14 Reasons Why Your Store Isn’t Making Sales (Part II)
In the last article, we discussed the first 7 reasons Why Your Store Isn’t Making Sales. But that wasn’t it. We’ve got another 7 more for you to look at!
Want to find out if you are making these mistakes? Let’s go.
8. Social Links Are Empty
Visitors do often click on the social links. Adding social links in store to give the illusion of trust can easily backfire when customers find them linking to blank pages. Congratulations, you’ve just wrecked your credibility.
Updating Instagram, Facebook (or whatever social profile) is easy. It is building engagement that takes a bit of time, but the payoff is well worth it.
If your social media profiles don’t have a profile picture, any information or pictures, don’t link to it yet. Social media is a great way to show people that you are a real shop.
9. Not Accepting Refunds or Returns
Having a “no refunds and no returns” policy makes a storeowner look unreasonably harsh and can show a lack of confidence in their products quality and delivery.
In a highly competitive marketplace, not having the ability to return or refund means that visitors will go elsewhere.
An analysis shows that around two-thirds of online shoppers will look at the store returns policy before whipping out their credit card — they want to know that if there is a problem with the product, they haven’t wasted their money.
Include a well thought out, flexible return policy to show confidence in the product.
10. Too Many Items ‘on Sale’ or ‘Out of Stock’ Is Gimmicky
Stores that aren’t making any sales often discount their prices hoping to attract more customers. But the overuse of discount and “sale” tags gives the impression that everything is cheap (and possibly poor quality).
Note: this is different to a limited time store-wide flash sale, or a store-wide seasonal or stock-taking sale.
Displaying items that are sold out can show high demand, but overuse shows a poor business operation — a weak supply chain, a disorganized service or a site that’s not up-to-date.
If you’ve got a value-added brand with a boutique feel, don’t put “on sale” across all your inventory all the time. You should have a reason to put items on sale. If you’re a one-stop-shop discount bargain basement store then this strategy this might work for you. Setting your prices as low as you can while still making a profit can devalue your brand.
Avoid pricing gimmicks to draw more attention, give thought to your pricing strategy in the context of your store brand.
11. The Company Name Doesn’t Match The URL and Logo
It’s a big deal to visitor perception if your company name doesn’t match the URL and the look of the logo and design. This harms sales.
Your store may change brand names several times in an attempt to make more sales but kept the same URL. Changing the look and name is part of a good strategy in experimenting with optimizing conversions.
But while experimenting to find what works is good, what this says to the visitor is that your brand is neither stable nor reliable. How can a customer trust that goods will be delivered to them when the company is changing names every other five days?
Make sure the company name, logo and URL all match perfectly.
12. Poor SEO Practices Makes The Site Hard To Buy From
If your store isn’t making any sales, there’s a good chance it lacks in SEO, and that’s affecting user experience. Heading tags, descriptions and natural language is not only good for SEO and traffic, but it also helps visitors navigate around your store and make informed and quicker choices on purchases.
A store owner that can’t be bothered to add in decent headings and descriptions is sending a message that they will pay little attention to orders after they have the customers money. The right SEO practices are are about building relationship trust.
Always include SEO optimized headings and adequate descriptions.
You can scan your site to find SEO errors, and you can find our SEO tool here.
13. Confusing Shipping Information Is Suspicious
We’ve all seen it before. The site says “free shipping worldwide” across the top bar, but when an item gets added to the cart, the cart says “Price excludes delivery, which is applied at checkout.” Or the customer is advertised ‘free shipping worldwide,’ but on the delivery and returns page, it states that there’s a shipping charge. So which is it, free worldwide or paid shipping?
Contradictory information stops would-be customers from going ahead with a purchase because it’s confusing and creates doubts about the seller.
Always double check your whole site to make sure your terms for shipping are the same across all pages (even in the fine print).
14. Faulty Payment Gateways Stops Any Sales
Not even the best site can make sales if the checkout system is disabled. And some payment providers don’t work in particular countries. Take a look at your data, if you’re getting a bunch of add-to-carts but your store isn’t making any sales probably your payment gateway isn’t working.
Always run some test transactions to make sure your tax settings are accurate, your shipping rates are working, and that your payment provider is correctly set up.
What To Do To Fix Your Online Store If You Have No Sales
If you’re someone who is left asking why your online store has no sales, things can change with some small but useful changes.
Take a look at your store critically and with fresh eyes from the point of view of your visitors. All too often we get bogged down in the details of store product sourcing, curation, and design and forget about the fundamental issues facing real people who visit your store.
- Take a tour of your site and make sure you have no contradictory info such as shipping or returns
- Think about what makes you buy from specific sites and not from others
- Get rid of pop-ups that block your visitors from seeing your site
- Update any missing or thin SEO headings and descriptions to help customers make decisions about products
- Redo the About Us page
- Add proper contact information
- Watch over a friend’s shoulder as they go through your site ‘buying’ and see if there’s anything they find confusing
- Work on your social sites
- Test your payment gateway
Got more questions or need help? Contact Uplinkly here.
Originally published at www.uplinkly.com on March 5, 2018.
