Monthly Archives: November 2023

3 Easy Ways Get More Sales This Season

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Here are 3 easy ways to get more sales between now and December 24th

The holidays are here and if you’ve gotten all your promotions ready ahead of time—congratulations! If you didn’t quite have time, or just want to boost the end of the month sales report, here are three easy ways to get more sales. 

Bundling

Take a look at the things that you are probably going to have left over inventory on, and think about ways to bundle them, before you have to put them on sale in January. Can you sweeten the deal with another complementary product by bundling them together? Buy 3 and save also works. Think about how the products will be gifted. Can you promote them as stocking stuffers? Would they make great Secret Santa gifts? Every kid has several teachers, so if you have a great teacher gift, try offering a set of three. Bundling lower priced items and telling shoppers how to use them is a tried and true tactic.  

Animated gif showing a laptop that displays Stylaquin's Look Book Feature

Does Your Site Do This?

It can with Stylaquin! Stylaquin is the easy to add Shopify app that transforms your website. Stylaquin makes shopping faster, more engaging, and more fun. Stylaquin shoppers stay longer, view over 85% more products, come back more often, and buy more when they do. Find us in the Shopify App Store.

Learn More

Leverage your best sellers

Send an email to your customer list with your best sellers front and center. Use headlines like “Here are XX of our customers’ favorite things!”, “Looking for gifts everyone loves? Here are our customers’ favorites!”, “Last minute gifts that are sure to make them smile—our customers’ favorites.” You get the idea. Right now everyone is in a mad scramble to find the right gifts for all their loved ones. Bestsellers have already gotten the seal of approval, so shoppers who are worried about not choosing the right items will breath a sigh of relief. 

Be sure to showcase some best sellers on your home page. Best sellers are proven winners and the items that are most likely to appeal to new visitors. In Shopify, you can set up a carousel of best selling items that will adjust as your inventory levels change. This means it will automatically update with new products if you run out. (You have to set your products to not show if inventory is zero.) There is awesome power in showcasing bestsellers on your home page. 

Use collections to create price ranges

If you are on Shopify, one of the easiest things to do is to create collections based on price ranges. This time of year shoppers are very price conscious, but not because they don’t want to spend too much. They want to spend the right amount. If they are buying a small gift for a colleague or friend, they have a price in mind. If they are buying for a significant other, they have a very different price in mind. In both cases they have a price in mind and they are looking for a gift in a specific price range. Think about who your target customer is buying for and make create collections with the price points that will help them find the right gift quickly. If you are selling high end merchandise, don’t be afraid to use “over” as well as “under”. This strategy doesn’t work as well after the holidays, but while shoppers have a list that they are checking twice, it rocks!

Add a Styling Board and a Wishlist!

The Stylaquin Idea Board keeps customers engaged in two ways: it’s an interactive styling board where shoppers can collect and curate all the things that interest them; and it also acts as a wishlist that shoppers can return to. Find us in the Shopify App Store.

Learn More
Animated gif showing a laptop displaying Stylaquin's Idea Board

This time of year it’s easy to get overwhelmed while trying to get everything done. If you have time to just do one thing on this list, I would recommend creating collections with price ranges. You can set it up in half an hour, and then add it to all your emails and social posts. It’s also something that can be set up and reused every year. Good luck!

Focusing on Gratitude

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This time of year it's easy to focus on the hustle and not the gratitude

Nose to the grindstone. Peddle to the metal. Go. Go. GO! 

This time of year it’s especially important to slow it down, take a breath and appreciate what we have. 

I am grateful for my family. They are my best friends, my most vocal cheerleaders, and my rock solid support. 

I am grateful for my friends. There are the many, who help when they can, share thoughts, opinions, and really great advice. You guys rock, and I’m here if you need the many favors returned. There are also the few, who know they can call at 3:00 in the morning and I will get on a plane or grab a shovel, flashlight and dark trash bags without pause. Love you.

I am grateful for the country I live in. I don’t always agree, but I participate, and try to hold myself to the same high standards I expect of those in charge. 

I am grateful that I can do something as crazy and interesting as trying to change the way people shop online. Even though Stylaquin was designed for the way women shop, it turns out that having a more beautiful, engaging and memorable shopping experience is just another thing men and women have in common. Thank you to the men who set me straight. Each step in the journey has made me more aware of the complexities of online shopping and the web, and convinced me that creating a better user experience is more powerful than chat bots and AI.

I could go on, but I want to finish here by saying how grateful I am for the community of founders, entrepreneurs,  Shopify store owners, Shopify developers and all the other people as crazy as I am, working and growing in the online space. You guy are SO interesting and a blast to be around. 

I’m going to sign off and show my dog that I am grateful he chooses to hang out with me, even though I don’t give him all the attention he deserves, or all the belly rubs he asks for.

Thank you!

Enjoy your holiday

P.S. Below is an experiment I did a few months back to see if I could get AI to create an image of a turkey on a platter in the style of a woodcut illustration. Count the legs and notice which way the joints bend. Apparently AI has much to learn about turkey anatomy. We won’t even discuss the whole woodcut style thing.

Four AI generated images of a turkey on a platter done in a woodcut style. All are malformed in some way. Some with too many legs and the joints moving in the wrong direction.

Get more WOW from the products you have now

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How to Promote the right products on your Shopify store's home page

Imagine your home page as the digital red carpet to your store, where you have the power to make a dazzling impression on potential customers. When you strategically select and showcase your products here, you’re not just displaying beautiful items, you’re creating an experience that resonates with your audience. By understanding your customers’ tastes, staying on top of the latest trends, and curating a captivating home page, you can turn visitors into loyal shoppers. So, get ready to boost those conversion rates and sales like a boss! Your home page is your secret weapon in the competitive world of online retail, and it’s time to shine!

Understanding Your Target Audience

Understanding your target audience is the compass that guides your success in the world of online fashion retail. It’s not just about selling products; it’s about creating a shopping experience tailored to their desires and needs. Knowing your target audience intimately allows you to speak directly to their hearts and capture their attention on your home page. To achieve this, start by identifying who your target customer is. How old are they? What do they care about? What’s trending in their world? Put yourself in their shoes. 

Animated gif showing a laptop that displays Stylaquin's Look Book Feature

Does Your Site Do This?

It can with Stylaquin! Stylaquin is the easy to add Shopify app that transforms your website. Stylaquin makes shopping faster, more engaging, and more fun. Stylaquin shoppers stay longer, view over 85% more products, come back more often, and buy more when they do. Find us in the Shopify App Store.

Learn More

Start with Bestsellers

The best place to go for inspiration on what to put on the home page is your best sellers. Bestsellers should have a prominent place on every home page. Why? Because they’re proven winners. Bestsellers are also a roadmap to seasonality. You probably won’t have the same bestsellers in August that you do in November.

Let Shopify do the heavy lifting

Go to your Shopify sales report, make sure it includes the date the product was sold, the number of products sold as units, the product name and SKU, the price and the profit. Download the report and open it in excel or whatever spreadsheet software you use. Open the file and subtotal the report by product. Some spreadsheets call this categories rather than subtitles. You are trying to find the products with the highest units of sales. If you have Stylaquin installed you can use the Insights Panel to see your best sellers. We have a video titled Bestsellers you can check out to learn more. Just change the date range to see a specific time. 

Use color

This will make spotting the winners easier to see later. Color the cells with the top ten or so products with a bright green color. Then color the next ten or so products with bright blue, and color the following ten or so with bright gold. This will give you an easy way to spot where the best sellers are showing up in each season. 

Sort your table by date

This way you can see where the best sellers are working their magic. Are they all Q4 gifts? Are they summer self purchase? What can you learn from them? Are there any the show up consistently throughout the year? We call those perennial best sellers and they typically are problem solvers. 

Add a Styling Board and a Wishlist!

The Stylaquin Idea Board keeps customers engaged in two ways: it’s an interactive styling board where shoppers can collect and curate all the things that interest them; and it also acts as a wishlist that shoppers can return to. Find us in the Shopify App Store.

Learn More
Animated gif showing a laptop displaying Stylaquin's Idea Board

But wait! What about new products? 

There has long been a debate about which is more powerful—new products or best sellers. If you want to dive in even deeper here’s a post on the subject. But the short answer is that most of the customers coming to your site will be new. That’s just how the online world works. So showcasing new products on your home page in place of bestsellers is risky. What if the new products are a bust? There are stores that can make showcasing only new products work, and clothing and accessories are frequently about tends. How do  you pick? Not to worry, you can test it!

A/B testing is easy in Shopify

Head over to the App Store and you’ll find lots of apps that offer A/B testing. A/B testing lets you create two versions of a page which are randomly shown to visitors. It allows you to see which version gets you more clicks. You can A/B test headlines, product assortments, images and offers. Be sure to keep your A/B tests clean by not changing too many things at once. It’s also a good idea to keep a diary of what you’ve tested so you can keep track of learnings.

Keep learning, growing and being creative! ““

Nail the Sale Before the Cart – Browse Baby!

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Before the Cart: Using Stylaquin's Idea Board to Curate Your Customer's Journey

We all know where a purchase begins, or do we? The cart is actually the midway point, not the beginning and not the end of a customer’s purchase journey. The decision to buy comes before the cart, not after. So we need to think about how we can help shoppers have a better purchase journey from start to finish.

Mapping the journey

Shoppers come to your store because they are looking for something. It may be a specific thing, so they use the search bar, the nav bar, or the filters to find it. But if they’re just browsing, they may not know what they want, but they’re interested enough to poke around. Most sites aren’t offering the shoppers who are just browsing a great experience. Browsing shoppers want to consider their options. Most women fall into the browsing category. Women will often open a different tab for every item they’re considering. They don’t want to lose track of things they like, but they aren’t ready to put them in the cart. That’s where Stylaquin is a game changer.

The Idea Board Revolution: A New Way to Shop

This browsing behavior, which we can easily do in any brick and mortar store, gave birth to the Stylaquin Idea Board, it allows shoppers to collect all the things that interest them, rearrange them, change colors and sizes and visualize them in different combinations, all before committing anything to the cart. Shoppers who use the Idea Board when they shop will view more items and come back more often than those who don’t. When they come back, they’ll see all the things that interested them the first time, so they can start shopping right where they left off. When you think about why Stylaquin shoppers buy more on return visits, it just makes sense, they had an engaging experience that they enjoyed, and when they returned, they didn’t have to remember, and then search for, all the things they liked on their previous visit.

Animated gif showing a laptop that displays Stylaquin's Look Book Feature

Does Your Site Do This?

It can with Stylaquin! Stylaquin is the easy to add Shopify app that transforms your website. Stylaquin makes shopping faster, more engaging, and more fun. Stylaquin shoppers stay longer, view over 85% more products, come back more often, and buy more when they do. Find us in the Shopify App Store.

Learn More

An Interactive Styling Board or a Wishlist?

There’s nothing like Stylaquin. In fact it’s so unique it’s patented. Stylaquin totally transforms the current shopping experience into something fun and engaging. Stylaquin shoppers stay longer, view more products, come back more often, and buy more when they do.

Think about how different the two shopping experiences are. In the experience we have now, shoppers have to click on each product and the click through each product picture. If they like something, but aren’t ready to add it to the cart they have to save what interests them in tabs, and then toggle through different tabs trying to figure out which is the best choice. If they have to leave and close the browser window they will have to start from scratch when they return. Maybe they’ll find what they liked, or maybe they won’t. Now let’s compare that with Stylaquin. Stylaquin shoppers can flip through a site like a magazine, collect all the things they like in one place, and then edit them till they have exactly what they want. When they come back to the site, all the things they were interested in are right there, so they can pick up where they left off. It’s a better journey, a more engaging experience, and a whole lot easier.

Add a Styling Board and a Wishlist!

The Stylaquin Idea Board keeps customers engaged in two ways: it’s an interactive styling board where shoppers can collect and curate all the things that interest them; and it also acts as a wishlist that shoppers can return to. Find us in the Shopify App Store.

Learn More
Animated gif showing a laptop displaying Stylaquin's Idea Board

Once you look at the shopping experience as a whole, from the moment of need or curiosity, through the consideration phase, the purchase decision, the actual product experience, and finally to embracing the brand, it’s clear that the cart isn’t last step in a journey of discovery and consideration. Meeting your customer at each phase of their journey and finding ways to delight and engage them throughout is what creates a passion for your brand.