Since Dec 2016, SPO has been helping niche sellers to improve organic traffics and social presence. Nowadays, the world is in a serious crisis that everyone has to change our daily lives and many of us even lose our life. The logistics are down. You can’t ship the product from your supplier. There are fewer buyers to shop online. I know that it’s a tough time for all of you. As an indie maker, I’ve been thinking about how I can assist more online stores to survive during lockdowns, border closures, etc. Though we are small companies here, it doesn’t that we cannot help other people who are suffering from the CoronaVirus now.
The Challenge ?
While I am working from home this week, I am trying to research what are the killers for new stores trying to launch. After reviewing 30 stores, I find that one of the most common issues in eCommerce is traffic-no-sales, a.k.a low conversion rate. It’s so painful! You waste your budget on Facebook or Instagram ads but you don’t know what’s going on. I am sure some of you tried very hard to get through it in the early days. Other new stores are having the same problem too. I can see that there are new stores desperately asking for feedback on Shopify / Reddit every day.
According to my research in the Shopify community forum, the causes are mainly:
To conclude, I would say that the reason is due to
lack of experience and no marketing sense ?
To help more merchants to stay afloat, I would like to start a new initiative by interviewing some successful SPO users to share their stories in the early day. How did they start from small and grow? How can they optimize the store to go through traffic-no-sales? What are the challenges and how did they tackle them?
People will usually block out sales pitches, but everybody loves listening to stories.
How it works?
In particular, I would define a set of questions. The merchants will prepare the questions and send it back to me. I will edit the story and post it on this blog. Regarding the style, the format will be similar to StarterStory but tailored for niche online stores. You may wonder Why would a merchant share her valuable experience with the others. What are the benefits?
Your Benefits ⚡
Well, when a merchant conducts an interview, it will create a history for his store and transparency leads to trust. This is the very first step to create branding. Imagine when a potential customer is considering buying from your store. She will definitely google your store to read reviews. An interview on a 3rd party site will definitely give him more confidence to purchase. Today, consumers are not only buying for features. According to Forbes, more consumers purchase from purpose-driven brands aligned with their personal values.
For each interview, I will add a link pointing to the store. An external link from a highly relevant site will greatly boost SEO. This is because Google loves unique content. The content marketing technique is called “guest blogging”, which is well known in the tech world for years. Personally, I also wrote about my startup story in the series From 0 to 0.1. It is proven to be a highly cost-effective channel to reach customers.
Giving Back by Sharing! ❤️
The opportunities will be primarily reserved for our users with > $3K MRR. If you’re interested, feel free to fill in the form. The enrollment will be made on a first-come-first-served basis. If there are more responses, I will purchase a new domain and put these interviews into a separate site. In this way, your store will be put together with other relevant interviews. It will definitely give you more SEO juice. ?
Feel feel to leave your comment below if you have any questions!
* The deadline is 30th April 2020
* The service is completely free as an initiative to support other small businesses under covid-19
* Priority will be given to SPO paid users
Credit: Banner Photo by Gabriel Bassino on Unsplash
Research data for traffic-no-sales: https://airtable.com/shr3ESTjhmfo3rGuS
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