How to sell more products your ecommerce website in shopify

19 Proven Strategies For How to Increase Sales on Your Shopify Store

Creating a Shopify store is only the first step to building a successful e-commerce business.

The challenge lies in really getting it off the ground—developing a stellar product line, finding the right apps to support your work, and driving traffic to your brand-new thing.

For many small businesses, the biggest reason for failing to hit their goals is that they step out of line with their strategy.

Or, they never developed a strategy, to begin with.

The top Shopify stores out there have many things in common—the apps they use, the quality of their designs, and their dedication to the customer experience—but the main thing they all do is focus on a winning strategy and execute it.

The e-commerce market is only getting more crowded and competitive, so new store owners have to use the best strategies to stand out and grow.

E-commerce revenue is predicted to grow to $5.4 trillion USD by 2022. The only question is, how do you get some of that?

In this post, we’ll dig into how you can get some Shopify sales for your store. But first, let’s talk about why your store might not be turning traffic into sales.

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Reasons you have traffic but no sales in your Shopify store

Some existing online stores may be attracting traffic just fine but the sales aren’t forthcoming.

In that case, you need to put yourself in the shoes of your shoppers. You’ve got people to hang out in your store, but they aren’t feeling it. Why is that?

Here are a few reasons why your traffic isn’t converting:

• Lack of trust. Shoppers have become smart about avoiding scams, so they look for reasons to trust the brands they shop with. Create trust by showcasing your customer reviews and other social proof as well as by making your dedication to their security clearance.
• Poor navigation. You want to make it as easy as possible for your shoppers to find exactly what they are looking for, so your navigation must be on point. Add your Shopify collections in your navigation menu and throughout your homepage to get them to the product they want faster.
• Not mobile-friendly. Increasingly, people are using their mobile devices to shop and buy. Don’t miss out on that valuable traffic by not optimizing your store pages for the mobile experience.
• Product descriptions. The reason they are shopping is the products, so if you haven’t put in the work to describe them fully and evocatively, they have no reason to stick around.
• Low-quality images. Your images, just like your descriptions, are the final piece of product marketing for the amazing wares you want to sell. Ensure you have high-quality images that follow the best practices so that your shoppers can really get a feel for what you sell.
• Store design. If your store looks just like everyone else’s, it’ll just get forgotten. Or worse, it looks worse. You want to create custom store pages that are super on-brand so that nobody forgets who you are. Make it look good and make it look like you.
• Wrong audience. You could be attracting the wrong crowd. Whether it’s because your SEO is misleading searchers or your paid ad strategy is going after the wrong demographics, you need to fix it so that the right shoppers can find and buy your product.
• Wrong messaging. If you are sending all your traffic to your homepage, you could be doing yourself a disservice. Knowing your different audiences is a gift because it means you can send them to landing pages with more specific messaging that will ensure conversions.

Now that you know why you might be having issues with conversion, let’s get into the tactics you can use to get those sales racked up on Shopify.

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19 tips for how to increase sales in your Shopify store

Whether you are an existing brand hoping to scale your Shopify store or new to the e-commerce game, building a powerful strategy for increasing sales on Shopify is required.

If you are like Kevin Costner, you may have heard a disembodied voice whispering, “If you build it, they will come.”

But, this isn’t Field of Dreams and you aren’t building a baseball diamond. 

When building a Shopify store, you’ll have to do a bit more than just wait for your customers to come through.

Here are 19 proven strategies for driving traffic to your store and converting that into revenue.

1. Increase email signups
2. Create email marketing campaigns
3. Add SMS marketing
4. Invest in social media marketing
5. Use SEO to drive traffic
6. Leverage paid ads for targeted traffic
7. Build dedicated landing pages
8. Offer free shipping
9. Optimize your product pages
10. Earn trust with social proof
11. Use upselling and cross-selling tactics
12. Get reviews and showcase them
13. Start a loyalty program
14. Integrate personalization
15. Optimize for speed and mobile
16. Sell on Instagram and Facebook
17. Add live chat and chatbots
18. A/B test for better conversions
19. Use wishlists

For the traffic you already have, you want to pull as much value from it as possible.

You can’t count on all that traffic turning into sales. And, that’s OK.

But you can give those visitors the opportunity to convert in various other ways and it will only cost them their contact info.

Once you have their email address and/or phone number, you can start marketing to them to drive future sales.

These opt-in forms come in all shapes and sizes—popups, flyouts, chat windows, and on-page fields. Offering downloadables and discounts are powerful tools for driving conversions.

On average, popups have a conversion rate of about 3.1% and the highest-performing ones have a conversion rate of 9.28%.

Not too shabby!

That said, you need to be careful about what pages you add popups too.

When there is an obvious intent to purchase—say like on the checkout page—you are only hurting your sales potential. Don’t ruin the buying experience.

You can include opt-ins on your homepage, product pages, About Us pages, collection pages, blog, and other educational pages.

With your lead capture strategy in place, you can start creating email marketing campaigns that keep your brand on their minds and drive new sales.

For every dollar spent on email marketing in e-commerce, the return on investment is $45. 

Spending a buck and getting a 45x return is really a no-brainer, so don’t skimp on your email marketing efforts!

To leverage that email list effectively, you’ll want to develop a strategy that relies on segmentation and drip email sequences.

Start your strategy with these buckets:

• Audience: first-time users, regular customers, browse abandonment users, cart abandonment users, etc.
• Email workflows: transactional (like order and shipping confirmations), promotional (big sales and special offers), and lifecycle marketing emails (cart abandonment, re-engagement, welcome series)

Segmentation allows you to speak more directly to customers with different needs to increase the likelihood of conversion.

Email drip campaigns you can develop for your Shopify store include:

• Welcome emails
• Browse abandonment reminders
• Post-purchase emails
• Cart abandonment reminders
• Product launches and company updates

Just don’t send too many emails, as you will quickly find your emails in their spam folders. If you use the right email marketing tool, you can set rules to ensure you aren’t bugging people.

Becoming just as important as email marketing these days is SMS marketing. You can send marketing messages straight to the pockets and purses of your customers.

With proper opt-in, shoppers are more than happy to receive special offers via text and may even prefer SMS to other communication methods.

Where the average open rate for email marketing is 18% across all industries, SMS open rates can be as high as 98%.

And, those messages are, on average, opened within the first 90 seconds of receiving them. 

You can also go the anonymous route with web push notifications, which gets browser opt-in and gives users important nudges right where they shop without having to use customer information.

A great e-commerce marketing strategy wouldn’t be complete without a strong social media game.

A major takeaway from some of the top Shopify stores we’ve studied is that social media has been essential to their success.

For e-commerce brands, Instagram has proven a powerful marketing tool with its focus on images and the ability to tag products for easy unstoppability.

In 2025, its global user base is expected to balloon to over 1.4 billion. While you won’t be targeting all those folks, your ideal audience will certainly be somewhere in there.

While Facebook isn’t as visual a medium, many brands find great success there as well as interacting with busy Facebook Groups to drive interest in their brands.

Pinterest is another shoppable visual platform where shoppers congregate to find great new products (like yours) and develop relationships with brands.

With consistent posting, you can start building followers and with it new traffic and brand awareness. You’ve already warmed these leads with great content, so when they land in your store, they are more ready to purchase.

Free traffic is the dream.

With search engine optimization (SEO), that dream is a reality. You just need to put in the initial effort to make your store SEO-friendly to reap the benefits.

Shopify has great built-in settings to create SEO-friendly pages, giving you updatable meta fields (title, description, URL slug), and automatically generating sitemaps, 301 redirects, and canonical URLs.

This all ensures that your homepage, product pages, collections pages, and more are indexed and findable on the biggest search engines.

Where it comes up short, there are powerful Shopify apps that can pick up the slack, calling out issues as they arise and making suggestions for updates.

Outside of the traditional eCommerce store pages, you can also build out a content marketing strategy by creating a blog and targeting the most relevant educational keywords in your industry.

Blog posts are more likely to rank well on Google and you can directly answer the questions your ideal customers are asking on that massive search engine.

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The last step to gathering that all-important store traffic is to create paid advertising campaigns that are capable of targeting just the right people.

You can do your best to take the top organic spots in Google, but it remains that Google ads always top the search results.

Luckily, you can get up there too with paid search ads and Google Shopping ads (to show off particular products).

Bid for search keywords you want to show up for and just pay for the clicks you get.

Some brands, they have more success with paid social ads on platforms like Instagram and Facebook (both manageable through the Facebook ad dashboard).

Instead of targeting keywords, you target particular audiences with your Facebook and Instagram ads.

With their overwhelming repository of personal information (likes, locations, brand associations, politics, etc), they can show your ads to the people most likely to purchase your products.

You can continue to tweak your ad copy, visuals, and targeting as you go to get it just right. As long as you are making more than you are spending, it’s a good way to drive traffic.

OK, you’ve established a solid strategy for getting traffic to your Shopify store.

By way of SEO, email and SMS marketing, push notifications, and paid ads, your store now has a ton of curious shoppers milling around.

Amazing!

Now, you could just do nothing and let them all figure it out from your homepage. That’s fine and you will certainly get a fair number of purchases that way.

But, given that you’ve already got multiple unique sources of traffic (and at least some that is well-segmented), you can build landing pages designed for conversion.

Paid traffic is a great example.

You know exactly who the audience is that would click on your link. So, would you choose to send them to your homepage or would you rather send them to a page specifically designed to sell to them?

That’s a landing page!

A great landing page has a few features that make it successful:

• An engaging headline
• A compelling call to action (CTA)
• Powerful images and design
• Clear features and benefits
• Social proof

Create an amazing landing page, then replicate it for your unique audiences.

To get inspired, you can check out our roundup of the best e-commerce landing pages, as well as our Shopify Landing Page Showcase.

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The phrase ‘free shipping’ is powerful. It’s a psychological unblocker for the sales pitch to come.

When shoppers know they don’t have to worry about some last-minute costs tacked on to their cart, they are more likely to stick around and buy.

A 2019 survey found that 68% of shoppers didn’t make a purchase at least half the time when free shipping wasn’t an option. Most shoppers (80%) actually expect free shipping when their orders exceed a certain dollar amount.

You can either decide to take the hit to your profit margins or increase production costs to cover free shipping. You might be better off absorbing the costs for all the benefits you’ll get from offering free shipping.

This is especially true if you offer conditional free shipping, where shoppers need to spend enough to unlock free shipping. This is a powerful strategy for boosting average order values (AOV).

You can also offer free shipping for specific products to help clear out inventory or for certain holidays as an extra incentive to buy from your brand.

Your products are the most important thing in your Shopify store. So, it’s obvious that you want to do as much as you can to highlight what’s so great about them.

Beyond that, even as shoppers are flocking online to do business, it doesn’t mean they don’t miss the in-store experience.

In lieu of being able to turn products over in their hands and inspect the particularities of your wares in person, you need to create a product page experience that does as much as it can to get close to that.

That means taking incredible photos from various angles that show the smallest details, as well as creating an atmosphere for your product to shine, be it on a model in the forest or set against a solid background.

Video is also a powerful visual tool for communicating the details of your product. There are so many great video editing tools to make them look incredible.

To accompany these visual explainers, your product description should be detailed and evocative.

Include vital product specifications as well as a powerful story about the product. Commerce is built on great storytelling.

While you’d love to think that shoppers make their purchasing decisions based on your great marketing alone, the fact is that they most trust their fellow consumers.

Adding the sentiments of your happy customers to your store can do a lot to convince prospective buyers to take a chance on you.

By taking user-generated content (UGC) and showcasing it on your store, you can show potential customers that your product is well-loved and trusted already.

A popular form of UGC is Instagram posts from customers using or wearing your products out in the real world.

Social proof is powerful and you want to put in real effort to encourage its creation of it and display it prominently on your store pages.

If you’ve been featured in publications—like gift guides or great reviews—or you’ve been given an award, that’s a great opportunity to add those logos and quotes to your store to gain the carryover trust from those organizations.

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Just as the inclusion of social proof on your store pages can have an effect on customer trust, the addition of cross-selling and upselling elements can drive them to buy more.

These two tactics are different but work well in tandem.

Cross-selling is the method of persuading shoppers to add complementary products to their cart. Upselling is the strategy of encouraging people to upgrade their purchases.

So, if someone was buying a laptop, the cross-sell would be a wireless keyboard and mouse but the upsell would be the laptop with more RAM and a higher resolution screen.

This comes in the form of product suggestion widgets and dropdown menu sections on product pages.

Apparel brands often include a ‘Complete the Look’ section that suggests clothing that goes well with the product in question.

Brands most often use these elements on product pages and shopping carts, as the shopper is getting closer to purchasing.

In a brick-and-mortar store, the closest equivalent is the product displayed just before reaching the register. The difference online is that the products can be more personalized to what the customer is actually buying.

A subset of user-generated content (UGC) is customer reviews.

As we mentioned earlier, shoppers most trust other shoppers when making purchase decisions online. Reviews from your customers are a valuable barometer of how good your products are.

According to Statista, 53% of shoppers say that reviews and ratings are the most important attributes of the online shopping experience, only behind navigation.

To take advantage of this, you want to ask your customers for reviews and add them to your product pages. Especially positive reviews can be excerpted and used throughout your store in customer testimonial sliders.

There are lots of great apps that help you both ask for reviews at strategic times and display them across your store for the greatest effect.

Both Yotpo and Shopify’s Product Reviews are directly integrated with Shogun Page Builder to make adding reviews super easy, no matter what page you are building.

Loyalty and referral programs are powerful engines of word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing.

Rewarding your best customers is a no-brainer, especially when it means even more business coming your way. Seventy-seven percent of consumers say a good customer loyalty program is more likely to make them stay with a brand.

These programs not only boost your customer retention, but they also make those loyal customers into brand ambassadors—a valuable addition to your marketing team.

Increasingly, consumers are willing to not only tolerate personalization in their online shopping but expect it. One study found that 80% of customers are more likely to purchase if the experience is personalized.

E-commerce marketers love when customers share their data.

And, consumers are more than willing to do so, with 83% saying they’d share data for a more personalized experience.

But, what do you do to personalize their experiences?

One powerful way to use personalization is through product recommendations. Amazon uses this to great success, showing shoppers products that relate to other items they’ve viewed and recommending product bundles to increase average order value.

Or they show you what you were last shopping for to keep the sales process moving forward.

You can also leverage email marketing sequences based on customer behavior, like browse abandonment, cart abandonment, and products added to wishlists.

This targeting can easily extend out to one of the cheapest forms of paid advertising—retargeting. Follow visitors across the internet with visuals of the product they were looking at in your store.

There are so many ways to create a great personalized experience for your shoppers, so it’s great to know they are game for it too.

When a store takes forever to load, shoppers don’t bother to wait around to see what the fuss is about. There are so many stores out there and no reason to deal with a slow one.

Nearly half of the online shoppers expect a load time of two seconds or less for webpages and mobile users expect pages to load in four seconds or less.

Further, it’s been shown that a delay of one second in load time equates to an overall 7% loss in conversions.

All that to say, speed up your store pages!

Speed is just one dimension of the experience though. Given that so many people are now shopping from their mobile devices (and that Google specifically looks at your store’s mobile version), it’s no longer an option to ignore the mobile experience.

The best e-commerce stores out there also have the best mobile landing pages for good reason—it means increased sales and conversions.

To understand where you stand with regard to speed and mobile responsiveness, just plug your URL into Google’s PageSpeed Insights portal.

There you will find how quickly your page loads on both mobile and desktop, as well as your Core Web Vitals scores. It will then give recommendations on how to improve your stats.

Your main Shopify storefront is your e-commerce HQ, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only game in town.

By adding extra sales channels, you can get in front of more shoppers and start new customer relationships.

Instagram makes selling easy with its Instagram Shopping feature, which allows brands to have mini stores on the platform and include product tags in posts to make them shoppable.

With Shopify, you can even let your customers checkout from Instagram.

To get your Instagram Shopping profile up and running, you just use Facebook’s Commerce Manager, which makes syncing products simple.

While you are on Facebook’s backend, you might as well add Facebook Shopsto your sales channels. On Shopify, both platforms are run through the Facebook sales channel, so it makes it super easy.

Unlike marketplaces like Amazon, these sales channels can lead directly back to your product pages, allowing you to keep control of the customer relationship and your marketing program.

No matter how well-designed your store is, shoppers will have questions.

If they can’t find the answers they need (despite having a really great FAQ page), they may just go elsewhere.

Live chat is a great way to reduce the friction of lingering questions during the shopping experience and offer customers timely support.

With immediate answers, they can complete their purchase worry-free.

But, even with a powerful support team, it can be difficult to provide live chat support all the time.

Luckily, chatbots have gotten incredibly sophisticated, allowing you to create complex Q&A workflows that cover the most common questions (more interactively than a FAQ page ever could).

Once you have your first landing page in place, you might be thinking of the parallel world where you had a different headline and wondering how much better it would do.

We don’t need to bother with the multiverse to see whether slight tweaks would make a difference in conversion.

Instead, you can start A/B testing your pages and choosing the winningest version every time.

You can do A/B testing on your Shopify store with external tools that actually draw over your pages with a slightly changed version.

When you make changes to your pages, make sure you only do one thing at a time.

If you make multiple changes, the resulting improvement or decline can’t be attributed to one particular update.

Once you’ve completed a test and found a change that works, you can add that element to your page and start a new test with another changed element. And so on.

There are great tools for doing A/B testing that is super easy to use, such as:

• Google Optimize. A free tool for merchants just starting their design experimentations.
• VWO. Enterprise-level A/B testing tool, with pricing based on your business details.
• Optimizely. A good option for businesses big and small, pricing determined by call.

There are many other tools you can choose from, so do your research beforehand.

Visitors to your store may not be ready to buy right at that very moment. 

But if they like something you sell and they were reminded of it at some point in the future—say, when they are ready to buy—you would want to create a way to keep them updated.

Enter wishlists.

Giving customers the option to add products to their wishlists gets them to subscribe for email updates and allows you to develop a relationship with them going forward.

You can create a segment of these potential customers and create specialized email marketing campaigns to get them to convert later on.

Also, you can gain insights into inventory demand and plan your purchasing with that data in mind.

The little things can make a big difference

You don’t need to do everything in this post to start seeing big impacts to your sales numbers. Start with low-hanging fruit and go from there.

Every business is different and the returns from any particular implementation are going to vary. The biggest thing you can do to make positive changes to your business is to listen to your customers and learn what will work for them.

A lot of these suggestions are easily implemented through the use of apps or tools, so you just need to determine what works best for your store and your customers.

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