Why No One is Purchasing from Your Website? The goal for any eCommerce store or online business is to generate sales from the online traffic its store receives.
For beginner eCommerce entrepreneurs asking, “why is nobody buying from my website?”, there are effective solutions to this problem.
Convert eCommerce traffic into sales by making sure your online store works, communicates clearly and is visually attractive to visitors. Having these items in check will increase sales and make sure customers remember where to return to for purchases in the future!
Are you struggling to sell from your website? You’re trying to sell your products, but people just are not converting?
- You’re Not Driving any Traffic to Your Website
Building a website does not guarantee you traffic. It doesn’t mean that your website will magically appear at the top of search engines and you’ll magically be found. You have to start getting people to your website. And there are several ways that you can do that. The first one I suggest would be running ads.
- Build Ads around Conversions.
Let’s analyze this through the eyes of an entrepreneur who thought if she just moved to a different platform, everything will be fixed, right? No, the problem was she said she was running ads.
We asked, “Okay, great. Send us a screenshot. Let’s have a look at your ads.” When we reviewed her ads, what we saw was that she was never sending people TO her website. Really! She was posting a picture of a product and saying, “Isn’t this awesome? You can get it for 25% off,” but then she didn’t have any links back to her website.
When we asked her why she was running an ad for “likes” rather than for “conversion”, she said, “Oh, I thought those were cheaper.” Eventually people might buy, but that isn’t helping you in the now. You might end up spending thousands and thousands of dollars on a like campaign but get zero results. Why? The reason is it’s not sending people out of Facebook or Instagram to your website. It is simply getting buzz on those online platforms. Even if you explicitly tell someone where to go, that doesn’t mean they’ll magically want to go.
So instead of running an ad that is just built around likes, you need to build an ad around conversions.
- Post Content as well as Pictures
This same entrepreneur had another issue when it came to selling on their website – we found when looking at how she was marketing, she was just posting pictures of the product she has on her Facebook page and Instagram and thought that would be enough. She didn’t have any content on some of these pictures! Her friends were like, “Oh, that’s so cute” or “That’s awesome.” And yes, eventually someone might say, “Hey, how can I buy one?” But that doesn’t mean the average person knows that you sell that thing.
We think that our family, our friends, they know what we do. We might have thousands of friends and think that they’ll all buy, but that’s just not true unless we guide them and direct them to where they need to go.
So instead of just posting a picture about the product, you have to put some content about how and where they can buy, put a link to your website, and specifically the product you’re promoting. Will it mess up your algorithms to have links? Sure. You may not be seen as much, but those people that do see it will see a link and know where to go to buy.
- Stay updated on Inventory, Links and Contact Information
Another thing about this person, was that she posted all of these pictures of products on her Facebook ads, but then when people went back to her website, those products weren’t showing up. She wasn’t keeping her inventory current. She said, “But I’ve spent so much time and money on the products that I want to sell the ones that are there, I didn’t know if I should put both.”
If you have a similar product, put both because when somebody sees something on your social media or in your advertising and then goes to your website and doesn’t find that thing,
they’ll likely have a negative experience and buy nothing. People aren’t going to buy a different product just because you didn’t put the product that they were interested on your website. They might have an interest in something else, but that might not always be the case.
Be sure that if you sell multiple things that you link out to the correct page, and if you advertise it as available, have it available on your website.
There are some other service based businesses where we’ve gone to their websites and wondered, “Where are you even located? You have a cell phone number that’s in a completely different state. So I don’t even know if you service my area and yet I found you.”
People are going to be turned off by that. And they’re going to go find somebody else who is clear and obvious with their contact information. So make sure if you service a particular area that you have that in the somewhere obvious like the footer, or header.
Also, not having this in place may hurt your rankings.
- Send them to the Product they were Interested in.
It might seem easier to link to your website home page and think “Oh, well if they were interested enough to click on the link, then surely they’re interested enough to find the actual product for themselves.” While this might be true for a few people, it isn’t true for most people.
We live in an age of busy people and fast technology, where people have no problem moving on or exiting out of your website if they feel it’s not worth their time. The more you make them search for the product they saw, the more turned off they will be with your user interface, your website and your company in general. This drives people away, so make sure to avoid doing it.
- Have a Clear Call to Action
Do you have a call to action? Or do you just have some vague information and some contact information that you hope they can find? If you don’t have people coming to your website and being able to stay on that website, they’re just kind of bouncing off quickly because they’re not getting the information they need, or they don’t know where to go. This means you’ll have a higher bounce rate, lose traffic and potentially lose ranking as well.
So make sure to add a Shopping Cart, add a Newsletter sign-up, add a Contact page etc. Buttons are really clear to understand, but it is up to you to make sure the contact forms are also really clear. Make it super easy for your visitors.
Always be guiding them and showing them where you want them to go on and around your website. You have to have some calls to action. People need to know where to go to buy from you or else they never will.
- Use a Good Keyword Strategy
The next thing that we see is, is you’re not using keywords to actually get people to your website. We’ve talked about keywords over and over. I know we always talk about keywords, but keywords are a huge part of why you are or are not successful.
Sometimes it’s because you’re describing something in your terms, maybe a high-level term, whereas people are searching differently for something.
For instance, let’s try to think of a product. Let’s say we’re working with some construction companies right now, and one of the construction companies is very specialized in plumbing and wastewater services. So they service wastewater manholes sewers, that type of thing for municipalities. And what we found on their website is that they had pretty much no keywords whatsoever. The only things that were getting good ranking was if people put their name in specifically, they would be pulled up at the top.
If they put your business name and you come up at the top, but when we searched for what they were ranking for, we found out that it was really for their PDFs, not even for anything on their website, it was PDF links out that were getting them any rankings.
So turning that around and looking at what real people are searching for, we found that that high level words they were using like “assessments” isn’t how people are searching.
They’re searching for “inspections”. So switching the way that they are writing is going to help a lot in getting rankings. Check your keywords, do some keyword research. You’ll be surprised at what you might find.
- Be Active on your Website
Sometimes we run into individuals that don’t put any real value in their website, they might have an attitude like “I don’t care about my website. People come to me personally to do business anyway.”
This is going to really hurt you in the long run.
Here is an important statistic for you- Over 52% of people who hear about your business will go to your website first before they even call you. Studies have show that people are conditioned do this behavior first. We go online to search out a company. Before we pick up a phone and call, we want to check them out. We are researchers. We want to make sure we’re getting the best deal. We want to make sure we’re working with someone professional.
If your website falls short of expectations, people are going to leave. When people come and leave quickly, that is another way that will drop your rankings.
An outdated website is almost as bad as having no website. The reason for this is people don’t know if you’re still current. Ever been to a website that still had holiday promotions from two years ago on their website? Can you imagine if this was the first thing that people were seeing when they went to your website. When your website is outdated, and when you don’t have current blogs or information that shows relevancy, people are going to think that you’re not the right choice to do business with.
Make sure you have a plan in place to keep things updated. We really recommend being careful about not having promotions showing on your homepage that are very date specific. Unless you are an eCommerce business that is keeping your site updated all the time.
Also, if you haven’t blogged in four years and you only have two blog posts, get rid of your blog all together. Don’t provide it an option on your site as it’ll make you look less credible.
Make sure you to keep your website updated at least quarterly, review everything and make sure there’s nothing out of date.
- Have Testimonials
The next thing that we see that really hurts a website’s reputation is when users go to a website and they want to purchase, but they don’t feel confident purchasing from this business because they don’t have any reviews or testimonials.
This is one of the reasons why Amazon is so huge. They have so many reviews that people can go and see, how the product you’re considering has done for anyone else whose bought it.
Is this product worth your money?
If you have products on your site for sale, and you have no testimonials, find a way to get some testimonials! Contact past customers, see what their experience was. You may find that those products that still don’t have reviews, may not get as many sales, and the ones that do, tend to sell more.
So make sure to make testimonials on your website a priority in your marketing plan.
