Why am I Getting Lots of Clicks But No Sales? (Dropshipping)

One of the most common question on dropshipping facebook groups, fora, and my personal inbox goes as follows — “Why am I getting lots of clicks but no sales?”

This question often goes paired with a link to their Shopify store, which to no surprise — is full of rookie mistakes.

I’ve decided to write this article to help those who experience this very frustrating issue. 

The first question to ask is, how many clicks are we talking about here?

Oftentimes, I get asked this very question by people who have invested less than $20 on Facebook Ads and somehow assumed it would give them automatic results.

Sadly, that’s not how it works.

Just because 200 people visited your site, doesn’t mean any of them will purchase.

200 visitors are nothing and should not at all be a reference as to whether your product is good or not.

10 Questions To Ask When You Get Lots of Clicks But No Sales

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, ask yourself these questions why your lots of clicks aren’t converting into sales:

Q1: Is your Facebook Ad considered clickbait, a lie, or anything similar?

Oftentimes, beginner drop shippers and Facebook marketers use clickbait tactics to seduce visitors into clicking on their store.

This will do absolutely nothing for you.

These people will instantly leave and worse — drain your ad budget and really mess up your Facebook pixel.

Let’s say you’re selling a watch and advertising it as a FREE product. 

And once visitors reach your store, they find out the product is in fact not free. 

This won’t bode well for you, as the only interested people came in for a free product.

Now this is an extreme example, but there are many ways you can clickbait or lie to get visitors to your store.

Don’t do this.

Focus on the exact product you’re selling. Be honest and do not attempt to lie to get more clicks.

This is the easiest way to get people upset and have them leaving your store instantly.

Q2: Is your product page clean?

Shopify has thousands of apps from urgency timers to email popups and so on that can litter a page and make it unusable, hard to navigate on or simply look like a scam.

We have all seen the spinning wheel and the hundreds of different urgency timers and so on.

People are sick and tired of this.

In fact, many instantly associate these Shopify pages with scammers.

Whenever my father clicks on a Facebook Ad that leads them to a product page littered with urgency timers he instantly leaves.

I’ve seen him do it! He calls these websites Chinese scammers.

This is a man that barely knows how to navigate the web, yet, he seems to know what your average dropshipping store looks like.

To put this to the test even further, I decided to test this out on other family members.

I sent a poorly designed product page to 6 family members.

4 out of 6 told me they did not trust the website and believed it was a scam.

One of my aunties believed she had already been on the website (not possible) but she likely visited a different Shopify site with similar urgency timers. 

Clearly, these urgency apps and pop-ups make your webshop look super unprofessional and scam-like.

Avoid them! Not to mention how much these apps slow down your site, which brings me to the next point. 

Q3: Does your page load fast?

One very common issue is that Shopify sites load extremely slow.

This is because every app you have installed, has multiple files of code that add to the overall loading time.

High quality images are also a huge issue and can increase your loading times.

Your overall page load time should be less than 5 seconds. Anything over that, and visitors will leave your site before the page is loaded. 

You can check your site speed with pingdom.

You should limit the amount of apps you use on your store as each has a big impact on the loading speed. 

You should also compress all the images on your site using Photoshop or an online image compressor. 

Keep in mind, that simply uninstalling an app doesn’t mean the code disappears from your webshop.

For the cleanest uninstall, you are better off starting with a fresh theme after uninstalling the apps. 

Q4: Does your checkout page work? 

Now this may sound ridiculous, but are you sure your checkout page is working?

You should always make test purchases before starting your Facebook Ads to ensure everything is running smoothly.

Trust me — mistakes happen to the most experienced drop shippers out there. 

I once forgot to add an entire shipping zone and didn’t find out until days later, causing me to lose out on lots of conversions as most of my traffic came from the US — whereas my site was only shipping to the EU. 

So test your checkout process.

Test whether you can receive credit and debit card payments, and check whether all shipping zones are activated.

Q5: How does your site look on mobile?

Most of your website traffic will be coming from mobile when using Facebook Ads. 

However, every drop shipper designs their Shopify store on a computer. 

This results in webshop that look good on computers but might look bad or not function well on mobile.

So visit your store on your mobile browser and check whether or not everything is working properly. 

Q6: Are you targeting the right countries?

Facebook Ads allow you to target just about every country in the world. 

However, that doesn’t mean you should be targeting every country.

Many third-world countries are known for offering very cheap clicks as people are likely to click on ads but these countries also have ridiculously low conversion rates as the they cannot afford the products offered on your webshop. 

Targeting these countries will only lead you to get lots of clicks but no sales. 

The best countries to target are the ePacket countries, these are countries that are known to have high conversion rates. 

Here is a list of countries you should avoid for your Facebook Ads. 

Q7: Are you using good product imagery?

Dropshippers tend to use the images they get from AliExpress.

These are often images that are poor quality and have logos or watermarks on them.

Visitors can easily find the AliExpress page by searching for those logos. 

You should avoid this and make sure all watermarks and branding is removed from pictures.

You should also make sure your pictures look professional. 

Avoid:

• AliExpress branding logos and watermarks
• Pixelated images and text
• Adding too many images

Example of good product imagery

Example of bad product imagery

Q8: Are you using good sales copywriting?

Now another big mistake I witness every day, is poor copywriting.

Actually, scrap that — no copywriting.

I see stores like this all the time with copied AliExpress descriptions.

Those AliExpress descriptions make it easy to find the AliExpress seller, makes your site look really bad in front of Google (bad for SEO) and generally looks incredibly unprofessional. 

Having a short description, no description or simply an AliExpress description will quickly lead to visitors leaving your store as your store will not look very legit in their eyes.

Good sales copywriting can persuade your visitors into purchasing your product. 

Q9: Does your site look professional?

Dropshipping has been around for a while, especially AliExpress dropshipping.

Facebook is filled with dropshipping stores that look almost identical.

I’m talking about the general stores with the default debut theme and badly-designed logo’s. 

Here’s an example of a bad dropshipping store design:

This is what most dropshipping stores look like. These stores are poorly and quickly put together and leave an unprofessional vibe with the average customer.

This is mainly because these sites are created after watching a bad dropshipping course they paid for or found on youtube. 

The basic layout of the debut theme is visible, with almost no alterations made.

The homepage consists of supposed best-selling items and that’s it.

No copywriting, no branding, no color scheme, absolutely nothing.

Every item is on sale, titles are non-sensical and often copied from AliExpress, same goes for the product descriptions and the product images are a mix of lifestyle and white background.

Having a site that looks like thousands of others, does not look professional and lets users quickly believe your store is a scam.

Especially when you consider the sheer amount of people that have shopped on similar dropshipping stores before.

They have often experienced BAD customer services and long shipping times.

This left a very bad taste in their mouth and will result in them avoiding sites like that in the future.

Here are some things you should really nail for every dropshipping store you make: 

• Design a good logo (hire someone if you don’t trust yourself) 
• Find a color scheme (find a color scheme that works for your niche!) 
• Mix up the themes (Shopify has more themes than just Debut, and if you must, there are many ways to mix up this theme to make it look better) 
• Get good product imagery, titles, and descriptions (as I have said earlier) 

As a graphic and web-designer first, I really believe these skills had a major impact on my dropshipping stores and is a big reason I found success faster than the average client. 

But you don’t have to be a graphic and or web designer to design a nice webshop. 

Shopify makes it so easy for you to do so yourself, but you have to put in the time and effort.

Watch some Shopify design tutorials on YouTube, watch some logo tutorials, learn about typography and so on. 

These skills will really help you make a better, more professional, webshop.

Q10: Are you sending traffic directly to the product page?

This may sound like a silly question, but are you sending traffic directly to the product page or are you sending them to your homepage?

You should always send traffic directly to the product page so your potential customers can go through your conversion funnel as quickly as possible (Product Page > Add To Cart > Purchase). 

By sending them to the homepage, you are adding an extra, unnecessary step. 

You might think they might be convinced to purchase more if they reach your home page and see a wide array of products but this is entirely wrong.

Always send traffic directly to the product page.

Q11: Are you asking too much money?

Now this is a big one. If the 10 previous questions above don’t apply to you, you are likely asking too much money for your product. 

Either you charge too much for shipping that leads people to abandon cart or your overall product price is far too high for visitors to even consider purchasing.

Lower your product price and test the product again.

Q12: Are you running conversion ads? 

Within Facebook Ads, you can run purchase conversion ads which I highly recommend you use.

Facebook is smart. If you optimize for traffic, you will get lots of traffic. If you optimize for engagement, you will get lots of engagement. 

But only if you optimize for purchase events, you will get lots of purchases (at least if your product is good).

Yes the other advertising methods are far cheaper and get you far more traffic and engagement but they don’t work nearly as well and you will drain through your advertising budget.

I would recommend you to only use engagement campaigns to increase your social proof of your purchase conversion ads.

DO NOT Worry About Email Marketing Just Yet

Commonly, clients will ask me how they can optimize their abandoned cart and email marketing so that visitors will purchase.

But this is not something you have to worry about when you are seeing lots of clicks but no conversions. 

While email marketing is a very good way to make EXTRA sales, you should not be thinking about this when first setting up your ads.

Doing so will divert your attention to the wrong things.

You should first make sure your AD is compelling and your product page is perfectly optimized for sales.

Once you can get sales, then you can worry about email marketing. 

Still No Conversions?

You’ve ran over the 12 questions I stated above and spend at least $100 on ADS and still can’t figure out what’s wrong with your store? 

If professional theme, good and fast loading product page, conversion funnel, sales copywriting and so on can’t convince your visitor to purchase — your product is either bad or saturated.

But likely just bad.

In this case, you should kill the ad and start over with a different product.

Don’t sulk and keep trying to advertise a product that simply doesn’t work, you have to realise when it’s time to move on.

Final Words

If you’re experiencing an effect of lots of clicks but no conversions, you should go over the 12 questions I have illustrated in this article. 

You should also test your store on multiple different browsers, mobile devices and have your friends and family test it for you just to be sure everything is 100% functioning.

Here is a sum up of the 10 questions you can copy/paste somewhere for later use.

• Q1: Is your Facebook Ad considered clickbait, a lie or anything similar?
• Q2: Is your product page clean?
• Q3: Does your page load fast?
• Q4: Does your checkout page work? 
• Q5: How does your site look on mobile?
• Q6: Are you targeting the right countries?
• Q7: Are you using good product imagery?
• Q8: Are you using good sales copywriting?
• Q9: Does your site look professional?
• Q10: Are you sending traffic directly to the product page?
• Q11: Are you asking too much money?
• Q12: Are you running conversion ads? 

Using the tips found in this article should vastly increase your sales.