Reasons Why Your Online Shop Isn’t Making Sales.

Your online shop isn’t making any sales. You might be getting traffic, but no one seems to be buying your products, or adding to their cart. You might even be running paid ads, but your ads aren’t converting to sales, making you crazy, and broke. Why are your sales stuck at zero!?

The following is a list of reasons why this might be happening and what you can do about it.

First reason, price. It could be that your products are priced too high. The way that you can test this is by lowering the price of your product. I would also suggest you do some market research to see what other products are priced at in your market. If they are priced much lower, you need to reconsider your pricing. If you need to lower your prices, do so without dipping into your margins too much. 

Next reason, market placement. If you are certain that the market you are targeting needs what you are selling, but you are not making sales, it could be that you don’t know who you’re target market is, or that you are targeting too broad. Try to be more niche-specific. Also, take a look at your data and see if you can find any information on demographics, gender, age group, or another area that will give you insight. Then, work on positioning your brand in that Marketplace. This is why I tell people to do their research first, then develop their brand and their products around that. 

Third, you don’t have enough traffic. Let’s say you’re the shop owner who has just launched your shop and you’re officially running paid ads to your website trying to make sales. You quickly notice you have more money going out, than coming in. So, you decide to turn off your ads to see what the problem is…and you notice you have zero organic traffic coming to your website (less than 20 visits a week). 

This could be because your shop is too new, your domain is too new, your SEO is terrible, or you don’t have an organic marketing strategy on social yet. To put it bluntly, no one knows about you, or worse, no one cares. If no one cares refer to steps 1 and 2 above. 

If you have spent more money on ads than making sales, and turn off your ads only to find ALL of your traffic is being paid for…you’re only spending money on buying data to tell you who you’re target market. Hopefully, you figured it out. A word of caution friend, this is the wrong way to go about getting your data, and try not to run ads until you are making sales. If this sounds like you, turn them off. Just stop doing what you’re doing and invest in an organic strategy ASAP!

When you are invested in SEM, SEO, email, and social strategy, you are going to be driving traffic to your shop, and see who the right people are that are interested in your product. They will go to your website, and your website analytics will tell you who they are, how old they are, where they came in from, and hopefully give you their email address! 

Lastly, your shop might not be making sales because you weren’t detailed enough in your market research. It could be that your target market is nonexistent, or that your product is a new or breakthrough product. If this is the case, and not many people know about your product, how to use it, why they need it, how it benefits them or adds value to their lives, then much of your marketing effort and energy is going to be circulating around education.

You need to tell educate the market, provide them with resources, benefits, use cases, testimonials, user-generated content, all the things that are going to help educate your people about your product. This can take some time, effort, and a lot of strategy before the market even catches on…if they catch on. The beauty industry and many of its products is the perfect example of what I am talking about here. You will have to get really creative and get deep inside the minds of your consumer to really educate them, then ask for a sale. 
If you have a shop that is not making sales and would like extra eyes on your website, product, or current marketing strategy, then get in touch! We can work together to get your online shop marketing and sales channels moving.