The longer you work the Low Hanging System, the more you’ll notice that your sales volume fluctuates throughout the year.
Around major holidays, like Christmas, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and Valentine’s Day, you’ll experience spikes. But during other times of the year, when there are fewer widespread gift-giving opportunities, your sales may slow.
There are numerous things you can do, however, to give your sales a boost during these “off” periods.
Below, you’ll find eighteen suggestions for what you can do if your sales volume is lower than you’d like.
Let’s take a look…
Look at the official “Why am I not getting sales?” post.
If you’re inside LHS, my all time best tips are right inside this post. These are the core elements for boosting up your Low Hanging sales.
Those are all CORE LHS, and then everything else is for after you’ve got that established and you want to scale up.
Let’s go for the rest:
Add new listings
LHS is a numbers game. The more listings you have, the more opportunities people have to buy from you and the more likely it is for customers to find something they want from your store.
So if sales have been slow, add new listings. If you need some help coming up with new design ideas, here are some resources that can help:
10 Ways to make new designs even if you’re not creative (update)
10 Ways to make new designs even if you’re not creative
Not feeling especially creative? Here’s a list of strategies to come up with new design ideas
Creating new design ideas – A compilation of effective strategies
Put your designs on multiple products
You want to get the biggest bang for your buck with each design you create. To keep this process as “low hanging” as possible, I highly recommend adding each design you make to every product that you sell (as long as it makes sense to do so).
So if you create a new design, don’t just put it on a coffee mug. Put it on a travel mug, a shot glass, a pillowcase, and a face mask too (and any other products you sell).
Simplify your designs
I cannot stress this enough — SIMPLE SELLS. You don’t need to get overly fancy or ornate with your designs. In fact, you really shouldn’t do that.
You want to create designs that have mass appeal. You don’t want to give potential customers any reason to not buy your products. And every single new element you add to a design gives people another reason not to like it.
For example, what if someone hates the color blue? Or what if someone thinks your font style choices don’t go well together?
Designs with basic black text, one simple font, and no images hold the most widespread appeal. So if your designs are more ornate than this and your sales have been stagnant, try simplifying your designs.
Big, readable, black text on a white background is really all you need.
Put your designs on more platforms (Amazon, Etsy, AND eBay)
If you’re currently selling only on Amazon, you might want to branch out and open an Etsy shop and/or start selling on eBay. The more opportunities you give people to buy from you, the more sales you are going to make.
I know some people have said they can’t afford the fees on Etsy. But if you can find a way to budget for other aspects of your business, I highly recommend reallocating some of those funds into posting on Etsy. Some LHS members do better on Etsy than anywhere else.
(Each Etsy listing costs $.20, but you can get your first 40 listings for free when you sign up using this link.)
Watch or re-watch LHS product critiques
Inside the Low Hanging System dashboard, you can find over thirty product critiques. Watch and learn from these so you can get a better feel for the types of designs that sell really well.
Here’s what Joey, the first person I made critiques for, said:
“FYI, using Rachel’s suggestions, that mug has actually sold a few copies. Actually, it was like a switch. As soon as I made her recommended changes, I sold the first one.
I highly recommend that people watch those critiques. They were very helpful to me. I’ve gone on to make a bunch of mugs that sell.”
Use my free product mockups
Over the years, I’ve had my designers create a whole bunch of mockups for LHS members. Click any of the links below to download your free mockups pertaining to a variety of products and special events, holidays, and seasons.
(You can also find mockups inside your Low Hanging System dashboard in the Download Center.)
Adding your designs to these mockups and including them in your listings makes your listings more dynamic and engaging to customers, thus enabling you to attract more visitors and earn more sales.
Lifestyle (coffee mugs, shot glasses, pillowcases, travel mugs)
Valentine’s Day (coffee mugs, shot glasses, face masks, travel mugs)
Easter and Passover (coffee mugs)
Summer season and holidays (coffee mugs)
Winter season and holidays (coffee mugs)
Other special events and seasons (coffee mugs)
Improve your SEO by re-optimizing your listings
If sales are slow, your listings may need a keyword makeover. Try digging in and doing keyword research to find new words and phrases to rank for. In addition to SpotNiches, you can use tools like…
Erank/trending
Erank is Etsy-specific, but you can use the keywords you find here on other platforms as well.
In the trending section of Erank, you can check out all kinds of keywords that are popular on Etsy. You can see a Trend Graph and Etsy Searches for each keyword as well.
The trend graph shows how a keyword’s popularity has changed over the last 15 months. This provides you with a sense of seasonality and whether a keyword is getting more or less popular.
Etsy Searches reveals the estimated number of searches for a particular keyword in a given month.
You can also use Erank to browse by category. The category that makes the most sense for me is Home & Living. And when I click that, I see keywords like…
As you scroll through the list, you’ll find lots of keywords you can add to your listings.
Keywords Everywhere
This is another Etsy search volume tool, but you don’t need a subscription to use it. You choose how many credits you want, and it’s relatively inexpensive.
The amazing part about Keywords Everywhere is that it actually shows you the search trends while you are typing ideas into the Etsy Search Bar. See the example below…
Google Trends
Google Trends is also a tool you can use to find new keywords for your listings.
When you enter a specific search term or topic into the search bar, such as “pitbull mug,” you’ll see a graph showing the interest over time in that particular keyword or keyword phrase.
If you continue scrolling, you’ll find a list of related topics and queries that may offer more good keyword ideas for your listings.
And if you create designs that aren’t evergreen, Google Trends actually shows you the specific month when people search for a particular niche. So Google Trends could actually help you plan your entire year of keyword research.
Google Trends also shows you if a specific trend or keyword phrase is still relevant. If you don’t see any activity on the graph during the month you are looking at, the chances are that a lot of people aren’t searching for that term.
Re-write your descriptions with keywords
In addition to looking for new keywords to add to your listings, you may want to revamp your listings’ descriptions, adding new keywords to those as well. You generally don’t want to “keyword stuff” your descriptions, though.
So make sure you’re adding keywords in a way that’s readable and makes sense to customers. And if your descriptions weren’t super readable beforehand, it’s definitely a good idea to do some editing.
Explore new niches
If the majority of your products pertain to only a few different niches, you might want to branch out and expand your inventory’s reach. Use the suggestions outlined above to find new keywords for your listings and see if any new niche ideas come up in the process. You can also explore trending topics for new niche ideas (more on that below).
Research trending topics for designs
Coming up with new design ideas is always a good strategy to give your sales a boost, especially if you go the extra mile to see what’s trending. To learn more about how to search for trending topics and turn them into winning design ideas, check out this blog post I made last year.
Submit a request to have me critique one of your products
After going through other people’s product critiques, if you’d like me to critique one of your products, you can submit a request and I’d be happy to look over your item and offer as much advice as I can. You can learn more information about my product critiques here.
Run promotions for “weird” holidays
As previously mentioned, sellers often experience sales spikes around major holidays. Unfortunately, major holidays don’t happen every day or even every month.
But lesser-known, “weird” holidays still occur year-round, and they can be cause for celebration, gift-giving, and promotions. To learn more about all of the offbeat holidays happening throughout the year, check out my Weird Holiday Guide.
Run a sale on Etsy or offer free shipping
Etsy sales and coupons
You can run sales or offer coupons on Etsy whenever you want. But it’s an especially good idea to create special offers whenever a holiday is coming up. You can have a store-wide sale or you can create discounts for specific items in your shop.
Additionally, after a holiday has passed, if certain items in your shop go out of season, I highly recommend running a 10%-15% off sale. You’d be surprised by the number of people who still want to buy seasonal items, like Christmas ornaments, after the season has gone by.
To learn, step by step, how to set up sales and coupons on Etsy, check out this blog post.
Free shipping
If it’s possible for you to still make a profit on your POD items, then I suggest offering free shipping on your items all the time.
Or, if free shipping would make your profit margins too slim, you could boost your listing price by adding your base shipping cost to your listing’s original price and then offer free shipping.
Etsy has been pushing listings with free shipping to the first pages of the search results because free shipping entices customers to buy.
If you don’t want to offer free shipping all the time, you can also create a special offer for free standard shipping for a certain period of time or on select items. (The aforementioned blog post shows you how to set that up.)
Check your Etsy conversion rate
Inside your Etsy Dashboard, you’ll find your shop’s analytics if you click where it says Stats.
Check your Etsy conversion rate. If it’s less than 2%, you should analyze how much traffic Etsy brings in versus how much traffic you bring in.
If your sales have been slow, I’d aim to bring in 20%-30% of your own traffic without relying too heavily on Etsy. The Etsy algorithm may fluctuate at any given time. But if you also bring in your own low-hanging organic traffic, your chances of getting sales will increase.
Social Media, Etsy Ads, and Direct/Other Traffic are what make up the kind of traffic you can bring in. To learn more about how to increase your traffic and sales using social media, take a look at this blog post. It offers a list of ways you can use Pinterest to increase your ecommerce sales.
Etsy ads are also super easy and simple. I would just be mindful of how much you are spending each day.
When you opt-in below, you gain instant access to the free Etsy Success Checklist my assistant created to help you keep track of what you should do when your Etsy sales are slow:
Run a “Detail Page Sales and Traffic” report on Amazon
Running a “Detail Page Sales and Traffic” report shows you which of your listings are capturing the most and least attention. Knowing this, you can take those under-performing listings and optimize them (add new keywords, revamp their descriptions, etc.).
Plus, you can create new listings in the same niches as your high-performing listings and hope they get similar results.
You need to have an Amazon Pro account to run this report. But as long as you have one, just follow the instructions detailed here and you’ll be good to go.
Get the “Buy Box” on Amazon
Having the ‘Buy Box” can be a great way to improve your Amazon sales. According to BigCommerce.com, “82% of Amazon sales go through the Buy Box, and the percentage is even higher for mobile purchases.”
Not all sellers are eligible to get the Buy Box, though. You need to have a professional account and good seller metrics.
To learn more about the Amazon Buy Box and how to get it, follow the instructions detailed in the attached document.
Create seasonal items 2-3 months ahead of time
Preparation is key when it comes to ecommerce success. Whenever a major holiday is coming up (like Mother’s Day), you should create new designs and listings ahead of time (2-3 months beforehand). Doing so allows your listings to have enough time to be able to rank in the search engines. a
Sign up for Jumpstart
When you sign up for Jumpstart, you get 100 done-for-you designs, 5 boxes of mugs sent to Amazon on your behalf, weekly group coaching, access to SpotNiches (a fantastic keyword and niche-finding tool), and more. If you want to give your sales a boost, signing up for Jumpstart absolutely can help.
Click this link to learn more.
I hope you find these suggestions helpful! Do you have any additional advice you can share about what to do when your ecommerce sales are slow? Please leave a comment below. I’d love to hear from you! And if you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it with your friends and followers.
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