If you run an online store, as is increasingly common (these days it’s accessible to full-time retailers and hobbyists alike), then you’ll almost certainly want to make more sales. Sure, there may be some merchants out there who can barely keep stock on shelves and are making quite enough profit already, but it’s not exactly the standard situation. Most people want more.
The question is how to get more. How can you drum up more sales? There are plenty of tactics, so many that it would be tough to get through them all in an article ten times the length of this one, but we’re not going to look at the most obvious options. You know the ones: run more ads, go for FOMO with limited-time offers, create a customer loyalty program, etc.
Instead, we’re going to look at 5 techniques that don’t get as much use as they should. Oh, they’re hardly unknown, but they often get overlooked for silly reasons, and that gives you all the more reason to try them. Let’s get started:
Switching up your theme
As far as aesthetics go, the typical process looks something like this: choose a theme, then stick with it in perpetuity (or at least until something breaks). Retailers don’t really like messing with their themes because they fear change. This is why the simple act of switching up your theme is so underdone. You can choose a stock theme or have one developed: take a close look at your analytics, check out the top performers in your niche, and change things up accordingly. It’s undoubtedly one of the easiest ways to pick up a bump in your sales.
Running a pop-up shop
Selling online while offline? It might sound strange, but it’s perfectly possible. When you route all your sales through your online store, all it takes is a portable POS system to open up a whole world of new opportunities without causing any organizational issues. Simply take a tablet with a mobile data connection to an outdoor fair or shopping mall (or any other place that might have prospective customers) and embrace your inner salesperson at your very own pop-up shop. Underused? Absolutely: most online retailers prefer to stay digital, limiting their options.
Polishing your content
The language and visuals you use on your store pages matter far more than most people think. Consider that most ecommerce products are available from numerous sources, often at comparable prices: what makes one listing stick out from another tends to be the quality of its copy and imagery. How compelling are your product descriptions? Are there any glaring typos or contradictions? Are the images formatted correctly? Work on your content and it’ll pay off.
Offering more products
If you have 100 products in your lineup and you’re making 100 sales each month, would 150 products get you 150 sales? Probably not — but that doesn’t mean there isn’t value in simply expanding your range, because there often is. It’s possible that you’re putting time and effort into getting more sales for products that are never going to sell, and while you could simply stop selling them, that would lead to stock issues. Instead, try bringing in some new products. You could even use drop shipping to make things about as easy as they can realistically get.
Cross-selling at conversion
You’ve achieved your main objective of getting a store visitor to add a product (or several products) to their cart and proceed to the checkout stage, so you could stop there — most stores do. But you shouldn’t. Instead, you should take the opportunity to engage in some cross-selling: recommending some other products in your range that might neatly accompany the items about to be purchased, or offering some tempting last-minute deals. Even if it only works infrequently, you’ll still make more money than you otherwise would have.
There you have it: 5 techniques that are undoubtedly effective for boosting online sales, yet also underused because they’re considered intimidating, overly obvious, or simply insignificant. Give them a try, and you might just steal a march on your competitors.
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