Why Do You Struggle Hard to Generate Sales on Shopify in 2024?

Do you struggle hard to generate sales on the Shopify store?

As an entrepreneur, your first sale is an important milestone but achieving it is hard. You need an ironclad strategy for your business to get into the spotlight at the right time. The right place is Shopify, but Shopify does not work like any other e-commerce website.

Creating an account is the first step to becoming a Shopify seller. That is the easy step in all of Shopify’s business starter guides. The true challenge lies in creating a stunning product line, finding the right applications to support your business, and, last but not least, trying to drive more traffic to your business through organic or paid marketing. 

However, it is difficult to get more traffic to businesses because of high competition in the market. Every day, small businesses struggle hard to generate sales on Shopify.

How can you, as an entrepreneur, mitigate those risks and see impressive sales on Shopify? This article will focus on those reasons and help you to form an iron-clad strategy for your Shopify business.

Why Is It Hard to Generate Sales on Shopify?

The answer to the question is complicated because it is difficult to determine what causes the difficulties in generating sales and revenue. If your store is new, it is difficult to identify the cause of your lack of sales, but there are some common factors among underperforming stores.

Having A Bad Design

Your website is the face of your business. You must have elements that can attract new customers and retain old customers. Great design helps the visitor to come around and browse through your product lists. Helpful features such as a quick view of the product, an auto-complete option in the search bar, and vibrant colors with clear photos of the products can help you generate traffic to your site.  

Your design must comply with your business objectives. It should show the purpose of your business which is helpful for your to convert visitors into target customers. 

Having A Wrong Target Audience

Most young entrepreneurs tend to buy various products and expect sales to happen, but this is a trap that they fall into. The first step is to identify your target audience or niche. For example, if you are a smartphone business, your target audience is young adults to adults aged between 30-40, so a senior citizen is less likely to purchase a new smartphone. You can decide what to sell as your product by identifying the target market. The first is to find the target market, and the next step is to find the product according to your target market. Your goal is to appeal to more customers without deviating from your target market to gain more customers. 

Too Many Products or Options

Too many options will make the customer lose interest in buying your product, so you must avoid overwhelming them but still offer products for your target audience. The solution is to categorize your products into simple categories. For example, most customers want affordable products, so you may make that a category for your store. Next, some people do not know which specific product they want but have a general idea, so a recommended section would suit them. You can bring all of your inventory into a divided branch which is helpful for customers to browse through your catalog and get what they need. 

Having No Content on Your Website

This is a small error, but you must focus on adding SEO-worthy content to your website. Many believe the article or content they post does not bring more organic traffic to their website, but the opposite is true. Content linking can bring more organic and paid traffic to your website. It is best to have a blog with content that shows your product, as it can help you to rank in Google SERPs, through which you can find potential customers. 

Having No Proper Marketing Strategy

Most people overlook or underlook some aspects of marketing. One factor that you should not underestimate is marketing budget and time. The general rule in business is the larger your marketing budget is, the more sales you will achieve.

But at the same time, you must be mindful of the budget. You should spend the resource wisely by choosing the right marketing approach and tools for your target niche.

Getting professional help to devise a good marketing strategy helps you stand among your competitors and is a great idea so long as you can afford it. 

Now you know some of the obstacles that can give you a hard time in Shopify, let us see some tips that can help you overcome those obstacles and substantially increase your sales on Shopify. 

10 Tips to Increase Sales

1. Social Media Strategy

Social media is a powerful tool for digital marketing. Major companies continue to invest resources in digital marketing, especially social media marketing. Facebook ads are a great way to advertise your business online.

According to Statista, Facebook ad revenue for 2022 was $135.94 billion USD and will reach $202.94 billion USD by 2026. Business retailers experience a 133% increase in revenue when they integrate social media into their business marketing strategy. If you are a young entrepreneur in Shopify, then social media marketing is a great tool that you must utilize. 

2. E-mail Marketing:

Leveraging activities such as email marketing, not having enough content to help you rank in Google search results, bringing more organic traffic to your website, and increasing your visibility online are all vital. For example, implementing email marketing for your business is still the best option for your ROI (Return on Investment). The reasons for this include:

• You can add a more personal touch with email, which helps find new customers. 
• You can tailor emails according to your target niche and target need. 
• It will help to leave a positive presence in the target customer’s mind, which can act as a catalyst to check out your business.

Any digital marketers and entrepreneurs must integrate email marketing strategy as one of the business’s core functions. For Shopify sales, you can easily gather many customers in a short amount of time according to your email structure and your goal. 

3. SEO Strategy

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. The biggest challenge in selling products online is getting customers to find your store and products, which is where SEO plays its role. Potential customers are always in a search engine looking for the product they need, including your products and website.

You can leverage SEO and rank in the Google search engine to increase your online visibility.  You can achieve this by performing basic SEO if you are a beginner. For example, you can add a keyword to your Shopify page, which helps your page rank higher in search engines.

You can add your focus keyword in the page title, meta description of your product, product description, and ALT tags. Apart from that, you can also include high-quality images with the focus keyword.

SEO is great for showing your presence online with a low marketing budget. But it is best to check with an SEO professional to devise a plan, as SEO is not a simple process and frequently changes with updates and improvements to search engines.

Related: 7 Best Shopify SEO Apps to Boost Your Ranking

4. Optimize Collection Page

The primary objective of optimizing your collection page is to make it easy for the search engine to crawl your page and ensure that customers can find your content without any difficulties. The good news is that Shopify has built-in SEO for search engines to help potential customers easily find your products, services, and content. However, you can perform these in order to increase your visibility probability:

• Optimize your store navigation so visitors and customers can easily find the product. 
• Optimize your product image and the internal links with descriptive titles.

Remember that you cannot change the name of any files or images after you upload them to Shopify. If you want to change the name, you must upload a new image and file with the new name. Apart from that, you can add a unique call to action, which helps retain your old customers and gain new ones. By integrating email marketing and call-to-action, you can inform customers about new features and products available on your site. 

Related: How to Change Default Sorting of a Collection in Shopify?

NOTE: Shopify’s collection page is a page that other e-commerce websites call a “category page.” It helps group similar products together and makes it easy for search engines and visitors to find the product they want. 

5. Add AI Chatbot

People buy products online for two main reasons: One is discounts, and the other one is time constraints. You must consider that people want to buy products in less time, so optimizing your store navigation can help greatly, but you should stand among your competitors. So, what is the best solution to reduce your visitor and customers’ time? 

The answer is adding an AI chatbot to your site. You can do the other tasks on this list, but an AI chatbot is a reliable tool for your business. Ochatbot is a great platform for your AI chatbot. Ochatbot focuses on the e-commerce and sales sector with rich features such as:

• Visitors/customers can purchase their products in the chat window, which saves a lot of their time. 
• Ochatbot uses machine learning algorithms with NLP (Natural Language Processing), so it will learn from every chat with the customer and memorize the pattern. As it draws information from customer queries, it can easily answer or solve them. A conversation with Ochatbot is natural and life-like, creates empathy with the customer, and mimics human interaction, which is the first thing you need for customer service. 
• It is a fact that Ochatbot can increase your revenue from 20% to 40% and reduce support tickets from 25% to 45%.
• Ochatbot includes deep analysis reports and insightful data about your customers and business performance. 
• The best thing about Ochatbot is that you need not know anything about programming. 

You can get the best AI Ochatbot from here. 

6. Integrate Shopify Apps

Running an online business is complex and difficult, so you need tools that make your life easier, which is where Shopify apps can help. There are various apps for various purposes available at the Shopify store, and the best thing about Shopify is the custom apps. With the help of custom apps, you can add various features to your Shopify admin and directly access your store’s data with the help of Shopify’s API.

You can extend your horizon and reach other platforms using Shopify third-party apps. Integrating the app with your website means you need not monitor all the processes yourself because you can configure the app by setting up notifications. Whenever there is a notable change, you may take a look with the help of a single click on your device, which saves time. For any business, time is the most important resource, and you need every tool to ensure that your business is time-efficient. 

Read More:

Best Shopify Apps to Increase Sales – 2022

5 Best Shopify Payment Apps for Seamless Checkout

7 Best Shopify Shipping Rates Calculator Apps

7. Reach Out to Relevant Influencers

This is a great strategy in order to give your business a great boost in visibility. Influencers are people who have some form of “power” in social media. With their influence and fan following, you can promote your business and products to the audience.

You must make sure that you are reaching relevant influencers. For example, if your product is an energy drink, you can reach out to influencers who are in sports or esports. Reaching out to art-based influencers is not a great choice for this product because it is irrelevant to their interests. It will impact your budget, but on the bright side, you can get greater visibility and promotion of your product in a short time. 

8. Adding Coupons and Sales

Sales and coupons are a core part of business in Shopify. Customers love sales, and you must ensure that you plan your promotion by setting up a great customer experience and automating the coupon generation process, which creates a great sales collection and reviews the latest marketing reports. Different regions around the world have different sales.

For example, America and Europe have their biggest sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This is a great opportunity for customers to get a high-value product for a reasonable price. With Shopify, you can offer discounts, set the sale prices for each product, and automate the discount process. You can visit the discounts for Shopify here to learn more about discounts and sales on Shopify.

9. Free Shipping

Free shipping is one of the options buyers look for when they buy a product from a Shopify site. Your customer is paying a considerable amount for the product they are looking for; imposing shipping charges will make customers think twice before purchasing.

Free shipping makes visitors and customers easily purchase the product without a second thought. You can impose shipping charges when there is international shipping or if the cost of the product does not reach the level where free shipping is eligible. It is necessary to mention when there is a restriction on free shipping on the product description page.

10. Upsell and Cross-sell:

Upselling and cross-selling are great ways to show your inventory without customers searching for related products. This helps to save time for the visitor. However, some buyers may not like this feature, so you must couple the buying product with the items that are related to buying the product. You can also implement discounts or coupons for buying two or more products. This makes customers happy and ultimately makes your business more reliable and profitable.

All these ten tips can help to generate your first sale or increase your existing sale on Shopify. You can perform most of these tips, such as adding an AI chatbot and optimizing the collection page with the help of Ochatbot. With a lot of features available, you can see the positive result of your business in a short amount of time. 

FAQs

1. Is it hard to get sales on Shopify?

Usually, the first sale is the most difficult stepping stone. You can use all the ten tips such as social media marketing, adding an AI chatbot, optimizing your page, having a great product line-up, and adding coupons and sales can definitely help to get that first sale.

2. Why do people struggle hard to generate sales on Shopify?

It is not possible to pinpoint the exact reason, but the following general reasons are hurdles for your sales on Shopify:

• Having a bad design.
• Having no proper website optimization.
• Too many options.
• Having no content on your website.

Focusing on these areas can help you to generate sales on Shopify.

3. Can SEO help generate sales on Shopify?

Yes, SEO can have a great positive impact on your website and your sales. You can get more potential customers to your business with more visibility on Google search results. It is better to perform SEO optimization on your website. 

Conclusion:

The first step towards your “first sale” is difficult. The first thing people ask on Shopify “Why do I struggle hard to generate sales on Shopify?” There is no definite answer to that question as there are various factors in the Shopify business. 

One thing to remember is that you must not rush getting sales first. You must first increase your visibility online to show potential customers your business, which will help you begin your journey as a successful Shopify store owner.