitors from searching for products and making purchases. Take a look at popular online stores to see how minimalistic they are. And try applying the same design principles to your own website. Alternatively, try hiring a professional designer.

2. Improve navigation

Not being able to find what you want is…disappointing. So make sure your online store has a clear structure and navigation!

Revise your product categories. Maybe some goods are located in the wrong places? Because finding a T-shirt in the ‘merchandise’ category instead of ‘clothing’ makes you go berserk!

3. Speed up your website

It may sound strange, but the speed of your store is as important as everything else. After a user got to your page, he or she will wait for three seconds. Not more! If the page doesn’t open, consider this client lost.

4. To increase your online store sales, offer vouchers and coupons

Has it happened to you? You find a really good online store and a product you may want to buy. But you get assailed by doubts. In this case, all you need is a small push. After getting a discount coupon in your inbox, you might change your mind and make the purchase.

So use discounts to your advantage.

5. Introduce a simple checkout

Each and every step your potential buyer has to make during the checkout process is an obstacle. And with each obstacle, the chances of losing the customer rise.

Make the purchase process as simple as possible. Remove all unnecessary fields, remove obligatory registration, and remove anything that might distract clients on their way to the purchase.

6. Show customer testimonials

To improve your online store sales, you need to win your clients’ trust. And there’s nothing better than customer testimonials!

When we buy something, we often ask our friends about their experience with this or a similar product or service. So seeing that someone has actually bought the product and is happy with the purchase is the best promotion ever.

Post positive customer reviews and make sure to only add products that are proven to be reliable and popular among buyers.

7. Guarantee refunds

When selling, do not just offer products. Offer guarantees and safety. Return policy is highly important in ecommerce.

Whenever I purchase something online, I want to be absolutely sure I can get my money back if something goes wrong or I’m not happy with the purchase.

Don’t worry about having to refund often. With the due approach, you can avoid most of these situations.

8. Always answer your online store clients

Nowadays communication is one of the key success factors in business. So talk to your customers, answer their questions and complaints. Do not be rude, do not blame your clients even if it’s really their fault. Having them come back, again and again, is better than fooling them once.

9. Show product benefits

Do not sell products. Sell the benefits they offer!

When I buy headphones, the benefit I get is the sound quality. When I buy a cup, the cup’s size and shape I’m concerned about. Or it’s the print on the cup if I buy merchandise.

So check out your product pages and descriptions. Maybe, some of them need a clear message as to what buyers will actually get.

10. Make it urgent

It’s a popular trick to increase your online store sales based on psychology. If a customer is having doubts, tell him or her that there’s a time limit on a discount offer. It stimulates people to make decisions quickly so as not to lose the opportunity. To do that, use a countdown timer.

11. Make it scarce

There’s a similar trick to motivate website visitors. Let’s imagine I’m thinking of buying this super cool hoodie, but I’m not sure I really need it. But then I notice that there are only 5 hoodies left in stock. And here’s the choice – either I buy now or I may regret not doing so later.

Although you have plenty of goods in stock, adding a false number often works well for driving sales up.

12. Do email marketing

Do you know online shoppers who have no email address? Me neither.

Any online store has a list of their customers’ emails. You get them during the checkout process, and there are other ways to create such lists. But how do you use them?

Email marketing can work wonders if properly applied. It’s not just a tool to tell your clients about what’s happening on your website. Email marketing can drive your sales up too. This article selection will show you how to do it like a pro!

13. Try cross-selling

Cross-selling is a marketing technique based on satisfying customers’ complementary needs.

For example, I’m about to buy a set of whiskey glasses. And before I check out, the shop also offers me an ice tray.

The point is there’s a high chance I’ll buy both. If the customer is about to buy something, he or she is likely to also purchase a related item. Often people are going to buy additional items anyway so cross-selling works as a well-timed help.

14. Experiment with up-selling

A similar technique that often gets confused with the previous one is called up-selling. Unlike cross-selling, this one offers customers to replace a product they want with a more expensive (and better) version.

If I’m looking for a chair and go to a product page, the store can offer me another chair for a higher price. Yes, it’s more expensive. But it can have features the cheaper version doesn’t, and I might want the better one.

Think of it as of upgrading the offer.

Speaking of up-selling and cross-selling, consider using our Upsell add-on to apply both of these techniques.

15. Think of decoy pricing

What would you prefer – a cheaper low quality product or a pricier high quality one? And what if I offer you yet another, even pricier option?

According to statistics, people are more likely to choose a mid-tier option. It’s probably because a low-tier product seems like trash while a high-tier one is regarded as too expensive. So the middle price is just what you need!

You can add similar products with higher and lower prices in order to bring customers to buy the goods in the middle. This technique is called ‘decoy pricing’. Read more tips on pricing in this article.

16. Create a buyer persona

A buyer persona is a generalized representation of your average or ideal client. You could say, it’s the same as your target audience, i.e. your potential and actual customers.

Before trying to sell something, learn everything you can about your future clients. How old are they? What do they do? What language do they speak? How much do they earn?

You can get answers by sending out surveys or through social media.

17. Show your expertise

It’s always a good idea to keep a blog on your web store with plenty of interesting and/or useful information related to your products. Why?

First of all, such content attracts visitors and works as a good sign for search engines. Second, it’s your chance to show what you know about the stuff you sell.

People tend to buy things more eagerly from someone who’s an expert in the given field or shares the same hobby. I’d prefer buying camping gear from a store owner who’s clearly an outdoors fan just like me!

18. Make mobile your priority

More than half of online purchases are made through mobile devices. And if you want to increase your online store sales, make sure your website looks good on smartphones and tablets.

19. Perform split testing

Another term used for it is ‘A/B testing’. In short, it’s a technique to try out two or more conflicting titles, designs, navigations, etc. These versions are shown to equal numbers of random users, and after a while, you can see which option works better.

You can never tell for sure what will work and what will not. So split testing is an effective way to improve your store.

20. Use social media

Today, millions of people consume content on social networks. In some cases, people see social media not only as places for communication or entertainment but also as online marketplaces. And that’s another opportunity to increase your online business sales.

First of all, consider paid advertising on such platforms as Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter – whichever suits your business best. Advertising can be costly. Besides, its efficiency depends heavily on your understanding of the target audience, the benefits of your own product, the budget you can afford, and promotion skills.

Nevertheless, if you do everything right, the result can boost sales considerably.

But don’t use social media for advertising only. When growing an online business, you want to build a community around your brand or niche. And that’s another huge opportunity offered by social networks.

Create a social media page and post regularly. Provide followers with both useful and entertaining content. Talk to your potential customers, answer their questions, and ask yours. By talking to your followers, you can raise your brand awareness, build trust, and eventually increase online sales.

Use the Social Rabbit add-on for growing your online business on social networks. It will help you manage several accounts, automatically publish posts, follow and unfollow other accounts, and many more.

21. Send abandoned cart emails

I’ve already mentioned how to sell products online with the help of email marketing. One of the ways to use this technique is to remind site visitors of the purchases they didn’t complete.

Sometimes, potential buyers visit a store, browse the catalog, pick one or two products, add them to the cart but never finish the checkout process. The reasons can be different. The person might have changed their mind, or decided to postpone the purchase, or didn’t like the final price or delivery time. It could be that he/she simply didn’t have time to complete the purchase because of unexpected but more important issues.

No matter what, you can still get these buyers back by sending them emails that will remind them of the items they wanted to purchase. Did you know that 48% of “serial abandoners” will come back to buy the product when remarketed?

It’s also a good idea to offer a discount or another incentive.

Use AliDropship’s free Abandoned Cart add-on to automatically send emails to abandoners.

22. Provide as many payment options as possible

Another frequent reason why businesses lose potential customers is that people simply can’t pay for your products. Not because they don’t have enough money but because they can’t use the only payment method available to them.

For example, if I can’t (or don’t want to) use my debit card but would like to pay with PayPal, I’ll probably leave your site when I see that you don’t accept PayPal.

So, if you want to increase your online store sales, make sure to offer as many payment options as you can.

23. Target Facebook lookalike audiences

Despite many drawbacks, Facebook is undoubtedly a wonderful advertising platform with lots of effective tools for online product promotion. One of these tools is the ability to target lookalike audiences or lookalikes.

When you start advertising on Facebook, you can target certain groups of users who share certain interests or demographics. Some of them will show no interest in your ads, some will visit the site but will make no purchases, and a few will buy a couple of products.

These people (who made a purchase) are definitely the ones you want to target. How? When you get enough of such buyers, Facebook can analyze their demographics and behavior and create a lookalike audience. It’s an audience consisting of users who are similar to the ones it was based on.

This way, you can target millions of new users and thus increase your online sales.

24. Send free samples to influencers

One of the popular online sales techniques used by ecommerce businesses is influencer marketing. In addition to building your own community on a social network or YouTube channel, you can also ask another popular influencer to advertise or mention your product or brand.

You don’t have to get in touch with a celebrity to benefit from this marketing strategy. A person who has hundreds of thousands of followers will hardly be interested in such an offer. But the good thing is people nowadays tend to trust micro influencers more than celebrities. So, it is even more beneficial to contact a person

So, if you manage to find a person working in the same or related niche and convince them to mention your store, you get access to his/her audience in addition to yours.

To get more sales, try sending that influencer a sample product. What he or she will do with it depends on what kind of product it is. But it’s very important to be creative here.

25. Be patient

As you can see, there are lots of strategies and techniques to increase sales. However, many of them bring postponed results or may not work at all. So do not expect them to solve all your problems at once.

Instead, try them out one by one. Keep testing new strategies and solutions. Implement what worked and abandon what didn’t. Be patient and improve your store step by step. A little bit here, a little bit there. Over time, you’ll see your online store sales go up.

Now, you know what to do if your online store sales don’t make you happy! Stick to this action plan, and see your dropshipping business performance improving gradually.