Making Your First Online Sales
So, you’ve set up your eCommerce store and now you want to start selling your products. Fortunately for you, you can have a big impact on this and can drive traffic to your website to help you in making your first online sales, meaning you don’t have to sit there twiddling your thumbs waiting. We’ve listed below some things that you can do to try and increase the chances of getting those first golden sales. If you’ve already started to make your first sales and need to get those orders out the door and on their way to your customers check out our wide range of postal packaging.
Share your business on social media
If you haven’t already set up some social media presence, it’s a good idea to at least set up the channels that are most relevant to your customer base. By putting your business on social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (amongst others) you can reach out to your potential customers so that you can engage with them; drumming up interest and awareness of your brand, company and products. Creating links from your social media platforms to your website can utilise these extra channels to drive traffic into your website and eCommerce store.
Don’t just look to sell to strangers either, many companies and sellers start by sharing their entrepreneurship with their friends and family on their private social media accounts. Although it may not be as satisfying, selling your work and products to your friends and family can be a great way for making your first online sales and gaining much-needed interest and feedback.
Spread your products over different eCommerce platforms
You may not want to put your attention on to areas other than your own website, but utilising different eCommerce platforms such as Amazon, eBay and Etsy etc can help you to reach other potential customers that might not otherwise reach your main eCommerce store. Not only will this help you in making your first online sales, but in the long run, it will help to increase them as you grow. Fortunately, many eCommerce platforms will only take their cut once you make a sale, meaning that you won’t incur any charges until you start getting some money flowing in.
Engage in online communities and forums
Many online communities and forums have groups of people that form themselves around specific niches, needs and interests. This makes it a perfect place for you to identify your target market and engage with them. Look for forums or threads where people could have an interest or need for your products and start to engage with that community and build some relations with the users. After you’ve done that you can leave a link to your website in the hope that they may click through and want to purchase from you. This can be quite manual; however it offers you the opportunity to gain access to very specific groups of people and once you’ve shared a link to your site any future visitors can click through to your site.
Paid advertising
It can seem a bit scary to start paying money when you haven’t made any sales yet. Paid advertising, however, is one of the best ways to start quickly driving traffic to your website and can often be done small scale with certain platforms if you’re not keen on investing too much to start with. Each platform such as Facebook, Instagram and Google operate their advertising a bit differently, but the principle stays the same in that you’re paying for these platforms to show your adverts to potential customers. Familiarise yourself with the different platforms and find which one works best for you and is most likely to reach your target audience.
Influencer and affiliate marketing
Influencer marketing has become increasingly more common in the age of social media and YouTube. By reaching out to people with large audiences on these platforms and having them endorse your products can be an effective way of gaining more traffic and increasing the likelihood of achieving a sale. There is also the option to work with bloggers who may wish to mention your products in their content. Each influencer will work differently but often you’ll pay them a percentage of each sale that is achieved from their advert. This can work well for beginners as you will only have to pay something when you’ve achieved a sale from that person’s affiliate link. Some others will expect a pay per click method more similar to how it works when doing paid ads on google and social media sites. Whichever way you choose is up to you, but make sure that you are picking influencers and bloggers that cater the most to your target audience.
Optimise your Processes
By implementing all these steps hopefully, you will have started seeing increased traffic on your website and can start making your first online sales. If you have, that’s great, but that doesn’t mean that you need to stop there. Reflecting on how you’ve done things to see what has worked well and what hasn’t will allow you to focus your efforts on what is important to drive your sales and help you to improve your processes.
- If you’re getting traffic but no one is adding your products to their basket, perhaps you aren’t attracting the right target group, or your prices don’t match the perceived value for money.
- If visitors are abandoning baskets at checkout, perhaps your lead times or delivery charges are too high and may need reviewing.
- If you’re getting a high bounce rate, perhaps your eCommerce site is difficult to navigate and confusing.
Driving traffic to your website is the key element in making your first online sales as well as keeping them growing. There are many possibilities and opportunities for achieving your first sales for your eCommerce journey and different approaches might work better for you. Try out our suggestions and keep aiming to make improvements, and while you’re here, why not check out our other blog with 6 easy ways to increase your online sales to help you keep growing into the future. Use our checklist below and try each of the methods to see if you can make your first online sales.
Sarah Hickson
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