Are sales kind of slow in your handmade business? You might have people coming over to your website, but why isn’t anyone buying?

In this post, I’m going to share with you five reasons why people aren’t buying from you so you can go and fix those issues and start making more sales.

1. Your Site is Slow

The first reason why people aren’t buying from you is probably because your site loads slowly. 

This happens more often, I’ve seen, with people who have their website on Squarespace or WordPress. Specifically with people who sell on WordPress. A lot of the time, the reason is you have to have your own hosting solution.

So, maybe you’re using something like Bluehost or Flywheel to host your website. The most affordable price point for this service that you’re paying for could be anywhere from five to twenty dollars a month.

It’s probably gonna be a shared host.

What that means is there’s a server that they’ve put multiple websites and multiple business owners on. It takes just one website to slow everything down, and it might not be your website.

Maybe someone who is sharing the host with you is uploading a ton of really large files onto the database; it’s gonna slow everyone who’s sharing that server down.

This is something that’s really hard for you to control.

Upgrade Your Server

One thing you can do is: upgrade your server so that you’re the only one on it, or so that fewer people are on that server. But of course, it’ll cost a little bit more money.

Reduce Your File Sizes

Now, people who are using Shopify don’t usually have a speed problem, and if they do, it’s usually because their image sizes are too large.

So, a couple of things you can do with that is to make sure images are saved at a lower resolution.

For website viewing, 72 dpi for image quality is good enough. You don’t need anything more than that.

In terms of image sizes, if you’re around like 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels, that’s also pretty good already. You don’t really need to do anything crazy big like 2000 or 3000 pixels wide and tall.

2. You Don’t Inspire Confidence & Trust

The second reason people probably aren’t buying from you is because your website and shopping experience do not inspire confidence and trust.

What does that mean? That means, maybe your pictures could be blurry, or your branding does not look very professional, or your website is not very user-friendly.

Make Sure Your Site is Mobile Friendly

So, one great example is if your website works on people who’re browsing on their laptop, or computer, but it doesn’t work very well if people are on their mobile phones. 

More than 50% of shoppers online these days are buying from their mobile devices.

So, you need to make sure that you’re testing your website on as many different platforms, and devices as possible.

Get Your Branding and Collateral On Point

Make sure your branding looks professional to make sure your photos represent your products clearly so people can see what they’re going to buy.

You want more than just one product photo per listing because people want to see what they’re getting at all different angles. It also helps to have pictures for scale. They wanna know how big or small their product is, right?

Give Them the Right Details

Other things that might people lose trust or confidence in buying from you is your website is just generally lacking in information.

If your product listing doesn’t have very comprehensive product descriptions (that includes the measurements, the materials your products were made from or just generally talking about why people should buy your products) people aren’t gonna buy it.

If your website doesn’t have information like when your product will ship, how long shipping is going to take, what your return and refund and exchange policies are people are also less likely to want to buy.

3. You’re Not Attracting the Right Customer

The third reason people aren’t buying from you is that you’re probably not attracting the right kind of customers.

 You might be attracting a customer who doesn’t place much priority or value in the kind of product that you make.

For example I make $28 necklaces that a lot of parents and aunts like to buy for their daughters or their nieces. I’m talking 5 to 10-year-old girls. There are just some people in the world who don’t place value in that and don’t think that’s normal.

Like, they don’t think that it’s okay to spend $28 on their 5-year-old daughter for a necklace that they think is gonna break in two days.

But then there are some parents out there who do want everything for their kids and like spoiling them by giving gifts.

You want to make sure that you’re attracting the right kind of customers through the marketing that you’re doing.

4. Your Prices and Branding Don’t Compliment Each other

The fourth reason is maybe there’s kind of a mismatch between your prices and your brand.

A really great example that applies to a lot of us creatives that are selling a handmade physical product is our prices tend to be a little bit higher than the competition that you’ll find at Target, for example.

If you make t-shirts you could probably buy a graphic t-shirt at Target for around $12 where for most of us who are screen printing it ourselves and designing the design of t-shirts, it’s probably gonna be about $24, $25, or $28 depending on the material of the t-shirt you’re using. It could be $32 or more if you’re selling like sweaters or hoodies.

What this means is that your website’s whole shopping experience needs to be elevated. Your branding, photos, everything needs to be at a quality that makes you look like a very premium, high-end brand.

If your branding and pricing do not match, that’s gonna cost people to not to want to buy from you.

They’re going to come to your website and if your branding looks “cheap” they’re going to be looking at your prices and think what, this is insane! and then they’re gonna bounce out of your website.

Your brand needs to be in line with the prices that you’re asking.

So if your prices are a little bit higher than the competition then you need to make sure that your branding also is a little bit more exclusive than the competition.

In other words, make sure your branding doesn’t look “cheap” if your products aren’t “cheap”. Do you get my drift?

5. It’s Just Not the Right Time

The fifth reason why people aren’t buying from you is because now is just not the time.

I’m sure this has happened to you before, right?

You’re browsing on your phone or your computer and you’re looking at buying some stuff then maybe your kids call for you and they need help with something, or the mailman knocks on the door and you have to sign for a package. Then once you step away from it, you have forgotten all about it.

And sometimes people just aren’t ready to pull the trigger and buy yet. Sometimes people are still kind of in that research phase.

For example, a lot of parents and aunties like to buy my jewelry for their daughter and nieces and for the kind of customers who may not be ready to buy yet they’re in that mindset of my daughter’s birthday is coming up soon but I’m not sure actually what to get her. She might be thinking about a lot of different brands and products that she might want to buy from and I’m just one of them. They might come on my website today but not buy from me until a week later.

Encourage Them To Sign Up For Your Email List

My biggest recommendation for how to prevent this from happening is to have some way that you are encouraging them to sign up for your email list.

Because once you grab their email address, you can continue to communicate and stay in the front of their mind and make sure that when they’re ready to buy or when they got distracted you can remind them again to come back and complete their purchase.

Ninja Tip!

Here’s an extra ninja tip for you. If you didn’t get the chance to collect their email addresses, all hope is not lost.

Install the Facebook Pixel on to your website.

Depending on what eCommerce platform you’re on (maybe Wix, Shopify, or Woocommerce) the way you’re gonna install this is different.

Go onto Google and just search “Facebook Pixel Shopify how to install” and it’s gonna show you every tutorial on how to do that.

What the pixel does is it places a cookie, which is just some custom code, onto the person’s computer and it makes it so that, if you want to, you can create Facebook retargeting ads that show to just those people who have been to your website.

Retargeting ads can just show people the exact products that they were looking at and it kind of just follows them along.

• There are a lot of ways you can strategize with this:
• You can customize how many days you want those ads to be shown to people
• How many times per day they see those ads
• Which products get shown

This doesn’t even have to be expensive.

I know when I say Facebook Ads, for a lot of people they think “Oh my God I don’t want to spend on ads yet!”, but I’m telling you even with just a budget of $1 a day (which is $30 a month) you can have some very powerful retargeting ads set up that show your products to those customers that went to your website but didn’t buy anything and that will motivate them to come back and buy from you again.

These are the most effective ads to get set up, and for a very low cost, you can have a very high return on your investment.