You’re here because you want to increase sales. How many times have you opened your Shopify dashboard only to see disappointing sales numbers?
Yet you know there’s demand for your product. You have a handful of happy customers, but you can’t seem to push beyond this initial traction to reach the next level of growth.
If sales aren’t reflecting the effort you’re putting in, you need a different strategy.
To increase sales on Shopify, there are three main things you need to do:
- Improve your website experience
- Optimize your store for conversions
- Drive more traffic to your Shopify store
In this guide, you’ll learn how to increase Shopify traffic through cost-efficient marketing, discover useful Shopify apps to boost sales, and see how you can easily localize your store to reach an international audience.
💪 Zero-fluff content
Increase Shopify sales by following a truly actionable, easy-to-follow guide. Once you finish reading the article, you’ll have a clear idea of incremental improvements you can implement right away.
Additionally, you’ll be able to rethink your current marketing strategy and experiment with new approaches.
At the very end, there’s a teardown of how one Shopify store increased sales to more than $10.5 million per month.
1. Improve your website experience
Bringing more people to your store won’t mean much if the experience is poor. This is true even if they have a strong intent to buy your products.
Think about the times you’ve ended up resorting to Amazon because the experience of buying the same product was so bad elsewhere.
To improve your store experience, first, you need to fully audit your website — both from a technical and marketing standpoint (i.e., where do shoppers drop off, how compelling is your offer). Once you map out areas of improvement, you’ll know exactly which changes you need to implement.
For this article, we’ll just cover the most common website experience issues to watch out for on your Shopify store.
Take care of the technical performance of your Shopify store
Does your eye start to twitch when it takes more than a few seconds for a website to load? What about the frustration of several full-screen pop-ups appearing as you try to scroll through the page?
It doesn’t take long for you to navigate away, right? Potential customers will do the same if your website experience is frustrating.
Poor website performance is the silent killer of your sales. Here are the most important things you need to audit:
- Page speed
- Mobile responsiveness
- Navigation and product discoverability
Let’s take a look at each one to see how you can improve it.
Optimizing page speed on your Shopify store
Third-party apps can slow down your store. This is why it’s important to download only those apps you truly need.
The same goes for adding custom code and media to your store. If you add multiple, high-resolution images, your page will load slower.
Lazy loading and image compression can help speed up pages. You could even arrange your layout so that there are no more than three images on screen at any given time.
Example of a Shopify store with a three-image layout
💡Pro tips
Monitor your site performance with Shopify’s built-in website analytics (includes the page speed score as well)Take a look at Shopify guidelines for optimal website performanceThere are a lot of apps that can help you optimize your store for better page speed such as TinyIMG, PageSpeed Monitor, Hyperspeed, and more.
Mobile responsiveness
Around 30% of all online purchases come through mobile devices. Responsive design is non-negotiable. You need mobile-specific features (e.g., sticky header for easy cart access) and optimized for touch (e.g., buttons and links large enough to tap on mobile devices).
If you’re just getting started with building your store, the easiest thing you can do is to buy a verified Shopify theme that’s already optimized for speed and mobile responsiveness. You can also use free Shopify 2.0 website templates.
Navigation and product discoverability
Your products may be great, but that doesn’t mean much if they’re hard to discover.
Make sure your menu includes clear categories and doesn’t overwhelm customers with too many options.
Example of a clear menu structure from BioLite Energy
To help customers quickly find what they’re looking for, make sure your search is functioning properly. With advanced search filters, autocomplete suggestions, and search analytics, you’ll shorten the path to conversion and know exactly what customers are looking for.
💡 Pro tip: Check Shopify’s app marketplace. There are a lot of add-on apps that can help you improve your search function.
Other things to look for are broken links and images. It’s easy to make a mistake while copying and pasting URLs or placing redirects, but this has a big negative impact on your conversion rate.
The same goes for trigger-based pop-ups. As a general rule, it’s good to combine several behavioral signals that identify a strong buying intent.
For example, if a potential customer spends a lot of time actively browsing your products or has previously bought from you, an exit-intent pop-up with a discount offer might be a good idea. But don’t overdo it, or you’ll come off as too aggressive.
Make your offer compelling
Now, let’s talk about marketing to improve the website experience.
Getting people to buy things from your Shopify store is tricky. This is why you should prioritize building trust through design, copy, and ecommerce localization.
Using design and visuals to increase sales on Shopify
How you present your products will give customers an idea of what they can expect. Here are some main things to pay attention to:
- Invest in high-quality photos or product renders
- Enable your customers to zoom in and access accurate product information
- Use a consistent color palette and fonts that align with your brand identity across all pages
- Incorporate short videos or 360-views that demonstrate the product in action
- Use white space in your design to make your Shopify store easier to navigate and key elements, such as CTA buttons, stand out
💡 Pro tip: Marketing a fashion brand? If you have the resources, include lifestyle shots so that your customers can visualize how your clothes fit in their lives.
Emotional selling and incorporating trust signals
You need to have strategic clarity about your value proposition. Why would a customer choose your brand over another? Is it how you make them feel? Do you have a loyal community that they could also belong to? Make sure you communicate this in your website copy.
Another important thing to mention is trust signals. Trust signals play a huge role in boosting sales for your Shopify store. Display things like:
- Customer reviews
- Money-back guarantees
- SSL certificates (to signal that the website is secure)
- Credit card processors (to signal that payments are safely processed)
- Refund policies
- PR or influencer endorsements
Examples of trust signals on the checkout page
All of the above will help you reassure your customers that: 1) your Shopify store is legit and 2) you already have happy customers.
Localizing your Shopify store
If you want to boost traffic and sales on Shopify, tailoring your store for international markets could be a very smart business move.
For small businesses, it’s advisable to start with 1-2 markets so that you can grow sustainably, and prevent spreading yourself too thin.
Localizing your Shopify store will help you create customer experiences that resonate. As customers, we are emotionally more receptive to messages in our native tongue. Language is deeply intertwined with our identity, emotions, and cognitive processes, and we subconsciously value brands that recognize this unique part of us.
But bridging the language barrier is just one part of localization. You need to think about cultural specificities, online behaviors, and buying habits of different locales, and all the details that can make or break customer experiences in different markets.
Need more convincing that localization could boost traffic and sales? Some of the best-selling stores on Shopify are tailored for more than one market.
Example of a localized store: Bee Inspired
Example of a localized store: GymShark
Localizing for a successful market launch
Besides localizing product descriptions and textual content, you’ll need to:
- Enable multi-currency support for customers to view prices in their local currency
- Offer payment options popular in the target region
- Adjust shipping options and rates based on the destination country
- Provide support in the local language, either through chat, email, or phone
- Update terms of service, privacy policies, and ensure compliance with local laws
While it might sound like a lot, localization is worth it.
Companies that invest time and money into ecommerce localization have seen a 47% increase in customer loyalty and a 53% increase in customer satisfaction.
What if we tell you that you can get a multilingual Shopify store in minutes? Completely affordable, no coding skills required.
2. Increase Shopify sales by optimizing for conversions
To increase Shopify sales, you either need to 1) get more customers to your website, or you need to 2) increase your average order value (AOV), which is the average amount of money spent by your customers.
We’ll cover increasing traffic to your Shopify store in the next section. Now we’ll focus on optimizing for conversions.
Conversion optimization is about setting up the mechanisms for upselling and cross-selling while also paying attention to psychological triggers (e.g., creating urgency, and influencing the perception of a product’s popularity by leveraging social proof).
Your job here is to make the shopping experience so seamless and simple that it’s easy for your customers to spend more.
That’s exactly what Amazon did when introducing the “1-click buy” option. Since Amazon already stores all payment and shipping information of its customers, “1-click buy” allows them to purchase items with one click. It’s a checkout process that is virtually frictionless.
So, how can you do something similar?
Best Shopify apps to make the checkout process frictionless
To help you out, we’ve handpicked some of the best Shopify apps to boost sales, and explain how you can easily implement them. Note: Shopify has a huge app marketplace that you can explore further.
UpCart
UpCart is a Shopify app that helps you increase your average order value with clever upselling add-ons. You can easily create urgency with timed offers, encourage more purchases with information on free shipping, or recommend similar products that the customer is likely to be interested in. Everything is done in the final step before the checkout.
You can increase sales in your Shopify store by creating urgency or offering free shipping for higher purchases
AfterSell
After the purchase, most online stores will display a thank you note to the customer. But this is a missed opportunity to encourage more sales. Instead, you can show a limited-time offer. After your customer completes the purchase, they might see something like this:
Example of a time-bound discounted offer displayed after the item has been purchased
Besides these two popular apps for upselling and cross-selling, there are apps that help you capture the attention of your customers, at the right time:
- Privy: A comprehensive Shopify app for email marketing and pop-ups. It helps capture leads, reduce cart abandonment, and drive repeat sales with targeted emails.
- Klaviyo: An email and SMS marketing platform designed for ecommerce. It offers advanced segmentation and automation to increase customer engagement and sales.
- Growave: A multi-functional app that includes wishlist, reviews, loyalty programs, and social login features to increase customer retention and conversions.
Additionally, it’s wise to remarket your Shopify customers which not only reduces abandoned carts, but also encourages shoppers to come back to your website and make a repeat purchase. The same goes for nurturing customer loyalty through email marketing and triggered offers.
3. Drive traffic to your Shopify store
Last, but not least, if yo want to increase sales for your Shopify store, you need to drive traffic to your website. This requires investing in marketing, localization, and optimizing your Shopify store for SEO purposes.
Ecommerce marketing is a very broad topic that could easily be covered in a separate article. But we’re going to point you in the right direction and equip you with resources to get you started.
On a high level, your marketing efforts can be divided into two groups: organic and paid. See the table below for an overview of different types of marketing you can try.
| Type of marketing | Main tactics |
| Search engine optimization (SEO) |
|
| Social media marketing |
|
| Email marketing |
|
| Paid advertising |
|
| Content marketing |
|
Instead of diving deeper into each marketing tactic, let’s take a look at how one Shopify store increased sales to $10.5 million per month.
How this Shopify store increased sales to $10.5 million per month
What would you do if you’re selling a commodity product, but you also have high growth ambitions? Loop Earplugs is a good example of just how valuable strong design, marketing narrative, and community can make a difference.
Loop Earplugs was founded by Maarten Bodewes and Dimitri O, who initially wanted to create stylish and effective earplugs for music lovers. They later expanded their product’s appeal to a broader audience.
Their marketing strategy centers on precise ad targeting, community engagement, and adaptability. Let’s break this down a bit.
Ad targeting
When it comes to paid advertising, Loop spends a lot of money on ads and are big on precise targeting. They heavily use A/B testing to optimize ad content, ensuring it resonates with specific audience segments. Plus, even though they initially targeted the music industry, they broadened their focus to include parents, people with ADHD, and those sensitive to noise.
Community engagement
Loop has a strong presence across Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and even Reddit. These are the channels that bring traffic to their Shopify store. Not only that, but they encourage user-generated content through their customer advocacy and affiliate programs.
Educating potential customers in a compelling way
One of the ways Loop managed to increase its Shopify sales is through empowering its customers. In the navigation bar, there’s a “Help me choose” section where shoppers can learn more about different types of earplugs or even take a quiz to find the best option. That’s a good way to engage your potential customers.
On the downside, there’s a huge missed opportunity for Loop: ecommerce localization. Currently, they’re doing light localization by displaying prices in the currency of their visitors’ shipping country.
To reiterate, ecommerce localization can help you boost customer loyalty by up to 47%.
And now that localization doesn’t require extensive resources like it did just five to ten years ago, it’s a shame to not take the opportunity to create truly local experiences for international customers.
