Shopify High Traffic Low Sales

Do you find yourself saying “I have huge traffic but very low sales”?

I have good and bad news. I’ll start with the bad one: You’re not alone with this problem. Most Shopify stores have this problem, and it’s a HUGE problem. The good news is that this is a conversion problem, and you’ll find a detailed solution in this article.

How Conversion Happens

Or how do your customers buy from your Shopify store? There are three layers of e-commerce conversions:

1. Store: This is very similar to offline, physical stores. You have to have products that people want to buy. The store should be designed properly. It needs to be easily accessible on mobile devices. Shipping, return, and other product and brand information should be easily accessible.
2. Traffic:You can think of this as foot traffic for offline, physical stores. You need potential buyers in your store. Let’s say you have an offline women’s boutique. You hire a marketing agency. Each day, more than 100 kids visit your store. You won’t expect any sales, right? The same is true for your Shopify store too. This is a step for digital marketing and targeting.
3. Sales: Think of vending machines. They have products inside and foot traffic. People just buy something if they need to. If you don’t have a sales plan for your store, your store will be like a vending machine, which means it’s so normal to see low sales even for high traffic. High-end stores have sales consultants on offline stores. They are there to help, answer your questions, and help you buy the best items. You need to do the same thing for your visitors.

Let’s summarize this section. Conversion has three components.

1. Store
   – You need to have products that people want to buy.
   – Your store should be easily usable on mobile devices.
   – People should be able to easily browse the store and find information regarding shipping policy, return policy, product, and brand information.
2. High-quality traffic
   – You need to be sure of your potential customers visiting your store.
3. Sales
   – Conversion is convincing people to try your product.
   – You not only need to convince them to try your products, but you also need to convince them to try your products today, right away.

Now let’s take a look at how you can find what makes people stop buying your products.

Store Checkup

If you’re using Shopify, you’re lucky. Most of the Shopify themes are optimized for easily accessible, clean, and well-designed layouts.

Your main concern should be about the content and images on your product detail page.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Get your phone and open your store’s homepage.
2. Check if there is any content about your brand and story.
3. Create or find a story to tell about your brand and products.
4. Explain what makes your products different and why people should buy them.
5. Go to one of the most popular product pages on your store.
6. Check if detailed product descriptions are easily found.
7. Check if the product description explains products using storytelling techniques.
8. Check if shipping information is easily found.
9. Check if a return and refund policy is easily found.
10. (Optional) If you’re selling fashion products, check if there is a size chart. Check if it’s easy to understand.

If you’re okay with all of these, now is the time to check your competitors. This is highly relevant to your branding approach, but it should make sense to customers regarding your products and price.

It can also be a good idea to try to find people who can be interested in your products and let them check your stores and products. Their feedback can help you find the blind spots in your store.

I review different Shopify stores on my YouTube channel. You can also watch them to get an idea of store setup.

Traffic and Marketing Checkup

Now you need to evaluate your traffic quality. This is a controversial issue. Ads, placements, targeting, creatives…

There are many different criteria that affect your traffic quality. In this post, we focus on the “high traffic, low sales” problem. So this step will be limited to determining whether something is going completely wrong or not. If there are any fatal mistakes, you should fix them first.

My approach is very simple.

The bounce rate shows us how many people leave the store without visiting any other pages. It means they land on the store, check it out, and then just leave.

So, to determine your traffic quality, first check the bounce rate based on traffic sources and landing pages. If your bounce rate is high, but not higher than 80%, it shows that people are not interested in your products, brand, or even your product category. Because they just leave even before checking your store. This means you have low-quality traffic.

After working with hundreds of Shopify stores, here is my quick checklist:

1. Meta Ads: If you run ads on Meta (Facebook and Instagram), check your placement settings.
   Generally, Meta recommends running ads on all placements. This includes the Audience Network, which means showing ads on other mobile apps and websites.However, most of the time, these apps will be games. This traffic is very cheap, but it is highly irrelevant to shopping. Kids just randomly click on these ads. You should turn off the Audience Network and only show your ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger.
2. Google Search Ads: If you use Google Search campaigns, you need to check your ad keywords. Sometimes, your ads can be shown to keywords that are not quite related to your products.
3. Google Shopping Ads: If you use Google Shopping Ads and see huge bounces, it’s a good idea to review your feed. Only use the best products in your feed. This will increase your chances of getting more quality traffic.

Onsite Marketing Check

Five years ago, I ran a data analysis and found that it took 9 days between first visit and conversion.

These were mainly well-established brands. When you think about new brands, it’s likely this will take even longer.

This is why it’s so important to have a strategy to convince cold, new visitors to become loyal customers.

It may seem like a lot of work, but when done right, it’s the best investment you can make in your store. Let me explain these processes step by step.

Conversion is the final step of a long journey. If you’re facing low conversion, it means you need to create micro-conversions. These are small steps that your potential customers can take step by step towards the final big goal.

Now let’s take a look at the most essential micro-conversions for your store.

Welcoming New Visitors

Also known as new visitors.

When a new visitor enters your store, it’s a big moment. They just saw a brand new store, and you have 6 to 10 seconds to get their attention. It’s a great opportunity to build a connection with them.

Design a welcoming experience that humanly communicates your values, brand, and an open invitation for connection (meaning collecting their email).

When you design this step, which is a welcoming experience and an important opportunity to build a connection, don’t waste it with WELCOME10-type email collection popups.

Why did I say that? Based on G2’s research 82.8% of people hate popups. It’s horrible, right?

Actually, this is why I don’t use any popups on my website either. Because they’re everywhere. They just block and look like pushy salespeople. You know they try to sell you constantly.

Growth Suite offers a great solution for this opportunity.

When a new visitor lands on your store, Growth Suite welcomes them with your photo and gives them a great reason to share their email address with you: time-limited discount offers. The same visitor can’t see this offer again, and the timer will appear on all pages of your store.

It works great on mobile devices, doesn’t block anything on your store, and messages and communicates people directly with your photo, which changes the communication.

Visitors don’t need to copy or paste code. Growth Suite will create a unique, personal, one-time usage limited discount and automatically apply it to their cart.

Also, when the timer is done, Growth Suite deletes the discount. You won’t face a discount leak issue.

Help Them to Find The Best Products

Let’s say you visited a new store and there are lots of options. Generally, you would speak with the sales consultant, right? They would ask you a few questions to understand your needs and offer you the best products available in the store.

It’s the same for your online store too. Don’t expect people to browse all the products on your store and find the best ones based on their needs. It’s your job to help them find the best products.

This is where product finder quizzes come in. There are a lot of different product finder quizzes in the Shopify app store.

If you use Growth Suite, it comes with an AI-driven quiz. It analyzes your store and products and creates a quiz. When people answer the questions, it shows them the best products based on their answers.

Why is it important to have a product finder quiz in your store?

First, it’s a great opportunity to ask for their email address. Let’s say your visitor didn’t enter their email address in the welcome offer. Growth Suite asks for their email address in this scenario and makes them a time-limited discount offer to use the best items for their needs.

Second, it’s a great way to learn what people are looking for in your store. You can learn your visitors’ preferences easily with this widget.

A product finder quiz can be a lifesaver, especially for mobile visitors. It helps them find the best products for them on your store.

Be There to Help

Trust is a strong word, especially when you’re about to try a new brand or product.

This is why letting people reach you is so crucial.

It’s also another huge micro-conversion on Shopify stores. If people are asking questions about your products, brand, or any other details, it’s a huge signal that they’re interested in buying from you. It also helps you to create trust with your visitors, because they can know that there are real people behind your store who are ready to answer their questions.

Growth Suite comes with live chat and a simple help center. You can use the help center to create frequently asked questions, and let people send you messages with the live chat.

Growth Suite offers two important advantages in this step:

1. Growth Suite won’t ask for email if the visitor has shared their email previously. For example, let’s say a new visitor lands on your store and enters their email address to get a time-limited offer. After 5 minutes, they want to get in touch with you. They write their message and click on the send button. Growth Suite won’t ask them for their email address again, because they already shared it. So when you reply to their message, let’s say you reply after 10 minutes, Growth Suite sends them an email.
2. Growth Suite uses AI to create pre-answers for messages. When a visitor sends you a message, Growth Suite puts a pre-answer in place. You can check it, make changes if you need to, and then just send it. This makes it easier to manage live chat messages.

Incentives for Visitors in Consideration Stage

When you check your visitors’ behavior on your store, you can see that some visitors add products to their carts but leave without even starting checkout. This is different from checkout abandonment. Generally, these visitors come back to your store a few days later.

Growth Suite takes action for these visitors. For example, if a visitor adds a product to their cart, leaves the store, and visits again after four days, Growth Suite identifies them as being in the consideration stage. It then makes a time-limited offer to these customers. All of these offers are personalized, and the same visitor cannot see the same offer again in the future.

Help for Returning Visitors

Let’s say you visited a store, checked out a few products, and then forgot about it for five days. But then you remembered it and wanted to take a look at it again, but you couldn’t remember the product name.

With Growth Suite, you can easily show the latest products that your visitors visited. This is very similar to the offline shopping experience, where you can visit the store later and ask the sales consultant which product you saw the last time you were there.

Summary

High traffic but low sales is a conversion problem. It’s a very common problem, and you’re not alone. You can find the solution without needing to spend huge amounts on design, ads, or conversion agencies.

You need to check your store in three steps:

1. Check your store. Make sure there are high-quality images and well-written product descriptions. Shipping, return, and refund policies, as well as other details like size charts, should be easily accessible.
2. Check your marketing campaigns. If your ads budget goes into cheap and irrelevant traffic, such as Facebook’s Audience Network, you need to fix that problem first. Make sure your campaigns bring potential visitors to your store.
3. Let’s say you have great products and you manage to get traffic highly interested in your products. That doesn’t mean sales are guaranteed. Onsite marketing can make a huge impact on your sales. Just think of this as the offline store experience, where a kind and smart shopping assistant can help you to increase your sales a lot. Use the same effect on your store.

If you want a free checkup, just reach out to us. We’ll be happy to do a quick checkup and help you install Growth Suite on your store.