Are rats stealing your store sales?

Over the weekend, we put out some seed for the birds. In less than a day, a gross rat found the seed and decided to make a meal of it.

To prevent the rat from eating the seed, we bought a bird feeder that hangs from the soffit of our house. Unless the rat is acrobatic, I doubt he can reach it. Right?

I stared at it every day from my desk waiting for the birds to enjoy their food. The bird feeder was up for a week before the birds took a chance.

This got me thinking about how often I hear from store owners that they get many visitors, but no one is buying.

Customers are like birds. They need to check it out first and make sure getting to the food is safe. “Is this a trap? Can I trust this contraption to provide what I need? Is the food good and something I want to eat? Is the rat, something I don’t want, going to eat my food?”

Your customers are asking similar questions about the products in your Shopify store. You’re checking Shopify’s analytics wondering why they aren’t buying and none the wiser.

And the rat… The rat is all the little things preventing customers from buying. I call that the conversion killer!

There’s no magic seed or fancy feeder you can use to increase conversion rates. Rather, a bunch of small changes and tweaks are what can make a big impact. And time. Many conversions improvements need time to start producing. Just like flighty birds.

We tested different areas for the birdseed before realizing that the free or low-cost options weren’t going to work. The rat took advantage and scared the birds away. The only way for the birds to get to the feeder and prevent the rat from getting into the food was to invest time, effort, and a little bit of money.

I’d recommend making small changes to your Shopify site to see what works. There are tools you can use such as Google Analytics, Lucky Orange, and HotJar to see how your customer interact with your store. Track your changes. See how customers interact with your site in total. Then make minor tweaks to continue optimizing your site.

A few things to ask yourself when evaluating your store:

1. Why would they buy from me vs another? Sometimes when customers don’t buy, it’s because they don’t trust they will actually get their product.
2. Do they know who we are? An About page is invaluable when gaining the trust of your customers.
3. Are there ‘rats’ on my website preventing customers from buying. This could be anything from links not working to words that don’t make sense or even product images that aren’t visible – to name a few.

Ensuring there are no rats is essential to building trust and increasing sales.

I have a service where I check over 100 areas of your store to find out why people aren’t buying. A Website Rescue may be what you need. With a Website Rescue, I’ll fix any number of issues like this that could be hurting your sales.