Pro Tips: How To Get More Shopify Sales In 2023
Find out everything you need to know about boosting sales, retaining customers, and saving money with your Shopify online store.
The hard work of setting up your online store is done. But don’t sit back and relax! If you want to guide your online business to success, your next task is figuring out how to bring in sales. Depending on what platform you’ve built your store on, that may be easier than you think. For example, if you chose to set up your online store with Shopify, you’ll find some great resources that can help you learn how to get more sales on Shopify.
Whether your store is brand new or a seasoned shop with a record of success, there’s always room for more Shopify sales. If your goal today is learning how to increase sales on Shopify, you’re in the right place.
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10 Tips To Increase Shopify Sales
There’s no one “right” answer for how to get more sales on Shopify. The number of ways to increase sales on Shopify is as great as the number of stores online. Read through these suggestions, then pick one or two strategies to boost your Shopify sales, focusing on the ones that make the most sense for your business goals. Let’s get started!
1. Go Back To Basics
Your online store is good. But it could be better. So optimizing your site is a good place to start when you’re considering how to get more sales on Shopify. Here’s a grab-bag of ideas you can pick from:
- Make Sure You’re Mobile-Friendly: The majority of shopping cart software and eCommerce platforms are already optimized to satisfy the increasing number of shoppers who browse your online store from a mobile device such as a tablet or phone. Even so, you should check every section of your website to see how well it loads on a small screen. If pages load slowly or oddly, tinker with your site to make improvements. You can use Google’s free mobile-friendly test to make sure your pages work for all your customers.
- Improve Your Images: Online shoppers are looking for good images of your products. Are you delivering? Make sure that your product pages include multiple high-resolution pictures, with clean backgrounds, that show off what you’re selling. This is one area where investing in professional services is worthwhile, especially if you’re not able to take high-quality product photos yourself.
- Fine-Tune Product Descriptions: A picture may be worth a thousand words, but you need to make sure your words pack a punch, too. If it’s been a while since you reviewed the text on your product pages, get moving. Eliminate extra words and make the text mobile-friendly too. That means adding space where needed to improve readability on a small screen. Instead of a couple of dense paragraphs, use paragraph returns or bullets to add space. If you’ve got the time, take a look at additional text, too. Beef up your landing page and your About Us section, as well as your return policy, shipping policy, and other pages with important information about your company that you want customers to know.
- SEO: Once you’ve put the work in to update and fine-tune your eCommerce store, your next step should be doing all you can to help customers find it online. Every Shopify store includes SEO tools you can use to make your site more visible to search engines and draw customers to you. You can’t rely on the built-in tools alone, though. Make sure you’re doing your part to make your site SEO-friendly, even if that means buying a third-party app to improve on the built-in Shopify tools. (You can also find some good free SEO apps for your Shopify store.)
- Give Your Store A Makeover: Let’s face it, you probably have learned a lot since you set up your Shopify store and started selling online. Knowing what you now know, you can probably find some areas of your store that you might be able to improve. That might mean something simple, like updating your fonts and colors or adding new pictures and a more welcoming message to your landing page. Or maybe it’s something a little more involved, like improving site navigation or beefing up your USP or CTA.
2. Explore Your Shopify Plan
No matter what level of Shopify plan you’re using to run your store, the platform comes with an array of tools you can use. Are you getting as much value as possible from how you use your Shopify plan?
Compared to some of its eCommerce competitors, Shopify does not come prebuilt with all the advanced features you may need to run a thriving online store. But it has plenty of features to help you sell, and if you find something that’s missing, it’s highly likely you can find it among the thousands of add-ons available in the Shopify app store.
Shopify also gives users access to advanced features as they move to higher-level plans. Start by investigating the features available on your Shopify plan. You can find a list of features by plan level in the Pricing section of our full Shopify review. Read through it for opportunities to boost sales that you may not have been aware you had. From advanced reporting to SEO, from discount codes to multiple sales channels, whatever your subscription level, you’ll find ways to improve your store and boost sales.
3. Get Social
Shopify excels at supporting multichannel selling. What does that mean? Shopify makes it easy to use external websites to sell your products. If you’re looking to increase Shopify sales, you can link your store to these channels:
- TikTok
Social media marketing can be a cost-effective way to draw traffic to your site, build your brand identity, and drive sales. And multichannel selling does not have to present big costs. You can do a lot with social media selling for free or cheap. For example, you can enable Instagram Shopping on your Shopify store to connect your products to your Instagram business profile.
On the other hand, you can spend more money, if you want, on paid advertising. Shopify includes tools for creating dynamic product ads, for example. The tools are available on your Shopify store, and if you run into trouble, you can always take advantage of Shopify’s well-rated customer service to help you sort things out.
4. Test Your Marketing Chops
If you want Shopify sales, you need customers. And you don’t have time to wait around for them to find you. No, you need a marketing plan to draw them in.
You could enroll in a crash course, learn everything you need to know about marketing, or maybe get a quick MBA degree. But that sounds like a lot of work. So why not add an email marketing software program to your Shopify store and make it easy?
These free marketing software options can help you do things like:
- Send an email marketing campaign
- Make sense of the results
- Place ads
- Create sign-up forms
- Build a marketing calendar
- Set up automated email messages
- Personalize contacts
- Look at live engagement reports
- Build surveys and polls
- Use social media integrations
- Send newsletters
- And more.
5. Add An App
Check out your competitors’ web stores and let your imagination go wild. What are they doing that makes you say “Wow”? You may wish you could add a chatbot, pop-ups, a loyalty program, wishlist capabilities, or something else. The good news is there’s probably an app in the Shopify app store that can help you make your dreams a reality.
Visit Shopify’s app store and use the pull-down menu to browse the category of your choosing. Whether it’s customer feedback, recovering orders, or promotions you’re looking for (look under Conversion for those!), you’ll probably see multiple options. The app store includes user ratings and reviews for apps, when available, so you can get the inside scoop on whether the app is worth your time and can deliver what you need it to.
6. Build On Sales Success
Maybe you’ve heard the old saying about how good salespeople don’t take “Yes” for an answer — they always try to sell more. If you don’t have a whole lot of sales experience, you may not have the tools you need to cross-sell, upsell, and get add-on sales. To tell the truth, even experienced salespeople can find it hard to translate their brick-and-mortar sales knowledge into online success.
Fortunately, there’s another old saying: “There’s an app for that.” When you’re trying to build Shopify sales, you can never spend too much time in the Shopify app store. You’ll find add-ons that will help you build sales by convincing customers to add more to their shopping carts, including apps built to integrate seamlessly with Shopify.
7. Make An Offer They Can’t Refuse
Sweetening the pot is a time-honored way of bringing in additional sales. So experiment with offering discounts, coupons, bonuses for referrals, and the like. Set a price threshold for offering free shipping, or look into creating subscription boxes that offer regular shipments of useful products at regular intervals.
Everyone loves getting something for free, or even for 20% off. Just make sure that you’re able to keep up with the extra sales you may start seeing in your dashboard!
8. Reclaim Lost Sales
What if you had a way to contact shoppers who visited your site, checked out your product pages, or filled their carts and left without buying?
Guess what? You do! You can use Shopify’s free abandoned cart recovery tools to reach out to those buyers and bring them back to your online store. Abandoned cart information is saved in your Shopify admin for three months, giving you a lot of data to work with. You access this information under the Orders tab in your Shopify admin. You can even export abandoned checkouts whenever you export order information.
Next, you can either contact those shoppers individually or create an automation to do the work for you. Be sure to include a discount code, coupon, or special offer when you contact these customers.
9. Join A Market
Sometimes the best way to sell more products is to join an established marketplace. Shopify offers integrations to these, allowing you to link your products without a lot of work to an Etsy shop, Amazon, Walmart Marketplace, or eBay.
Before you can join one of these marketplaces, you will need to set up an account there. That process involves submitting documentation, such as personal identification, your taxpayer ID, and more, depending on which marketplace you want to join. The application process is different for each and can take some time to submit and to gain approval.
Once you’re selling on a marketplace, you’ll pay fees to the market on each sale you make there. Be sure you understand those fees before you start selling. In exchange for the bite out of your profit, you’ll receive some valuable benefits, including access to the marketplace’s existing customer base and instant credibility with those shoppers. You may also face new price considerations, meaning that you may have to lower yours in order to appear competitive there. Spend some time considering all these factors before you sign up.
And, if your sales on the marketplace pick up, you may wonder if you need a Shopify store at all, especially if you’re paying for service with and fees to each platform. In that case, look at what each offers to you, where your sales are coming from, and how easy it is to reach customers and make sales. As an example, check out this Shopify vs. Etsy comparison, and then make your own comparison of any marketplace you might be using.
10. Add Payment Options
The easier you can make it for customers to say “yes” to your products, the more likely they are to buy from your Shopify store. Fortunately, Shopify has some great payment options you can put in place to make paying a breeze.
First, if you’re not already using Shopify Payments, you should look into that. This isn’t a payment option to present to customers, but because the name is similar to another payment option, Shop Pay, we wanted to mention it here. When you are approved to use Shopify Payments, you avoid Shopify’s additional transaction fees and keep more money in your pocket from every sale you make!
And, when you’re using Shopify Payments, you have the option of adding Shop Pay, a one-click payment method that stores customers’ billing and shipping information across every Shopify store. This speeds the checkout process and saves customers from having to dig out a credit card — and it’s a proven way of reducing abandoned carts and increasing sales. Shop Pay is offered at no charge to Shopify merchants, and it has added layers of security to protect both buyer and seller.
Even better, it’s a green payment option, with 100% of the delivery emissions produced by Shop Pay deliveries totally offset at no cost to you or your customers. That’s something that you can advertise and that your customers may find appealing.
You can also add a buy-now-pay-later option to your Shopify store once you’ve enabled Shop Pay. Shopify has partnered with BNPL provider Affirm, giving your customers a way to pay off their purchases with an installment plan. Or, if you prefer, you can work with another BNPL option, such as Klarna, Afterpay, or Splitit. The point is to give customers choices for how to pay because when it’s easy, they’ll buy more.
FAQs: How To Increase Shopify Sales
Final Thoughts On Increasing Shopify Sales
You have many opportunities for increasing sales on your Shopify store. This post offers 10 suggestions you can put into action starting today. But not every suggestion will resonate with every small business owner, and that’s okay.
The point is to find something you can do and then do it. If it works, and you see a bump in your sales, keep doing it — and add another strategy until your sales hit the level you want. As your sales grow, you may face some challenges that grow along with sales. Keeping up with orders and getting them out the door, correctly and on time, is one of those challenges. Fortunately, you’ll find ample resources for meeting them. If shipping becomes your biggest concern, you can find a shipping solution, such as Shopify Shipping or third-party software, that can help.
And, if you put in the work and find that you’re simply not reaching the customers you need to make the sales you want, it might become time to look for a Shopify alternative that can help you. Although Shopify is a good platform for many online sellers, subscription costs and transaction fees can add up. Looking for cheaper Shopify alternatives may be one way to help your bottom line.