Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year. It’s even better if you’re a dropshipping store owner who’s looking to make some serious money. But a dark shadow lurks and waits for inexperienced sellers to step in and ruin all their plans for this season. The shadow in our story is the constant rise of ad costs that may bring you from profitting to losing if you don’t plan ahead. Planning not only on how to bring sales but how to recover the lost ones.

In this week’s article, I’ll show you 4 ways to successfully bring back customers who left without buying and make them WANT to spend even more money on their second visit. Sit back, relax and read this article in full because if not, you’ll be leaving money on the table for others to pick up.

1. Engaging With Your Audience To Recover Lost Sales

The comment section is there for both you, as a business owner, and the users to communicate. If someone asked a question, you should answer it. If someone said something nice about the product you sell, then you should say something nice back. If someone left a funny comment, then it will be cool to just comment back “hahaha”.

People often check the comments section to see if the business advertising the product is legit. Once they see that the business is responsive and the comments are positive, they’ll continue to the site and hopefully purchase the product if everything else is right.

By engaging with your users, you not only build trust but you also remind them again about the product they liked a few hours/days/weeks ago.

It’s important to remember that Facebook limits the number of comments you can leave so don’t overuse it. Simply check your ad post once a day and respond to 5-10 people. Make sure to tag them and to make it personal. Don’t just COPY-PASTE.

2. Using Retargeting Ads To Recover Lost Sales

Fact #1 – More than 95% of the users you’ll bring to your store will leave it without buying anything. This is where retargeting ads kick in to follow these users everywhere they go and to call them back to purchase your product.

Fact #2 – Most users will buy a product only after seeing the ad 7 times or more. Although Facebook and other advertising platforms are aware of that and already show your ad to users more than once, you can’t count on them to do it for you and you should retarget them yourself.

A retargeting ad is a reminder for your users that your product exists and still available for purchase. Like a salesman knocking on your door to sell a painting but in this case he will knock on your door every 5 minutes.

To create a retargeting ad you will need to have a custom audience. Something which is easily obtained if you have a facebook pixel on your store. Once you have a facebook pixel installed, you can just go and create an audience of all visitors in the “facebook audience” section.

You can create your first retargeting ad after you get more than 50 visitors and the most simple one will be to just point your users to your original ad. Later on, you can create new creatives showcasing different styles or colors of your product, flash deals, bundles and more. Use your imagination and learn from other online stores retargeting ads.

3. Using Email Marketing To Recover Lost Sales

Email marketing or how I like to call it, the bread and butter of an online business, is one of the most powerful tools we have. It’s a list of clients and potential future clients that can be used for anything related to our business. If used right, a big chunk of your sales can come only from email marketing.

This article is about recovering lost sales so we will use email marketing to recover those who abandoned our checkout after leaving their email. This is when the email is legally collected by us and now we can use email marketing to call the user back to complete his order.

You have 2 ways to do that.

The 1st way is to do it by youself in your prefered email marketing platform. You can assign abandoned checkout emails to a new list and create one or more emails that will automatically go out each time a new email is added.

For example: The first email can be a few hours after the customer abandoned checkout. The next email can go out in the same day too and the third email can go out the next day with some kind of deal to lure your customer back.

Our advice is to check out what works for others and copy their strategy. One of the best ways is to visit a big online store and to leave your details without buying. This way, you’ll get sale recovery emails that you can later copy and use on your customers.

The 2nd way is to install an app that does almost everything for you. I recommend using Abandonment Protector app because I use it for all of my stores and have nothing but good things to say about this app. Their system gives you really nice templates that you can easily set up and customize and much more… Use the suggested sending time in their app and you should be ok.

Note: We have absolutely no affiliation with Abandonment Protector Shopify app and recommend it only because we think it’s the best out there.

4. Using Social Proof To Recover Lost Sales

Did you know that 86% of consumers read reviews of businesses and that a big amount of them trust reviews as much as personal recommendations? These are just a few of the statistics taken from BrightLocal consumer review research – This is enough to make you understand that a real business, especially an online one, needs reviews to survive and flourish.

First, we will need to get reviews and testimonials for our product. This can be done by simply approaching people who loved our product and ask for a review, a photo or a video testimonial. We can message them on Facebook, Instagram or by simply sending an email. To increase our success rate, you should always add a little gift like a coupon code or maybe a freebie as a thank you for their review.

Or we can always use Shopify apps like Loox (we have no affiliation with Loox app) and others that automatically send out emails to collect reviews, build nice review pages and more. So if you don’t have time to do it manually then you can always get one of the review collecting apps out there.

Once we have our reviews, it’s time to show it to the whole world. We can leave a comment on our ad with a review or a customer photo for other people to see. We can email our users, especially the ones who abandoned checkout, and just brag about our “happy users” loving and using our product. We can use these reviews as retargeting ads and much more.

This will eliminate any doubt about our product and should recover lost sales.

If you have hard time collecting reviews and product testimonials, you can always use services offered on Fiverr where you can send your product and get a video review.

To Sum It Up:

The majority of customers that visit an online store leave it without spending a dime. If you have a HOT product and a great store then sales will definitely come but you’ll be leaving a lot of money if you don’t use the retargeting techniques shown in this article.

Let us know what you think in the comments and feel free to share with us your techniques to recover lost sales.

Struggling with finding good products to sell? Not sure who’s your target audience? Tired of losing money on products you were sure were “winners”?

Then Ecomhunt is what you need! Find hot winning products that are added daily, spy on their ads & stores and import them into your store in 1 click and Start Selling Today!

Must Read Articles:

• How A Puerto Rico 22-Year-Old Built a 7 Figure Ecommerce Company
• Why You Should Use Photo Ads For Your Business
• 5 Tips To Increase Your Store’s Conversion Rate

The first article was a success and a lot of you emailed us for a second part. So here it is 🙂

If you missed the first part, you can check it here.

Too Many Apps:

This happens way too often – New store owners that install a crazy amount of apps when they didn’t even bring 1 visitor. Fortune wheels, scratchcard popups, “someone from *random country* bought this” notifications, counters and more…

Save your money! Having a successful dropshipping store is not an easy task. With advertising costs going up on almost every platform, every dollar you save counts and you must manage your budget wisely in order to have a better success rate.

Focus on finding the right product, optimise your store so it loads up fast and install only a few must have apps. Apps like Abandonment Protector that does a great job reducing abandoned checkouts(we have no affiliation with this app).

And you should also compare app prices. Sometimes you can find more than 1 app that does exactly what you need.

Spending Too Much On Design:

Repeat after me: “I will not pay $100 for a logo. I will not buy a premium theme when I can install one for free. I will save my money for the important stuff first!!!.”

It drives me crazy when I hear how much time and money beginners spend on their store. I know a lot of successful dropshippers and they can create a good looking shopify store in a couple of hours while investing only a fraction of the money.

I know that having a good logo and design on your store is important, but it doesn’t have too cost you so much. You can get a normal looking logo for $15~$30 and install one of the free themes and trust me that your store will look great!

You don’t need to pay hundreds of dollars as if you’re an offline brand going online. Keep your store simple, fast, clean and everything will be alright.

No Sticky Cart Button:

One of the most important lessons I learned – What’s obvious to me isn’t obvious to my customers.

When I browse online and swipe down to read the product’s description, I then swipe up to find the “Add to Cart” button to order the product. This is obvious to me and to you but unfortunately such simple task isn’t obvious to A LOT of people.

So by not having a sticky cart button, some of the customers get lost and leave the store. Or tap back and end up on Facebook again, getting all confused and stuff…

You have to chew everything up and spit it out for your customers.

*Some themes have a sticky cart button by default and some don’t. If you don’t have a sticky cart button, you can get one by installing an app.*

Not Recording Your Customers:

By not recording your customers, you will have a really hard time understanding what went wrong.

For example: A customer clicks the “Add to Cart” button, goes to the cart page and leaves. Not a special case, really common actually… But upon checking the recording of my store, I noticed that the item was added twice to the cart. So my customers were a bit confused and didn’t know how to remove 1 item so they left without buying. It also could be that some of them thought that it was a “cheap trick” to get them to buy 2 items, so they left.

By recording your customers you can see how they respond to your store, identify bugs and fix them. You can use Hotjar to record your customers. Easy to install and you won’t need more than the free plan.

Not Transferring Your Customers Straight To Cart Page:

If on your store clicking the “Add to Cart” button doesn’t transfer the customer straight to the cart page, then you’re losing money as we speak!

Some of the themes (Free & Premium) have an ajax cart or some other cart style installed by default. If that’s the case on your store, go and change it quickly so your customers are transferred to the cart page.

This is a really important setting that can affect your store’s conversion rate. These stylish slider/popup carts may look good but they drastically reduce your store’s conversion rate because it either confuses your customers or it doesn’t look good on their mobile device.

And it’s preferable to get our customers to quickly buy the product and later we can offer them more stuff. It’s much easier to convert an existing customer 😉

Here at Ecomhunt, we have reviewed thousands of online stores. From beginners to advanced sellers, these are the top 5 mistakes online store owners usually make.

Too Many Popups:

Customers hate popups! If the first thing your customer sees is a popup, I guarantee that there’s a big chance we already pissed him off. So instead of focusing on that cool product he saw, he will now think about that annoying popup. Add to this “click to allow” popup or that huge facebook messenger button that loads up on each page and we probably lost our customer.

Keep it clean. Customers visiting your store don’t want to be bombarded with newsletter popups or “click allow for [store name] to send messages” type of popups. We spend money on ads and when we finally get potential customers to actually visit our store, we want the process to be fast, easy and clean.

For now, the only type of popup you must have on your store is an exit popup. This to catch leaving customers and hopefully convert them with a small discount.

Slow Loading Time:

The number 1 way to lose customers. This may be obvious but you will be amazed on how many stores we review where the loading speed is really slow. The cause can be a lot of things… The usual suspect are the images, banners and other media files that are too heavy and cause the site to load slowly.

Instead of uploading JPEG image files, store owners upload their images in a PNG format. And if you didn’t know, PNG files are heavier than JPEG files.

Here’s what you should do:

First of all, use TinyPNG’s awesome free online service to compress your PNG and JPEG files. Next, check your site’s speed on GTmetrix. Their free service is great and they’ll compare your site’s score to the average score. Make sure to read and follow GTmetrix suggestions.

Image files aren’t the only reason for a slow loading time. Sometimes, the reason can be due to a bad theme installed or other coding related issues.

Lacking & Bad Descriptions:

Copying an aliexpress product description is just you being lazy. Not only do they look bad and robotic, some of the text sometimes doesn’t make any sense.

This is what you should do:

1. Tell a story around your product – It doesn’t have to be long. A few sentences is all you need for a product description to be appealing and actually help you to convert your visitors into paying customers. You can also add some reasons why your customer should buy the product and how it can be used daily.
2. Don’t forget important details – If your product needs batteries to work, you should definitely let your customers know what type of batteries they will need. Or if batteries are included or not included in the package. By not including(“forgetting”) important details in your product description, you literally throw your money away. Because no matter how good or “HOT” your product is, a customer wouldn’t buy it if he doesn’t have all the needed information.
3. Bad product titles – Don’t use the same product title as you see on aliexpress and hope for the best. Make it more appealing by giving your product a unique name or add your store’s name in the beginning for it to look more brand like. For example: Instead of “Silver Butterfly Necklace Shine In The Dark Ruby” product name, use something like this “Magicalbeast’s Magic Shine necklace”. This in an example of a better looking product title with “branding”.

Too Many Product Options(Variants):

So you’ve found a great product on aliexpress that you think has a good chance to sell. You import it to your store using Oberlo and you see that it has 20 colors to choose from.

Does your customer really needs 20 different color variants to choose from?

If you’re going to continue with 20 color variants, you’re about to lose customers only because they will have a hard time choosing one. Your customer will spend a lot more time checking all the colors available and then going back to see again the colors he liked the most. This is bad because we need our customers to convert fast. This ain’t the flea market where customers stroll and check stuff out.

Instead, you should keep a maximum of 4-5 of the most popular color variants. Less options = The faster your customer will choose and proceed to checkout.

No Reviews:

Nowadays, it’s so simple to import aliexpress reviews to your product page and edit it so it looks good, that there’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t do it.

Reviews are super important and have a huge impact on sales. Studies show that 84% of people trust online reviews as much as friends and that 91% of people actually read them. This should be enough for you to understand the power of reviews and to add them in your store if you haven’t.

Make sure to edit the imported aliexpress reviews. Not only by correcting grammar mistakes, but also changing the origin country and names. If most of your traffic comes from the US, it’s best if the review is written by “Eddie Murphy” from the USA and not “Dima Kazlov” from Russia.

Advertising costs are on the rise and increasing your Average Order Value can sometimes be the difference between a profitable and a losing campaign. And even if you’re not spending a dime on advertising, I don’t know anyone who would refuse to accept bigger orders and to make more profit per customer.

In this article, we’ll cover the methods used by store owners to increase their AOV. And we will provide numerous tips on how to setup a successful working system to increase your AOV which will lead to an increased profit.

Offer Bundles to Increase Your Average Order Value:

A Bundle is probably the most popular way to increase your AOV. Widely used on leading ecommerce websites like Amazon, all it takes is one tempting offer and the customer will be willing to spend much more than he intended when he first visited your store.

Bundles such as you see on Amazon and different websites can be easily done by using a custom shopify app. There are plenty of bundle apps on the shopify app store but if you want a recommendation, the “Bundles | Also Bought Together” shopify app is our favorite. You can check it here(we have no affiliation with this app) – https://apps.shopify.com/product-bundles-by-vitals

Buy More – Save More Bundle:

This bundle offer is our most favorite and it always gives us the best results. This option works best for low to average priced products. Sometimes, a cheap aliexpress product that costs $2-3 can’t be sold for $30. It really has to be something top quality for you to be able to price it at $30.

So instead, we offer our customers to buy more than 1 piece and give them a nice discount. A tempting discount they cannot resist! This way, a big portion of our customers will buy more than 1 piece and our AOV will increase. We also need to make sure that our profit for 2 pieces after the discount is considerably higher than the profit for 1 piece. So if you’re selling 2 pieces and profiting $2 more than selling 1 piece, you should definitely change the discount amount you’re offering.

Frequently Bought Together Bundle:

This is a straight copy from Amazon. We don’t really know if they were the first in the market to offer this type of bundle, but it really doesn’t matter. This bundle works great for a lot of store owners and can significantly increase your AOV.

The most important thing when offering this bundle is to have a logical connection between the products. As you can see, in this example the offer is an extra popular red color bikini that could be bought together with the black one. A Logical offer that will probably work really well.

If instead the red bikini, the offer was a wrist watch, it would probably fail. So it’s really important to offer related products and not just random “Hot” products.

Buy X – Get Y Free Offers:

One of the most popular offers that can be seen anywhere from your local small grocery store to retail giants. The offer of a “free” gift is one of the best psychological tricks out there and it works no matter how many times a customer has seen such offers.

You can use this method and offer the 3rd item for free or just throw in a random gift.

For example: If your customer buys 2 t-shirts, he’ll get a free sticker. Something as small(and cheap) as a sticker can be enough for the customer to decide and order 2 t-shirts instead of 1. The word “Free” has a lot of power and it’s a must for every store owner to utilize it in order to get more sales.

You can easily offer these options by choosing one of the available “gift options” apps on the shopify store. Or if you’re on a tight budget, you can always replicate some of these offers and add them manually. All you need is a bit of creativity!

Manual Example: On a product where you want to offer 1 free item when buying 2, you can simply write it in your product title. Or place a small “buy 2 get 1 free” banner with your offer. Next, change your quantity variant and make sure to add “get 1 free” in brackets. So when the customer chooses 2 he will see “2(get 1 free)”. And just make sure to send the customer 3 of the same item.

Pre-Purchase Upsells:

The pre-purchase upsells are usually activated after the customer already made a decision to add a certain product to their cart. Once on the cart page, a pop-up is triggered and offers another product for a discount. Pop-up upsell is the most popular way but there are also “upsell suggestions” which appear somewhere in the cart page and offer 1 or more items for a discount. Cart upsells do work but as we expalained in our previous article here, we prefer keeping the cart page clean to increase our conversion rate. This is why we don’t usually use cart upsells but as this article is about increasing your AOV, we had to include it.

To use pre-purchase upsells, you’ll have to install a shopify app. Some of the bundle apps available have already an upsell option in them so make sure to look for apps that offer multiple options.

Your online store’s conversion rate doesn’t just depend on how fast it loads and if it’s mobile friendly. There are many other technical and psychological factors that can drastically hurt your conversion rate if not applied properly.

Make sure to read these tips in order to maximize your store’s potential!

Send Your Customers Straight To The Cart Page:

We don’t want our users to click on our “add to cart” button only for a small cart popup to appear and disappear after 3 seconds. We want them to checkout as fast as possible without any delays or interruptions. By transfering them straight to the cart page, we increase our chances to get a sale.

On most of the themes we used, ajax cart was set as default. Or a different kind of  popup cart. Make sure you change this option in the theme settings and transfer them to the cart page. You can also transfer them to the checkout page but we personally don’t use this option because some users get confused and leave. But you can always test it out and see what works best for you.

Keep Your Cart Page Clean:

Our cart page is clean and doesn’t show any upsells or related products. Now, don’t get me wrong – Upsells and related products feed work well and can increase your average order to get you much more profit from one customer. But in our case, we were losing much more than winning.

What actually happened is that our customers were checking the upsells or the different products and ended up without buying anything. By giving them an option to check out different products, they got lost in the process and left. This is why we decided to change our system.

Instead of offering upsells and showing them other products, we decided to clean our cart page and first get a sale. Once we had that customer in our pocket, it was much easier to sell him something else numerous times by using personal email marketing or simply by retargeting him with different products on Facebook and other platforms.

In the future, if we wanted to increase our AOV(Average Order Value), we offered bundles on our product page and made sure our ad clearly displayed our deal. For example: Buy our “Neon Shoes” and get this “Neon Hoodie” for 40% off! And of course displaying the products in our video or photo ads.

Don’t Give Your Customers Too Many Options:

By giving your customer too many options, he may really have a hard time to choose one. This is quite common with dropshippers who important products from aliexpress with a lot of variants. Instead of your customer spending 10 seconds reading and clicking on the “add to cart” button, he will be checking out all the colors and sizes or whatever options your product has. This is a big NO-NO and you’re going to lose a lot of customers to this.

Make sure to keep just a few relevant/popular variants available so your customer doesn’t get lost. A good read on the subject by Psychologist Barry Schwartz: The paradox of choice.

Offer Multiple Payment Gateways:

This might be obvious to some of you but there are a lot of people who have only one single payment option on their store. If you’re only accepting credit card payments, adding PayPal can substantially increase your conversion rate. Even if you don’t like PayPal and have bad history with this company, it’s not a valid reason to deny this option from your customers. Same goes if you’re only accepting PayPal.

In case you can’t offer any other checkout options, It’s best to let your customers know about it. For example: If you’re only accepting PayPal, you can let your customers know that they can checkout on PayPal without having an account there. Simply by checking out as a guest.

Or if you’re only accepting credit cards, you can always set up a followup email for the ones who haven’t completed the checkout and ask if the lack of payment options made them leave without buying. And if the customer replies back, you can work stuff out and hopefully get him to purchase from you.

Remind Your Customers About Your Store’s Deals:

If you’re running a FREE SHIPPING store, an announcement bar saying “FREE SHIPPING ON ALL ORDERS” isn’t enough. You need to constantly remind them about your free shipping promotion.

If he’s on your product page, make sure that “FREE SHIPPING” is written in your product title and description. When he goes to the cart page, make sure the text under the total price is saying something about FREE SHIPPING and not the regular “shipping and taxes calculated at checkout” text. This may cause confusion and you’re going to lose a potential customer.

Same goes with every other deal. You have to basically show it to your customers in every place possible on your store!

To Sum It Up:

You need to always think as a 1st time customer visiting your store. Everything needs to be organized in a logical way so that the buying process is quick and easy.

Make it easy for them to understand and the sales will follow!