Ep 5: Why Your Shopify Store Isn't Converting

On this episode of Marketing In 10, I’m going to give you a game plan for what to do when your Shopify store isn’t generating any sales. I’ll walk you through the exact process that I use to help my clients identify conversion rate issues. Let’s talk about it.

Hey everybody, this is Jim. Hope you’re doing really well. So today we’re going to talk about Shopify stores and what to do, what things to look at when you’re not getting the sales that you’re expecting.

TRAFFIC ISSUE OR CONVERSION ISSUE?

It’s extremely common for new stores to not get any sales, but fixing the issue is a matter of you have to identify, do you have a problem with traffic or do you have a problem with sales? Two different issues, two different solutions. So you can’t generate sales without traffic.

So, first of all, if you’re not getting enough traffic, every store needs at least 10 to 20 visitors per day. If you’re not getting 10 to 20 visitors per day, then you need to look at your SEO strategy. Look at your paid search strategy, Facebook ads, all that kind of stuff. And you see where you can make improvements there to actually generate traffic. You’re going to need traffic before you can get sales.

CONVERSION RATE OPTIMIZATION

But if you are getting traffic and you’re not getting any sales, then you might have a conversion rate problem. A decent conversion rate for a Shopify store is 1 to 2%. So if you’re getting 1 or 200 visitors hitting your store, but you’re not getting a sale out of that, then you might have a conversion rate issue.

And there’s a few things that we can kind of walk through together to cover that and take a look at everything and make sure that everything is optimized the way it should be. So this whole process that we’re talking about is called conversion rate optimization, or CRO. And CRO is quickly becoming a key part of digital marketing as a whole right up there with SEO and paid ads.

Stores that convert better will be more profitable in the long run. Plain and simple. The better you convert, the better you’ll be able to stay in business.

DIAGNOSING CONVERSION RATE ISSUES

So there are a few things you can do to kind of diagnose conversion rate issues. First thing, there’s a few basics that you want to make sure you have covered.

MAKE SURE YOU HAVE GOOD PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS

So make sure that you have good product descriptions, good product images and make sure that your on page copy is good. You’ll want to make sure that your product descriptions are accurate. If the descriptions, and then the products that you’re selling, they don’t match up, then people aren’t going to buy that. It’s going to look maybe scammy, spammy or just incoherent and that’s never going to be good for conversion rates. So make sure that you have good, accurate product descriptions.

MAKE SURE YOUR SITE/THEME IS WORKING PROPERLY

Another thing, kind of a simple, basic thing that a lot of people miss is just make sure that your theme is working properly. It’s important that it looks good on mobile. And it’s also important that everything works on mobile. So we make sure that if there’s a button on the page, that it actually works if you click on it.

I’ve seen themes that like part of the button is kind of hidden by some invisible CSS element or something like that from the theme. And it doesn’t work like it’s supposed to. Just make sure everything works like it’s supposed to in your theme, especially on mobile.

Another thing is make sure the site loads quickly. That’s usually not too much of a problem with Shopify stores, but there are themes out there that are more bloated than others. And they can cause stores to load a little bit more slowly than they should be, which is kind of a known conversion rate problem.

Yeah. Those are the basics to make sure that your site is optimized for conversions.

NEXT STEPS, GOOGLE ANALYTICS

If you’ve got all of those kinds of things covered, then it’s time to maybe start using something like Google Analytics to go a little bit deeper and see if you can figure out what the problem is. Google Analytics is a big help here. So the first thing you want to do is make sure that your Google Analytics install is tracking everything properly.

So make sure that you’re tracking all the page visits, make sure that conversion tracking is set up. You might not have many conversions at this point, but you’ll want to make sure that conversion tracking is working. So even if you have to do a test transaction yourself, you’ll want to make sure you do that, just to make sure that everything works like it’s supposed to.

MAKE SURE YOU’RE USING ECOMMERCE TRACKING

Also, you want to make sure that e-commerce tracking is turned on. So you can find that in the view settings in Analytics. So make sure that e-commerce tracking is turned on. I usually turn on as many different analytics options as possible just to cover all my bases and give me as much information as possible to work with.

GOAL TRACKING SETUP FOR THE SHOPIFY CHECKOUT FUNNEL

So another thing that you can do is when you set up your goal tracking and conversion tracking and Google Analytics, Shopify has a funnel. So there’s a multistep process that you go through to check out for any Shopify store, you’ll enter your email address. Then you’ll go onto a payment information page, a shipping page. And then finally, you’ll get the new submission page. You can actually track all of those steps of that funnel in Google Analytics. And I recommend that you set up your analytics view so that you can see all those things. Shopify really does a good job of optimizing that checkout funnel, but it could be that there’s maybe an issue where someone’s dropping off may be after the second step of the checkout process or something like that. So you’ll want to know that and have a good understanding for what’s actually happening.

And I’ll put some screenshots and examples of how to do this on this episode’s page. So if you’ll go to jimlastinger.com/5, I’ll have all the information there for you and you can set up the funnel tracking for your own Shopify store. Something, again, I recommend everybody do that.

NOTE: See the bottom of this page for the setup information

So once you have that funnel tracking in place, you can use that to see if your customers are adding products to cart, or if they’re not even getting that far. So if no one is actually adding products to cart, then you likely have an issue with the product itself. So one idea that I’ve used in the past is if you’re not getting any sales, if you’re not getting anybody to add products to cart, what you can do is you can add a survey pop-up to product pages so that whenever someone goes to leave that page, like leave the site, close the browser tab, something like that. You can pop up an exit intent pop-up and ask customers, do you have any questions about this page? Do you understand the products? Is anything confusing?

So those types of questions, it’s not something that you’re going to do for long term, but it can give you valuable insight into how customers are perceiving your products. And again, you would only show that upon someone getting ready to exit. So exit intent only. So if someone’s actually considering buying your products and if they’re staying on site, they wouldn’t ever actually see that product.

Okay. That’s everything for today. I hope this can help you track down any CR issues that you’re having with your store and get you back on the right track. Feel free to reach out to me directly if you have any questions and be sure to check the show notes and jimlastinger.com/five for more information. I’ll be back soon with another episode of Marketing In 10, where we’re going to be talking about how you can manage your Google Ads campaigns in just 30 minutes a week with the simple maintenance schedule that I use. Until then, take care guys.

SHOPIFY CHECKOUT FUNNEL IN GOOGLE ANALYTICS

This is how I recommend you set up your primary goal in Google Analytics. Note this this “goal” is just for tracking checkout. The Ecommerce settings in Google Analytics will handle the sales revenue.