When You Aren't Getting Sales

We've been having lots of dips in sales lately. We got 5 orders in the last week of January, but no orders in the 1st week of February! Lots of shops go through this, and it can be pretty discouraging. We all put so much work into our hops, and it feels terrible when things don't work out right away!

The smallest shops have to put in the most work as far as marketing goes. When you have little to no sales, people are less likely to buy from you, meaning you have to work 10 times as hard to get orders. Most of us do this through social media, but growing a loyal following with many buyers if extremely difficult and exhausting too.

A lot of people don't realize how much they are going to have to struggle for success, and when they start their shop, they want to quit after a few weeks. For us, it took about 2 months until we got a sale from someone we didn't know. But when we did finally get that sale, it was from one of our social media followers! Our hard work building our social media communities started paying off when people from our Instagram, Pinterest, etc started purchasing! Now, over half of our sales come from our social media. Instagram and Pinterest drive about 40 percent of traffic to our Etsy shop. The rest comes from Etsy search, direct traffic, etc.

Although it may feel like growing your social media is useless because no one is buying, many of your followers are potential buyers just waiting for the right time!

So how can you get all those potential buyers to click "purchase"?

There are a few things you can do to encourage them to take the leap:

1. Run a sale. If your customer is waiting for the right time to buy, they might make the purchase when they see a discount. Even 10 percent can be enough to persuade the customer to make their purchase.

2. Offer a freebie! Customers always love getting extra goodies in their orders.

3. Update your product photography and listings. Your product photo is the customer's first impression of your product, and it has to be perfect. Make sure you have good lighting and a clear shot of the product. Also, make sure your titles, descriptions, and tags are descriptive and use accurate keywords.

Try these out and see what happens! I can't guarantee any of these will get you hundreds of sales, but hopefully they'll push your potential customers to buy your product. Once you have a few sales from your social media following, you'll start gaining traction and getting more and more sales! The more sales you have, the more people will trust your shop, making them more likely to purchase.

Good luck getting started!