Selling your first item on Shopify can seem daunting. You’ve invested time and money learning how to do it, but will anyone actually buy your products? Having had so many questions from new online shop owners in the past few months, we have created a guide on how to get your first Shopify sale. We’ll cover the basic components that trip people over and how to gain trust as a new online shop. So, before we waffle any longer, here is our guide on how to get your first Shopify order.

Initial Setup: Essential checks

Before launching any advertising or promoting your eCommerce site on social media, it’s important to be well-prepared to ensure your customers can buy your products. And before you say it, yes, Shopify does come working out of the box, but there are things you need to ensure are enabled to allow people to buy your products. Here are some essential and recommended features for new shops to check before launching live.

• Payment methods: Have you setup multiple payment methods like Card Payment, PayPal, Apple Pay and others? Offering multiple payment options will increase your conversion rate. It’s one of the many reasons people leave an online shop at the last hurdle.
• Delivery rates & options: These go hand in hand; having multiple delivery options and favourable rates, such as free delivery, can be the difference between getting the order and losing it. We recommend giving a free delivery option for orders over a certain amount of the total price. For example, you can offer free delivery on all orders over $100. This offer will incentivize users to add more products to the basket, increase your conversion rate, and increase your average order value.
• Optimization: Typically, this isn’t a common issue on new sites because they aren’t loaded with apps and plugins. However, images can increase the load speed significantly. Image optimizers are used to speed up the site, and only JPEG or WEBP formats should be uploaded. SVG is logos. PNG is too big.
• Consistent Branding: Most likely, you’ll be using a theme of some sort that has come prepackaged. This is great, but people forget many things, including up-to-date branding across mobile and desktop. Ensure the logo, font, and general text match across both device sizes. This consistency helps build trust, especially if they’ve seen your site on mobile first but wanted to buy via their laptop or tablet.

Trust Signals & Conversion Rate Boosters

If you’ve done the above, then you’re in an excellent position to dig deep and find if what you’re offering is actually interesting to the user and if you’re telling them the right things with what you’re presenting. This section focuses primarily on product pages but also trust signals that help convert more customers through your Shopify store.

• Product Page Optimization: A product page has a lot to optimize. Be sure to include the core components like description, multiple images, pricing, and the add-to-basket button.
• Product Description: These can feel tad boring to make but they should be informative and straight to the point. Format-wise, we recommend a few intro sentences followed by a triplet of bullet points that highlight the key selling points of the product. You can also hire a product description writer.
• Product Images: One image is not enough in most cases. If you’re selling clothing, then having multiple shots is key. Are you displaying it with someone wearing it? Is the background clean? If not, get to Photoshop and start editing. If you don’t know how to do so, hire a freelance photo editor or use one of many online photo editing tools.
• Pricing: Another element that’s easily a blog post by itself. Pricing is so complex because each niche is unique. Think about how your product is positioned against competitors’ stores. Is your product unique to you? If not, then is it cheaper to buy from you? Pricing isn’t easy to do because always being cheaper doesn’t mean people want your product more, especially if you’re in niches which believe in quality.
• Refund Policy: Seems common sense to include one but so many new shops forget it. Include this in your footer and highlight it in the product page.
• Delivery Times & Options: Another commonly missed page by new Shopify stores. It’s a go-to for people looking for weekend or next working day delivery. Don’t miss out on a sale because you forgot to specify your delivery terms.
• Search: Is your search visible on the website? We found that customers who use the search engine have much higher intent on buying an item than those who don’t. In fact, conversion rates were 12 times higher for visitors who used the search engine on an eCommerce website.

The Final Checks

Before we get into the architecture of your website and overwhelm you as a new Shopify store owner, there are several things you can do to ensure you’re ready to go. These include the final checks, which can also be done via our Shopify Audit, which helps new and experienced store owners to bring in more customers.

• Speed: Is your website fast enough? Check it on a new device that hasn’t seen the site yet. Run it through GT Metrix and PageSpeed Insights for more data.
• Try Buying Something: In incognito mode, go through the whole checkout experience. Do you like it? Do this with five different people, like your friends or family. Take notes and see if you can improve your store.
• Get rolling: In the final step, ensure any Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity apps are integrated within your shop. This will help you track your traffic, and if something is failing you, like your checkout, you will soon know and be able to amend it. As an extra tip, set up some key funnels that help with abandoned carts; this will let you ask questions directly to people who didn’t checkout.