You’ve got your store completely build and all set. Your products are all lined up. You might even have a few marketing campaigns off the ground and running. Your Shopify store is ready to go, and now you’re ready to sell.

Whether you’re struggling to build brand awareness, run profitable ad campaigns, or win over customer trust once they’re on your site, there’s a lot of factors that can keep businesses from reaching their full profit potential on Shopify.

So how do you stand out from the competition, win over customers, and get them to purchase from you? We wanted to find out, so we talked to some experts who have already done it. Take a look at what they had to say about how to sell more on Shopify, and how you can replicate their success.

1. Don’t Just Stop at One Purchase

Marketers focus a lot on the buyer’s journey, but many make the mistake of focusing just on the first several stages: awareness, consideration, and purchase. Once a customer has purchased, some businesses forget about the rest of sales funnel (which includes, depending on the model you’re looking on, loyalty and/or advocacy). As a result, they may have a lot of one-time sales, but that’ll be about it.

Alex Fedotoff is a Facebook Ad specialist who has made huge profits from Shopify, and helps other brands to do the same. One of the most common mistakes he sees made is Shopify owners who focus on getting that initial sale, and then move on to the next customer as soon as it happens.

“A lot of Shopify entrepreneurs don’t consider the life time value of each customer as important metric,” he told us. “And those who do are usually the most successful. If you would make 2X or 3X more profit from each customer by selling them 2-3 times, not just 1, then you are able to spend a lot more money on front end customer acquisition (think Facebook and Instagram ads) and still be profitable. There are multiple ways to do that, including email marketing strategy, increasing average order value with some of the apps, and incorporating subscription/ membership into your Shopify store.

2. Use More User-Generated Content

Consumers are smarter than ever, and they trust businesses and marketers less than ever before. Of course you’re going to try to sell people your product, however possible- it directly benefits you.

User-generated content (UGC) is the natural solution to this problem. We don’t trust a business if they say they have the world’s most shatter-proof dinnerware ever, but we’ll trust the consumer review who said they dropped it six times and still serve three meals a day on it.

Miriam Tremelling is a marketing specialist at Pixlee, which seeks to help businesses utilize UGC to improve their marketing and sales efforts (Shopify storeowners now can benefit from this thanks to their Shopify integration). She talked about the importance of UGC in the role of selling on Shopify.

Here’s what she had to say:

“Creating engaging displays of customer photos within your Shopify storefront is a sure-fire way to take your word-of-mouth marketing to the next level and add a layer of social proof to encourage customers who buy. Here at Pixlee, we’ve found that shoppers who engage with UGC on Shopify product pages are 2x more likely to make a purchase than those who don’t.”

The benefits of UGC don’t stop there; in addition to helping you get more purchase orders, Miriam said that one of their case studies revealed that UGC also improved the average purchase value, too.

“Last holiday season, swimsuit brand Jolyn worked with us to set up a customer photo gallery,” she said. “The brand saw a 6.81% higher average order value from shoppers who interacted with the user-generated content than those who didn’t.”

3. Go for the Well-Rounded Approach

Sometimes it’s easy to want to find one easy hack that we can apply in a few clicks, and then call it a day and wait for the sales to come pouring in. If you truly want to drive sales, though, sometimes you’ll need to take a look at the big picture and do a lot of small tweaks.

Liza Moiseeva is the Co-Founder of GlobeIn, a company that offers a subscription box service for women containing hand-made products around the world that supports the local farmers and artisans who provided them. When asked what Shopify marketing tactics worked to help make GlobeIn the huge success that it is, she mentioned several different things that were essential.

“Lead with your best-selling products. Use them in all PR and social campaigns. This will be what will get people to click on your ad and scroll through your site,” she said.

And speaking of capturing their attention: “Good photography is a must, especially for premium-priced products. Anything over $50 requires high quality pictures.”

She also mentioned that a lot of the tools that you need to succeed on Shopify can actually be found through Shopify.

“Shopify has a ton of resources right in your home page. You can see your daily sales, best performing products, as well as tips of apps, adds, and strategies to try during the key holiday says,” she said. “Apps are also very important. The most sales-generating app for us so far is Quantity Breaks, which allows us to sell products bundles and give customers a good deal on them.”

There are thousands of different Shopify plugins available. Take a look around in the Shopify App Store and see what you find and check out our list of recommendations here.

Conclusion

If you’re wondering how to sell more on Shopify, there’s no one better to learn from than those who have already done it. Each of our experts approached Shopify sales from a slightly different perspective, and together you can create a combination of their tips that works best for your business and your target audience.

The specifics and technicalities of what our experts said varied. Still, one key point that all experts mentioned at some point when I was speaking with them was to make it about the customer; connect with them on the platforms they’re already on, make their on-site experience exceptional, and provide them with the information they need.

What do you think? Do you agree with these strategies? Do you use different tactics to sell more on Shopify? Let us know what you think!