If you are trying to make more money in your handmade shop, you may be a bit exhausted from constantly trying to bring in new visitors and attract new eyes to your store and your products.
If you’re using an organic strategy only it can be incredibly time consuming – and if you’re using paid strategies like paid ads or paid partnerships, it can also be quite expensive!
And you’re wondering . . .
What else can be done to increase my sales — how can I get off this traffic hamster wheel?
And you might also be wondering…
How do I make more of the traffic I already have?
These are very good questions, and today we’re going to explore ALL of your options to boost your revenue and sales!
So, ready? Let’s dive in.
I want to start by quickly showing you the basic revenue formula, which is
What we know from looking at this formula is that there are three things that you can do to increase your revenue:
Now even though today’s article is about ways to boost your sales without needing to create more traffic, let’s spend just a minute reviewing how increasing your traffic affects your sales, just so we can compare/contrast to the other two ways of increasing your revenue.
Boosting your traffic is the thing that many shop owners tend to focus on when they are trying to increase sales.
For example, let’s say you have 100 people visiting your store, and you have a 3% conversion rate with an average order value of $50. If you are able to increase those visits to 1000 or 10,000, suddenly, you’re making not $150 but $1,500 or $15,000!
But as we talked about earlier, having a constant pressure to increase shop traffic can be exhausting . . . and/or expensive!
So the question we want to answer today is, what else can you do besides trying to increase your shop’s traffic to increase your sales?
Let’s look at the other two elements of this formula – conversion rate and average order value – to answer this question.
Grab this free conversion rate calculator!
Turning views into sales: this free calculator will help you figure out what your handmade shop’s conversion rate is, hassle free.
First is your conversion rate.
Conversion rate is the number of people that will turn into customers for every 100 people that visit your shop, or more simply, the percentage of shop visitors that make a purchase.
So if for every 100 visitors to your shop you are making 3 sales, your conversion rate is 3%.
Or, if for every 100 visitors to your shop you are making 5 sales, your conversion rate is 5%
So if you want to increase your conversion rate, you are trying to increase the percentage of shop visitors that make a purchase.
The industry average conversion rate is between 1 – 3%, but as I always say – remember that this is an AVERAGE and WILL vary based on your specific niche and products.
What is more important than comparing yourself to this average is that you constantly want to be improving, so I think your time is better spent figuring out YOUR current conversion rate and then working to improve it.
How?
Well, there are many, many details that all contribute to your conversion rate, and to increase it you want to go through this list and see if you could improve any of these details in your product listings.
Listing features that affect your conversion rate include:
So you can see that your conversion rate is really a reflection of many listing details, and shows you how important it is to pay attention to these details and not rush when you list your products.
The third thing that can boost your sales is one that not enough people think about, but it can have a HUGE impact – quite quickly – on your sales . . . and that is your average order value, or AOV for short.
Your AOV is the average amount of money that a customer spends in a single transaction or order.
You calculate AOV by dividing the total revenue generated in the specified time period by the number of transactions.
So for example, if you have a jewelry business and your total revenue last month was $1000 and you had 10 sales, then your AOV would be $100.
There are a number of very clever ways to increase your AOV, such as:
You will want to consider your products, your customers, and your market to decide which ones would be the most effective for your listing.
Next, let’s take a look at how improving any of these metrics can impact your revenue.
Let’s say your average order value is $50, your conversion rate is 1.5%, and monthly traffic is 1000. Your revenue in this scenario would be
Traffic X Conversion Rate X Average Order Value = Revenue
so
1000 X .015 X $50 = $750
Now let’s say you set a goal to increase your conversion rate from 1.5 to 2% – how would that impact your revenue?
1000 X .02 X $50 = $1000
If we look at our equation we see that your revenue increases to $1000, so that’s a 33% revenue increase, not bad!
Now let’s say instead of increasing your conversion rate (so we’ll keep it at 1.5% here), you increase your Average Order Value from $50 to $75.
Our equation becomes
1000 X .015 X $75 = $1125
So your monthly revenue increases by 50% — NOT BAD!
And finally, what if you did both of these things?
So you increase your conversion rate to 2% and your Average Order Value to $75 – look what happens:
1000 X .02 X $75 = $1500!
With just those two small changes, your revenue is up by 100 PERCENT! Or you’ve DOUBLED your income, without needing more traffic at all.
So you can see how these small increases in your metrics can really have a big impact on your sales revenue.
One word of caution if you plan to work on your average order value: there is a very common trap that people fall into when they work on their AOV, and if you don’t know about it then none of the AOV strategies are going to work. Click here to learn about this common average order value trap.
Now, Average Order Value may not be a metric you have thought much about before — it is probably the thing that people think about last, at least in the handmade world. But it’s one of the most important ecommerce metrics, and I wrote an article about how to raise your average order value taking a deep dive into its potential, and the trap to avoid, just last week — so be sure to read it!
Thanks for reading, and until next time, aurevoir!
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Grab this free shop’s conversion rate calculator
Debora, all the materials you offer to help us, the makers of unique handmade things, are very useful. They are consistent in style, easy to understand, well illustrated and connected with links. Thank you very much for your patience, knowledge sharing and belief that your audience can move forward in reaching our goals. Thank you very much!
Glad to hear that you like the content! We look forward to hearing from you on our free Tizzit facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/tizzit/) as well. You will be able to connect more with makers like yourself! 🙂
In summary, enhancing your handmade sales without relying on increased traffic is all about optimizing your current resources. By refining your product presentation, implementing strategic pricing strategies, harnessing the power of customer reviews, leveraging social media for engagement, and nurturing customer loyalty, you can unlock untapped potential within your existing audience and boost your handmade business’s success.
Thank you for your insights!