Ditch the discounts
The design stage of an online store is typically (at least somewhat) speculative. No matter how much research you do before launching, and how well you think you understand your target audience, you can’t be certain that your chosen style is going to prove a hit.
A store in operation generates a lot of valuable data, and an online merchant’s biggest task is to use that data to achieve optimizations and make more money in less time.
And an easy way to achieve that is finding the products that are thriving and making full use of them — and that calls for some reorganization. Remember, we could easily generate more sales without running offers.
Here’s how you can (and should) change the structure of your store based on your top products and boost your sales using Putler’s insights:
Identify your biggest profit sources
Before you can do anything, you need to know which products are earning you the most money. After all, one person might interpret the term “top seller” differently from another, and taking it literally would be a mistake.
Let’s say, for example, product X achieves 100 buys at a low price point with a slim profit margin. But product Y achieves just 50 buys at a high price point with a healthy profit margin. Would you say that product X is a better seller?
For this, you need a comprehensive overview of your sales data, allowing you to look at quantities, revenue, timing, and everything required to make a smart assessment of product value. This is precisely what Putler provides.
How Putler can help you find your best sellers?
- Connect any number of platforms – Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, etc. to Putler.
- Putler will dig deep and generate meaningful product insights.
Put your best earners front and center
Once you know from Putler which products are really keeping your store afloat, you should think about giving them pride of place on your homepage. After all, there must be something noteworthy about them, so you should really just go with the tide instead of stubbornly insisting that your original layout will pan out better in the fullness of time.
This achieves two things:
- Firstly, it makes the products easier to find and buy (which will potentially earn you some more sales.)
- Secondly, it helps to define your business.
You may not have intended your most successful products to be representative of your store, but there’s nothing wrong with pivoting – Plenty of hit companies had to pivot as startups.
If you have a large range of products, then your best sellers may have wider implications about what people want to see.
Look at comparable products in your range: those that are similar in some ways. Can you see trends indicative of certain types of product or traits being more popular than others? If you can, it’s a good reason to rearrange your navigation.
For example:
Imagine that your main navigation has 8 category links, but it’s clear from your product research that only 2 of those categories contain products that lead to valuable sales. You can tweak that navigation to reflect that situation.
Great. But there are two viable angles, and which one you should choose will depend on the exact circumstances:
- Put those categories at the beginning of the list – This is about making it as easy as possible for people to get what they want. There may be people hungry for those products that keep missing them, so updated navigation could be just what they need to find them.
- Reduce the prominence of those categories – If your traffic analytics suggest that most buyers are finding those products through search engines and/or PPC ads, then it may be a waste to take the rare opportunity of someone looking through your menu and spend the bulk of the effort on pages they’ll already know to exist. If you focus on other categories, you may bring them some fresh attention without diminishing the popularity of your hits.
In the end, you’ll have to go with your gut on this. Base the decision on how popular you think your categories are likely to be in the future, along with the traffic sources helping them flourish.
Use popular products to support others
As advantageous as it may be to place a stronger focus on particular products, it might not be a sustainable strategy. Perhaps you can’t acquire enough stock to rely primarily on those sales, or maybe you want to expand into other areas, something you can’t do by narrowing your appeal.
So instead of allowing certain products to get and retain all the attention, it’s advisable to use their popularity to make other products more popular as well.
How do you achieve this?
By making good use of recommendations or alternatives. Using sections such as “People who bought this also bought:” and “Not quite what you’re looking for? Maybe these are more suitable:” will exploit the popularity of your top pages to push traffic to the rest of your range.
BONUS– This is readily available in Putler’s Products dashboard. This gives you a fair idea of what products are sold in conjunction with your top sellers. Just promote that product bundle to your targeted list and see your sales soar.
Replenish your inventory on a timely basis
A smart seller will understand that their inventory shouldn’t remain static. Trends come and go, stock issues arise, and new seasons and events prove disruptive.
If you want to make the most of the opportunities available to you, you must cycle in new products on a semi-frequent basis (clearing out the weak sellers to avoid clutter). And if your top sellers happen to point to gaps in your range, you should fill those gaps.
Let me explain this. Imagine that you sell a couple of electric hand-warmers, and they’ve become your top sellers, but it’s clear that the popularity isn’t due to those specific items but due to them being the only ones you have. When you look at your internal search, you see that people are simply searching for “hand warmers” and going with whatever they find — and there’s evidently a greater trend around hand warmers.
Do you stick those two items at the top of your homepage and call the job done? Or do you look around to see what other hand warmers — and what related items — you could add to your range to better take advantage of that trend? It’s particularly easy to make this type of change if you use a drop shipping supplier because then you don’t need to physically import anything.
Winding up
Knowing where the revenue (and profit) is coming from isn’t just mandatory for overseeing your finances; it’s also essential for optimizing the design and structure of your store. Every visit and every sale gives you invaluable feedback, so don’t waste it. Identify the top sellers and use them to make your store even more compelling.
So if you haven’t yet…
