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Making your first sale is a major accomplishment for any new business. To achieve this goal, it’s important to set yourself and your online store up for success. There are three main steps to reaching this milestone.
Build your ecommerce store.
Define your target customer.
Promote your store to drive traffic and sales.
Once you’ve made your first sale, there are a few ways to keep the momentum going and attract repeat customers. Read on for our step-by-step guide to making your first sale and check out the video above for more tips and examples.
1. Build an online store
Before you start selling, it’s crucial to build an online store and brand that sets you apart from the competition. A high-quality online store should show off your products, and be easy to navigate. Use the design to seamlessly guide customers from your store to your product pages and through checkout.
Set up the basics, like your homepage, About Us page, and online storefront. Then go through this checklist for ecommerce businesses.
Add product photos and clear, detailed product descriptions. These will help future customers decide what they’d like to buy first.
Check that your top products are featured prominently on your homepage and your store’s main landing page.
Connect a payment processor to your website.
Include clear shipping and return policies on your site.
Make sure your prices—including shipping fees—fit your business’ bottom line.
Set up automated abandoned cart emails.
Get our full guide to starting an ecommerce website
2. Define your target audience
Once your online business is up and running, the next step is to start attracting visitors to your site. While any visitor is great, you’ll convert more visitors into customers if you focus on attracting the type of people who’ll be interested in your products.
Spend some time thinking about who’s in that audience. It helps to ask questions like:
How old are your ideal customers?
What stage of life are they in?
What problems does your product solve for your customers?
Would your product be more useful for someone living in a certain area or for specific situations?
What other brands does your audience follow and support?
Think about who would get the most out of your products or services. Knowing the answers to these questions will help you craft your copy, images, and digital marketing to speak to that specific audience.
Learn how to build a brand for your audience
3. Drive traffic to your site
Once you have a sense of what kind of traffic you’d like to drive to your site, you can be more strategic about how and where you promote your business online.
Social media marketing
Social media platforms are a great place to start building a following for your business. Start small by choosing one or two platforms that’ll help you show your products off. Then ask friends and family to follow the account and add businesses that serve similar customers so you have an initial audience in place. If you sell in person, make sure you’re sharing your social handles on flyers or business cards.
Your social accounts are an ideal place to show off your products and share more about your story and your business over time. You can also use the account to run a giveaway for a free product, explore influencer marketing, or promote sales and new releases.
Be sure to connect your account to your website so you can automate sharing new content with your followers.
Email marketing
Start building an email list early by adding a field or pop-up encouraging site visitors to sign up. The people who sign up are opting into hearing more from you, so you’ll have a more engaged audience.
Start by sending a monthly email to your subscribers. You won’t overfill their inboxes, but you’ll keep your store at the top of their mind. Your monthly emails can include updates about the business, a limited-time discount code, or sneak peeks of upcoming products. Try a few different styles and see what brings more visitors to your website.
Search engine results
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of strategies that will help your online store appear higher in search results based on certain factors search engines take into consideration. These factors ultimately boil down to how well your website answers the intent of different search terms.
SEO is another great way to reach potential customers outside of your existing network or local area. And because it doesn’t cost anything to optimize your site, it’s a much more affordable way to promote yourself.
Start by working relevant search terms into your website copy and product descriptions. Over time, your store’s analytics can also help you measure the traffic to your website and where it’s coming from, so you know where to focus your efforts.
You can also promote your product listings in Google searches with the Google Shopping integration. Physical products will appear in the Google Shopping tab, Image search, and YouTube to help you expand your reach.
See more tips for promoting your online store
Making your first sale
If your first ecommerce sale doesn’t happen as soon as you launch your store, don’t worry. Building awareness takes time, especially for a new business or product. Continue to follow through on your marketing strategy and make adjustments if you don’t seem to be reaching the right audiences.
If visitors are stopping by your store but not buying anything, consider changing something up to see if that converts more buyers. Look at where they drop out of the shopping process for clues.
For example, if buyers are dropping out at the product page, maybe your product is too expensive compared to competitors. If they seem to be dropping out at checkout, it could be that your shipping fees are too high.
How to keep the sales momentum going
Once you start growing your sales, look at your analytics to get a better sense of who is buying what. That will help you become even more strategic when it comes to production, inventory, promotions, and pricing. For example, if two products are often bought together, create a pack of both at a slight discount. Or look for products that are selling well and test methods of replicating that success on other products.
Be sure to reward your loyal customers with the occasional discount or promotional offer. Ask them to tell their friends about how much they love their purchases and share their reviews on your website and social media.
Ready to make your first sale?
This post was updated on June 22, 2023.