If you run an online business, sales are a key indicator of your success. You need to keep selling product to remain profitable. When sales slow down, your revenue stream decreases, and the health of your business becomes questionable. However, it can be difficult to understand why your sales are slow and what you can do to fix it. If you are experiencing a decrease in sales, read on below to find out what may be causing it and what you can do to solve the problem.
Confusing Websites
With so many online stores available to customers these days, they know that they can find what they need anywhere. If your site is too confusing to navigate or taking too long to load, people will ditch it in favor of another. Customers shouldn’t have to click through multiple pages just to find what they are looking for, and they shouldn’t need to jump through a bunch of hoops just to place an order or make a payment. Your website needs to be smooth, streamlined, and fast in order to maximize your sales.
The Solution
Navigate the website yourself and determine where the problems are. If you can’t purchase an item in less than 3 clicks, then something needs to be fixed. Make the links to your products obvious and direct. Once there, give an option to purchase with one click and use the most basic, simplistic payment forms in order to get sales rolling. If web development isn’t your thing, you can hire developers and designers to help you with formatting your website and driving more traffic towards the purchase pages.
Your products should be categorized and organized neatly and orderly, helping customers to find exactly what they are looking for every time they come to your website. Your most popular products should be front and center on your webpage, but that doesn’t mean they should distract from other items. It should be simple to find anything that you are selling, and your site should load quickly and smoothly every time someone visits. If it isn’t, you might want to consider finding a new ISP or web host. Convenience is key when it comes to online shopping, and your customers will buy more product if your site is easy to use.
Ignoring Search Engine Optimization
In today’s world, search engine optimization is one of the most important things in online business. If you aren’t utilizing a strong SEO program and analyzing your results on a regular basis, there’s a good chance that your customers will find somewhere else to go and that your competitors will leave you in the dust. Search trends change gradually over time, and product popularity dwindle very quickly. If you aren’t paying attention, it may even move faster, requiring you to shuffle to re-think your business plan and come up with new ideas. When you ignore SEO, you are ignoring your customers’ requests and failing to understand the market in which you are competing.
The Solution
Invest heavily in SEO as your business grows. You may even consider hiring SEO experts who can help you with your search terms and website building in order to improve visibility on the front page of the search engines and drive more sales. These professionals can find where you are going wrong and know exactly what to do in order to fix your problem. They will tweak your website and social media outreach to optimize your traffic and help you bring in more revenue. They can even help in reaching out to a new customer base. If you’ve saturated one market, you can use SEO to start penetrating new market segments and audiences.
It isn’t always the most fun or easy part of doing business, but SEO is vital for any online company. Today, more clicks mean more conversions and more sales, and the best way to maximize your clicks is to optimize your search engine results. Whether you do this on your own or pay for the service is entirely up to you.
Poor Product Descriptions
Most people aren’t going to buy something if they have no understanding of what they are being asked to purchase. If your product descriptions are inaccurate or incomplete, you are only doing harm to your business as people will skip right past them. For technology items, this can mean using too many technical terms and not getting down to the basics, allowing people to understand what the product can do for them. In other cases, it might mean that you are continually leaving out important specs such as sizes and dimensions. For example, if you are selling bookshelves, people will want to know if a particular one will fit in the room they are trying to place it. If there are no dimensions posted in the description, they probably aren’t going to call and ask about them – instead they’ll find another site and purchase from there.
Solution
In some cases, the fix is as easy as just tweaking the product descriptions yourself. However, it is also beneficial to use an inventory management software such as EMERGE App. This streamlined app allows you to manage all of your product information, allowing you to provide descriptions for your warehouse and keep track of your current stock. You can then use these to get a good idea of your current inventory and use the descriptions on your website.
Another way to really ensure that your customers understand your products is to include high-quality images. Make sure that you take multiple pictures from different angles and that the lighting is professionally done. People won’t be impressed by a low-resolution cell-phone picture that fails to show the product in its natural state. If you must, it can be beneficial to hire a professional photographer to really help you drive sales of your product.
Seasonality
The seasons can play a major part in the fluctuation of sales. If you sell items that are only geared towards one season, you are likely to experience a slowdown in the other seasons of the year. There’s also the fact that certain seasons are just more popular for shoppers, and entire industries are affected by this even if they make products that offer year-round functionality. Summer, for example, is a slow season in many industries because people are going on vacation rather than focusing on stocking up on food, clothing, or other goods and services. While you can’t control the seasons, there are things you can do to soften the blow of low sales.
The Solution
If you only have one seasonal product, consider adding another product line to boost sales during the off-season. Even if it isn’t as popular as your original item, it will help to cover the costs that you may incur when you aren’t generating as much revenue. You could also provide discounts for your seasonal item during the off-season. Smart shoppers know that the best time to buy summer clothing is in the winter because it is heavily discounted. It may hurt to sell your item at a lower price, but it is better than not selling it at all.
The slow season is also a good time to focus on strategy for the next quarter or next year. Now that you have a little bit more free time, you should work with your development team to come up with new ideas. You should also speak with marketing and come up with a strategy to sell more product next year. It’s a great time to tweak your website and increase your social media outreach as well. If you can’t make sales during a certain time of year, you can at least continue to find new customers and penetrate new markets.
Insufficient Outreach
If you’ve been coasting with strong web sales for a while and only recently noticed a slowdown, it could be because your outreach efforts have slowed down as well. Many people get complacent when business is going well and feel as though they don’t have to continue to promote their product to boost sales. This is a common mistake and often leads to a major loss of customers. People will be intrigued by new products and leave your company if you don’t keep in touch with them and improve your marketing efforts.
The Solution
You have to be proactive about reaching out to customers, both old and new alike. This means strengthening your social media marketing strategy as well as retargeting old customers to get them to come back to your site. Your marketing team should always be looking for new ways to attract customers, and you should continually be finding new markets to penetrate in order to maximize your exposure.
Collect customer information and allow them to opt-in to receive messages via email or social media. Continue to send them offers, promotions, and information about your product lines so that they don’t forget about your company. It’s a fast-paced business world when running an online store, and you can’t afford to lose any customers.
