How To Set Realistic Expectations For Your New Ecommerce Store

Creating an ecommerce business is no easy task. Most often you bootstrap the entire process. You select your target audience, your product, your business name, create a logo and website and everything else which can take months. This is no doubt a lot of work and takes up a lot of your time. There is a lot of blood, sweat and sometimes tears in the process. After having done all of that work you launch your store, create a social media account to promote your business and may also run paid ads to get customers to come to your site. 

Seeing the numbers on your ad reach hit the 5 figures and then only 2-3% of those people visit your site and then maybe getting 1 or 2 sales completed, can feel defeating. You begin to wonder “what do I need to do better?” “Is it my site?” “Is it my ads?” We think there are a bunch of things to consider when having a successful launch but sometimes it's not the launch but level setting your expectations. There are tough questions that you need to ask yourself as a business owner. Not having a successful first launch is not the issue, having a problem and not knowing how to solve it is. 

I have often heard people say they don't expect to be an overnight success but get frustrated when their store has been open for 2 days and they have only made 2 sales or none. It makes me wonder if they are setting realistic expectations for themselves? Selling products is hard and it's especially hard when you are selling to a cold audience. A cold audience are people who are unfamiliar with your business and your product. You have not provided them enough value to earn their trust, to buy a product from you.  Seeing an ad one time often cannot provide that value so why do you expect it to? Do you buy products this way? Probably not. 

Setting realistic expectations for yourself will lead you to create a sales funnel of how you will get attention, gain leads, convert leads into prospects and close the deal. Understanding this will give you better insight into what it takes to make a sale and therefore how much effort you anticipate to put in and what the outcome should be. Once you have this information down try it for a few months and look at your metrics. How many people are seeing your ads, how many are signing up for your email list, how many visit your site and how many are converting? Having this insight from a system built by a plan can help you see what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong. 

Ecommerce businesses like any other business should be looked at like playing the long game. Quick wins are nice but they aren't what create a sustainable business. A plan that you adjust and tweak until you find your sweet spot does. The most important thing we want you to get from this blog post is that if the numbers in your ecommerce business dont look how you want them to, there is hope and steps you can take that will change that for you. To stay up to date with all new content sign up for our newsletter below.

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