I Do What Every Other E-shop Does. Why Am I Not Making Sales?

If you compete on price, you need the best wholesale price, so that the higher volume you sell lets you make a profit. Watch out for a very common mistake online and in online sales: people leave the cost of advertising, which is usually somewhere between 1 and 10 euros, out of the total cost. So, for example, if a product costs 1 euro from the supplier and 1 euro to advertise, in theory you would need to sell it for at least 5 euros to make any profit, and hope that a very large volume of orders brings a meaningful profit. We usually advise our clients against competing on price, unless they bought the product at a special price to begin with or make it themselves. Also, your online shop can have cheap products as loss leaders alongside others that are not as cheap and could give you a bigger profit in combination with the cheaper ones. For example, a cheap product plus some more expensive ones that fill up the basket and give the customer free shipping! For a service, you could offer it at a lower price for a short time to build a customer base, or as a promotion, especially for a start-up.

A wide range can be one of the strengths of your eshop. In other words, compared with the competition, you let customers choose from a large range of similar products in different colours and designs. This way, even if a customer doesn’t find exactly what they want straight away in our e-shop, they can find another product that interests them. With this approach, after a customer’s first purchase we can also focus on cross-selling, thanks to our wide range and the fact that they have already trusted us once. A wide range also lets customers browse our online shop and find what they want. Of course, this assumes we have categorised our products properly and have a good set of filters in our e-shop.

If you make or sell a product that is truly unique in design, build quality or some other feature, or entirely unique, that is the best possible case. Of course, there has to be demand for the product, or you have to create the need through your advertising and target people who need it. For example, a wooden keepsake with a unique design to mark the birth of a child could be such a product, advertised to new mums, grandmothers, dads and grandfathers!

Stock is an important factor that can increase your sales. To give an example, if no other shop has a popular shoe in size 38 and only you do, and you have set up the right channels for users to find it (ads, search engine listings and so on), then you will make the sale at any reasonable price, even if you are, say, 6 euros more expensive than the competition. From time to time, various products also run short for different reasons, and this can lead to higher sales and higher prices. (for example, at times there is a shortage of wood on the market)

Whatever advantage you have, if you do not communicate it through advertising, your e-shop will not make sales. If you spend a bigger advertising budget than your competitors, and you have a stronger brand and attractive ad creatives, someone is more likely to buy from you than from them, because you will be the one appearing in front of them in searches and ads. For example, companies that spend 3000 on advertising a month are far more likely to get better results than companies that spend 500 euros, even if their products are more expensive.

The goal of every online shop is to build a climate of trust between itself and the potential customer. At the start, building that climate should come before profit. Early on, the goal may be purchases that make no profit yet create the conditions for a repeat customer, which is where the profit will come from in the long run. To build this trust, alongside sales ads it is important to run ads with images or videos that strengthen our brand, so that users see us in front of them all the time. Clients often ask me whether email marketing matters, since it does not bring in sales. And I answer straight away: yes, it matters a lot, because customers keep seeing you in their inbox even if they don’t open the email. It is very important that they see you in their inbox twice a month.

The first single sale of a product is only the beginning, and on its own it will not bring success over time. First of all, customers must be happy with the product or service you offer, and then, if needed, they should have access to support or some after-sales service (it doesn’t have to be free, as long as it is available). Often, average services or products beat far better ones because of their support. For example, at Web-Mate we try to answer our existing clients’ requests straight away and complete them within 2-3 days. This is how we build a bond with our clients, and they trust us.

Seasonality, and how early you start advertising or promoting your product, matters enormously. If, for example, you advertise fans too early or too late in the summer, you will probably fail. And of course, if you advertise fans on your e-shop in winter, you will certainly fail! In each season you need to advertise on your eshop and also stock products that make a difference and give your eshop a boost. That boosts those particular products, and users may also buy other products from your shop once they have shown an interest.

Having a distinctive, “premium” product or service is what everyone wants. Managing to launch a product as premium, however, is very hard and does not happen overnight. To launch a product and have it recognised as “premium”, you have to spend a lot of money on its packaging, promotion and advertising, and that is how it eventually earns the label. The profit from this process will not be quick and will come later, though in the end it may be bigger. Selling products like these is always a good but difficult investment for your online shop .