How long does it take to make your first sale on your Shopify store?
In today's video, I'm going to tell you that Hi, I'm Clarice Lin, the ROI doctor who helps
small businesses and online stores get more sales by getting on Google and YouTube page
one.
In today's video, I'm going to answer this question on how long would it take for a Shopify
store to get that first sale.
If you're a Shopify store owner, and you're just starting out, don't have any sales yet;
or if you're planning to start a Shopify store, sometime soon, this is the video for you to
watch.
There are some people who have this perception that when they first launched their Shopify
store, they thought that if they click on, go live, publish the products, and somehow
magically, sales is going to come because they have put their products out there, it's
online, now everybody should see it, and they will come to buy.
And you can't be any further away from the truth.
The fact is, even if you publish your product, you just put everything online, nobody knows
about your store.
Nobody knows about your product, nobody knows about your brand.
So why would they come to your store?
Who is going to come?
And why would they want to buy from you if you're selling something that someone else
is already selling?
So that comes back to our question about, would a Shopify store make any money?
Theoretically speaking, if you're doing all things, right, yes, you would make money from
setting up a Shopify store, you're setting up your own business, you have good products,
people want to buy, people know about your store, they come to your store, they buy it,
so your store is going to become successful over time, you're going to make money, great,
but it doesn't happen magically.
Just like sprinkling some star dust, doesn't work quite like that.
It could be anything from getting an immediate sale after your official store launch to a
few months, a few weeks, it all depends on you.
Depends on the prep work you've done.
Whether you've done your marketing work, whether you have put in effort, whether you have put
away marketing budget to decide how you want to market your product, you want to market
your store to let more people know about it, so they have a chance to come visit your store
and decide to buy your product.
If you have heard of people who got their first sale almost immediately after they have
launched the store.
This is probably what they have done.
Before they launch their store, they might have already set up their social media channels,
maybe on Instagram, on Facebook, on TikTok.
So they have started putting up content even though even before the products are ready
for sale.
Many software companies actually do that before they actually launched their product.
They start creating videos, they put out posts and content to create some kind of excitement
around the entire launch to tell people in advance that hey, you know we have this products
coming.
So they actually do the prep work beforehand.
And through all the different channels, maybe even running ads as well, they have one page
where they will create a thing called a waitlist.
Have you heard of waitlist?
Sure you have.
This doesn't just apply to queuing up for restaurants and booking reservations beforehand.
This also applies to a store pre launch activities.
If you have your one pager, you have your email address, what you can do is after creating
those contents, or even running ads, you can ask them if you're interested to know about
our products that's going to be launched on the first of November, if you want to know
more about it, put your email here and you'll be the first to be notified when we go live.
You would also benefit from having a 20% promo opening offer when we first launch our products.
This could be something exciting for potential customers to lock themselves into, to sign
up for it.
So you can garner some interest this way, before you launch one to three months ahead,
you can start preparing for it and you can start running those marketing campaigns with
about six weeks before that will be a good time to start because you need to build up
momentum, you need to get your first few followers when it gets nearer to the date, then you
could also add on the marketing budget by collaborating with micro influencers like
one week or two weeks before so you can actually step on the accelerator to drum up your marketing,
get more people excited.
Ideally, when it comes to actual launch day, you would have a couple of 100 people sign
up to your email list.
So on the day before, you can start doing a countdown, getting people excited, having
like a launch day special, blasting the email out to everybody on that list and that will
result in a first sale fairly quickly.
I can guarantee you that.
However, if you haven't done all of this prep work beforehand, you don't have any of these
potential customers on the list then it's highly unlikely you're going to get your first
sale on the official launch day of your store.
If you're lucky, perhaps if you have a couple of friends who are really interested in your
product, to buy a couple of your products when your products go live.
However, getting a few of your friends to buy is not something that's sustainable over
time, you could get them to buy a couple of your products at the beginning, in the middle,
there will be a drought because nobody else knows about it.
Ideally, if you have friends of friends where you can spread the word, and get more people
to know about it, not just relying on your core inner circle of friends to buy your products
than likely that could also help to grow your Shopify sales over time.
Spread the word to get friends of the friends of the friends, the second degree friends,
third degree friends, as many as you can plus the marketing campaign that you should be
investing in, put a marketing budget aside, decide whether you want to collaborate with
TikTok influencers, Instagram influencers, get on magazines, online magazines, find people
to help to promote your products, or running ad campaigns.
And of course, you also want your store to be found on Google as well.
So you need to get a listing if you want to know how to get a free listing and get your
Shopify store on Google Shopping as well, this is my other video which you can check
out here.
Make sure your Shopify store is found on Google because it's the number one search engine
where people would go to browse and look for products and services.
About 2 billion people went to Google last year to look for products and services to
buy.
Make sure that your store can be found on Google, put your store or presence on social
media channels.
Think about consider running a ad campaign to get all that sales coming in.
The entire idea of running marketing campaigns to promote your products is to get as many
people as possible who are most likely to buy to visit your store and ultimately get
them to convert into customers.
I hope that answers your questions about how long would it take you to make that first
sale.
You have to put in the hard work, the store will not sell by itself, your products no
matter how amazing they are, if nobody knows about it, then it's unlikely they're going
to get sales.
If you are planning to launch a store sometime later this year or next year; or if you've
just launched your store and you are struggling wondering why are there no one else buying
your products now you know the reason why, get going.
If you need help to market your Shopify store, I also offer service to help Shopify store
owners get more sales so you can check out https://claricelin.com/ services/.
Before I go, I want to share with you two stories.
On June 25 1964, Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight, founded Blue Ribbon Sports.
Seven years later, it was renamed to a name that you will probably be very familiar with,
Nike and today it's a multi billion dollar business sports brand franchise, and it's
a brand that even if people don't buy the shoes, they would have heard of this name.
And who would have thought that Blue Ribbon Sports would become Nike?
They didn't become successful overnight.
It took them over 50 years more than half of a century to make it a successful brand.
The successful Apple brand before when they first started, they were selling personal
computer PC, as what it was known back then.
That was in 1971, founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne.
Over the years, they have done their marketing to evolve to today's iPad, Air pods, MacBook,
iPhone, something that they would probably never have imagined when they first launched
their first personal computer.
What's the takeaway from these two stories?
Running a Shopify business is not an easy thing.
It's not a business that you start and you expect it to succeed overnight.
If you're not getting your first sale.
Don't be disheartened.
Those international brands that we know, those household names took years and years, took
decades, over half a century to become the brand that they are known today.
It starts from getting that first customer.
It starts from getting that first visitor into their door.
It starts from running their marketing campaign to get more people to know about their brand
and product and you build up your success from there step by step.
And with that, good luck with growing your Shopify store.
If you enjoyed this video, give it a like, thumbs up, subscribe to my channel, turn on
the notification bell so you don't miss any more of my videos on how to get your Shopify
store on Google and YouTube page one and get more sales for 2022.
I'll see you in the next video.
Bye bye!