Traffic but no sales? Do this...

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Author

Flo Thompson
September 12, 2024

Shopify can be broken down into exactly two main problems:

  1. People don’t want my products.

  2. I can’t find people.

Problem 2 can be solved in 60 minutes.

We can tell roughly 4 billion Facebook and Instagram users about our products with a few clicks.

The key problem is #1.

You can have all the traffic in the world and still no one will buy if you get a few fundamentals wrong.

Pro tip:
If you’re running ads, run them directly to the product page of the promoted product. Not(!) to the homepage.

There’s one question I always ask that fixes 90% of our problems:

“Why would anyone want to buy your product?”

This is not to be mean, quite the contrary. This will be the guiding principle for everything you do from design, to copy, marketing, emails, …

Here’s what you’re probably thinking:
1. I’m going to sign up to Shopify
2. Upload my products (let’s say Jewelry)
3. Then I tell people I sell jewelry

  1. Then I wonder why no one buys and I start to believe Shopify is not actually working.

Number 4 is a bonus. That’s what I used to think when I got started.

Here’s the truth…

You’re actually pretty close.

The thing that is not working, is telling people you sell jewelry or (insert your product) and hope that’s going to make them buy.

Why doesn’t it work?

Because that’s not how we make purchase decisions.

We don’t wake up and say “let’s buy stuff. Because we don’t have enough stuff….”.

We buy things because we are trying to solve a problem.

Example:

My wife and I recently had a baby and we needed new laundry detergent. Because we wanted one without the chemicals so that it’s friendlier for our baby’s skin.

I wasn’t looking for Laundry detergent… I know where to find that.

I was looking for a laundry detergent that solved my problem.

Most beginners would create a Shopify store that says:
“Buy our laundry detergents.”
or “Get 20% off our laundry detergents”

But imagine they said
“The laundry detergent made for kids. No chemicals, no toxins.”

I would have bought it immediately. Without discount or anything.

Once you understand WHY anyone would buy your products.

All you have to do is talk exactly about the WHY and HOW your product (WHAT) solves it.

Tada. That’s it.

Here’s a real-world example:

Duradry sells deodorant.

Instead of saying WHAT they sell “The best deodorants you can find”.
They focus on WHY someone should care “Stop embarrassing sweat”.

In the end, if it could be a cream, a pill, anything…

If someone wants to stop their embarrassing sweat, they will be interested.

To tie it all together…

All we do in our ads then is show our product and say “want to stop embarrassing sweat?”

I know, I made this sound very simple but it took me over 7 years to learn.

Happy selling,
Flo

P.S. Reply with “Yes” if this long-format lesson was useful.