Depending on the range of products in your Shopify store, some items may sell slowly during certain seasons. In such cases, you want to sell these products quickly before the season ends. As anyone in e-commerce knows, every product that sits on the shelf not only takes up space but also costs your company money. Also, once some products go out of style, it can be hard to find customers for them again. The shorter the time products stay in stock, the better it is for your business.
In this article, I will explain how to set up time-limited campaigns on Shopify to sell out the products you want to clear.
Understanding Time-Limited Discounts
First, let’s look at the idea of time-limited discounts. Today, many Shopify stores offer customers generic discount codes like WELCOME10 that are always valid. Discount codes without an end date only mean that you sell your products at a lower price to customers who are sure to buy. This can reduce your potential earnings.
To avoid this and to encourage customers to decide quickly, you should create discount campaigns that create a sense of urgency. These campaigns can turn visitors who are not ready to buy into actual buyers. Instead of using an always-valid code like WELCOME10 for all visitors, Shopify stores are better off using time-limited discounts on specific products they want to clear, valid only for certain dates.
This way, when visitors see your products, they know the offer is only for a limited time and will end soon. This gives them a strong reason to act now. Research shows that 49% of customers delay purchases thinking, “I will buy this later.” After spending a lot of effort on marketing these products, you don’t want visitors to leave items in their cart with the idea of buying them later, right?
Preparing Your Shopify Store for a Clearance Sale
To prepare for a clearance sale on your Shopify store, start by deciding which products you want to clear out. Look at your current stock, seasonal trends, upcoming special days, and fashion trends in your industry to choose the products to clear.
Once you know which products to clear, decide on your profit margins, product prices, and shipping costs. Then figure out the highest discount you can offer on these products without losing money.
After this analysis, you can create your discount campaign for the chosen products. If you are not using a tool like Growth Suite, you will need to create the discount code manually. In your Shopify admin panel, click on the “Discounts” menu on the left, then click the “Add discount” button at the top right. Choose “Product Discount” from the options to create your discount code.
Marketing and Communication
After creating your discount code, add content about your time-limited campaign on the pages of the products you want to clear. This tells visitors that these products are on a special offer. In the campaign content, show a countdown timer, the time left until the campaign ends, and the discounted price of the product.
If you use a tool like Growth Suite, you can do this automatically without any coding. If you want to do it yourself, you can ask Gemini or ChatGPT to help generate the needed code and add it to the product page. When the campaign ends, remember to remove the discount codes and the related code from the product pages.
After you finish setting up your website, you need to bring traffic to these product pages and inform your audience about the time-limited campaign. You can send emails to your list at the start of the campaign and 24 hours before the campaign ends, without spamming them.
It is also important to announce the sale products on your social media accounts, both through free (organic) posts and paid ads. Create clear images that show the products, the sale prices, and the time left until the offer ends. After posting, you can target users who visited your website in the last 30 days or have bought from your store before to see these posts.
Monitoring and Adjusting During the Sale
Once the campaign starts, it is important to check its performance in real time. The first 24 hours are very important in a clearance sale. In those hours, count how many units of the products you want to clear you have sold. If the performance continues at the same level, estimate how many you will sell by the end of the campaign.
If the campaign is not going as well as you expected and you think there will still be unsold stock at the end, review your campaign. You may consider increasing the discount rates to make the offer more attractive. By doing various A/B tests on your offer, you can find the best discount rate to clear your stock.
Conclusion
In this article, we talked about the importance of stock clearance campaigns in Shopify stores and how to plan them with a time limit. Every product that stays in stock costs your business money. Seasonality and changes in customer preference can mean you want to sell unsold products faster with time-limited campaigns.
Start by identifying which products to clear and do a profit margin analysis to decide the highest discount you can offer without losing money. Also, consider your daily average orders and the number of products to clear to set the start and end dates of your campaign.
During the campaign, on the product detail pages, show that the offer is only valid for a limited time. Use a countdown timer to show the remaining time until the campaign ends. Clearly show customers the benefits they will get from the campaign.
From the start of the campaign, track its performance live. If you are not getting the results you want, consider increasing the discount rates slightly.
If you want to manage this whole process easily without coding or technical work, you can install the Growth Suite app from the Shopify App Store for free and test it. Without any code or theme changes, AI can help you find the products you need to clear, suggest the discount rates to offer, and show the discount content and countdown bars on your product pages.
For more information about time-limited discount campaigns on your Shopify store, check out the posts below.
Shopify Time Limited Offer GuideMastering Percentage Discounts in Shopify for Maximum Impact
Fixed Amount Discounts on Shopify: When and How to Use Them Effectively
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