You have just finished setting up your eCommerce website. Your web design is trendy, and your products are great. You have very great product descriptions and a perfect payment gateway. So, you officially launch your website. What next? Sit back and wait to see the orders and purchases trickle your way, right?
To be frank with you, things will not be that easy. Getting your first order for your eCommerce store is not a walk in the park. It is a long, arduous battle. Beginnings are always tough, and getting the first sale for an eCommerce store is a significant milestone to your eCommerce business success. Sealing the deal to your first eCommerce deal requires patience, determination, and understanding of the different techniques and tricks that will lead to that first sale.
This article discusses some of the best tricks that you can employ to get your first sweet sale. So, let us get started.
Share the Load With Affiliate Marketers
If you want your eCommerce business to succeed, you will have to keep your costs as low as possible. Do not go overboard, spending vast amounts of resources to land your first sale. One of the most cost-effective strategies you can use to land your first sale is sharing the cost with affiliate marketers or brand influencers. Affiliate marketing is where you allow other people to market and sell your product on your behalf. Affiliate marketing is becoming popular day after day, with more than 80% of brands using this technique.
Influencers will give you access to a small, reliable, and prospective audience that could end up becoming your first customers. The influencers will actively engage loyal followers and present your products to those followers who might quickly turn into your first customers.
However, the success of affiliate marketing will depend on the type of products you sell and the amount of commission that you will be willing to pay your affiliate marketers. You ought to understand that using affiliate marketing is a worthwhile investment, and you should be willing to put in your resources. At the end of the day, you are assured of a profit. The cost of affiliate marketing is also low. This means that you are at liberty to use multiple affiliate marketers to reach out to a great audience.
The best way to get started with affiliate marketing is by searching for influencers or affiliate marketing within your niche. In addition, you can explore various social media accounts to identify your best affiliate marketers and brand influencers.
Solicit the Help of Your Network:
The first group of people that will know about your eCommerce business will be your friends and families. Soliciting their help could be so effective in landing your first eCommerce sale. If they find your product valuable and capable of solving a pain point in their lives, then they will probably be your first customers.
Apart from being your first customers, your friends and families and all the people within your network could also help you to promote your product and spearhead it to its first sale. For example, you have probably had people ask you, “My friend/brother is running an eCommerce store. Would you like to have a taste of his/her products?” Such could be the source of your first sale.
To successfully use your network, you can ask your immediate family members and friends to not only try out your products but also help you promote them. You can provide free samples as well. Additionally, you can use social media platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter to reach out to your old friends, colleagues, and classmates and tell them about your eCommerce business. Some of them could end up being your very first clients. Ensure that you follow up with all those interested and answer any of their questions to clarify your products.
Improve Your eCommerce Website Security:
Lack of proper website security measures and protocols could be the culprit for delaying your first sale. Designing your eCommerce website without security in mind could be costly. Today, with so many data breaches and sensitive information losses, most online shoppers are extra cautious about their online security. They will never put their sensitive information in danger by buying from an insecure eCommerce store.
Your users will be looking out for the signs that prove that your website is secure—one of the things that prove that a website is the SSL certificate. If you want to instill confidence into your potential clients and make them buy from your eCommerce store, then you should buy SSL certificate today.
An SSL certificate is one of the best and popular security protocols that plays a crucial role in web security. It will encrypt the communication and information exchanges between your website and your clients’ browsers, ensuring that the information is safe from intruder threats. Encryption makes the information indecipherable. An intruder who intercepts the communication will not be able to decipher its meaning. It will be meaningless for a hacker to steal what he cannot understand. As such, the attacker will not be able to alter the communication or compromise it in any way.
The certificate protects all sensitive data such as debit card details, credit card details, user financial records, social security numbers, among other sensitive information. For the sake of the safety of this information, you will need to acquire an SSL certificate for each of your subdomains. But isn’t that too costly? It is not. Not with the wildcard certificates on the market. All you need is a single wildcard SSL certificate, and you will be able to secure an unlimited number of first-level subdomains under your chosen primary domain.
Users want to see an SSL certificate before they can buy from you. It gives them a sense of security and relieves them of any worries and fears they might have before using your website. Being the first time using your website, their worries are justified, and so should you make efforts to assure them that they are secure by installing an SSL certificate.
Run a Blog:
Starting a blog is one of the best ways to market your brand and bring traffic to your website. You can also use the blog as a platform to expose your platform to your new audience. The blog will attract more visitors to your website. The more traffic your blog brings to your site, the higher the chances of making your first sale. Some of the excellent blog examples you can create on your eCommerce website include the following:
- Articles that explain to your potential clients how your products can help them achieve their goals.
- Guidelines on how to use the products to solve specific problems.
To make your blog more impactful, you can optimize it for SEO. You can do some keyword research that will help you rank high in the search engine results pages.
Give Discounts:
Discounts will help to persuade your potential customers to buy from you. New buyers usually find it difficult to purchase new products from a new eCommerce store at full price. This is because you do not have an established reputation or reviews that might trigger them to buy from you. Therefore, offering quality products at affordable prices can be very helpful in triggering your first sale.
Discounts usually act as strong incentives that will entice clients to try out your products. However, you have to consider the costs of producing and selling the product to your clients. Do not go overboard with your discounts to the extent of making losses. Giving out huge discounts might lead to heavy losses. There is no point in making great first sales and, in turn, make huge losses that might lead to business failures.
Use a Simple Website Design:
The first impression speaks volumes and can determine whether or not you make that first sale. If your visitors find your website unattractive, then they will exit your website without making a purchase. Therefore, you must invest in a simple website design and work to improve your website’s functionality.
You must ensure that the interface of your website is not cluttered. It must be easy for your visitors to find what they are looking for. For example, you can have a prominent search bar to allow visitors who know what they want to find it easily by simply searching it. It would help if you also had clear and precise Calls to Action that ignite quick actions and make your visitors make quick purchases. Additionally, you should invest in a mobile-friendly design and work to improve your website’s loading speeds.
Use Social Media Platforms to Build Your Brand:
Building a brand will make it easier for customers to find and learn about your business and the people behind it. One of the best ways of finding new customers is by creating active social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tok-Tok. The world is witnessing a tremendous increase in social media platforms’ usages, and businesses should leverage this trend to find new customers.
Conclusion
Launching your eCommerce store is just one of the steps to starting your eCommerce business. However, the ride might not be as easy as it seems. Making your first sale is not that easy. You need to take a few steps to achieve your first sale and see your business succeeds.
