Selling your handmade products on your own online store is a great way to reach a wider audience, get more sales and grow your handmade shop.
But with all the features and platforms available these days, it can be a hard to know what features you should focus on, that are actually going to increase your sales and turn your visitors into paying customers. Today I want to talk about the 4 features you need on your online store to get more sales and increase your revenue.
The first thing you need is an email marketing integration. You need to add sign up forms on your website, so that your visitors can opt in for your newsletter.
This allows you to keep in touch with them and bring them back to your store. To do that, you can use any email marketing provider such as MailerLite, MailChimp, or Klaviyo. They’re all really easy to use, and you don’t need to know any coding skills to integrate them on your website.
The next step is an email marketing strategy: once you’ve got all those email addresses, what are you going to do with it? I recommend you download this free guide to get you started with your first email marketing sequence.
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The second feature you want to set up on your store is called “cross sells”. Cross selling is a fancy word for something really simple: it’s a sales strategy used to get your customers to purchase more by offering them to purchase a related item to the one they’ve already decided to buy.
A great example of cross selling is the standard McDonald’s order. If you’re buying a burger, the first question you get asked is “Would you like some fries with that?” That’s a typical cross selling strategy.
If you’re using Shopify, most themes already have this feature built in and the same goes for WooCommerce and WordPress, it’s already built into the software itself. If you want to take it one step further you can also download some plugins and addons that will let take this feature to the next level by letting you end pick the items and the cross sales that you show your customers. Some plugins also let you set it to “automatic”: the related items shown to your visitors are updated automatically depending on what the visitors have viewed on your website or what they’ve already added to their cart.
The next feature is called cart recovery. It’s a really powerful tool that lets you follow up with visitors who’ve browsed your website, added a few items in their cart but didn’t finish their order.
To “recover” those lost orders, you can send an email automatically to offer your website visitors to come back to your website and finish their purchase. You’d be surprised at how many sales you are able to recover this way and how many people are actually willing to come back to your website and finish their order.
If you’re using Shopify this feature is built-in to their $29 plan. If you’re using WordPress and WooCommerce there’s a plugin that you can purchase and download to add this feature to your store.
The last feature that you need to have on your online store is “product reviews”.
Did you know that 70% of customers look at reviews or ratings before making a final purchase? Sadly, a lot of shop owners disable this feature when they’re just starting out because they think that it looks a bit weird if it stays empty and no one actually writes a review. But the day someone is ready to write one, you need to have this enabled.
Pro Tip: Make sure to ask your customers if they’re willing to write a product review. You can do that in a post-purchase email (Eg.: “Did you receive your order? How did we do? We’d love it if you could take the time to write a review”).
There’s plenty more features you can add to your online store to boost your sales as you grow, but these are the four essential ones. If you’re just starting out and need to know what to focus on, this is it!
Take some time to set this up properly, and you’ll have a very solid foundation for a very successful handmade shop.
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