How to get more customers?

[Food From Cyprus]

Hi There,

Do any other online shop owners have any advice on how to get more customers without needing to spend a lot of money on advertising, Google Adwords, facebook, etc?

Thanks.

 

[Ryan000001]

Why not run a once weekly/monthly cooking masterclass or demonstration? You could show people how to cook great food from Cyprus (if that's what you sell).

There is a Whisky shop in Edinburgh that runs a monthly Whisky club where they hold tastings and are a ton of fun and extremely informative! Of course they give attendees special offers while there and people buy a ton of stuff on the way out.

You could demonstrate three national dishes then offer a discount on the ingredients... just a thought.

 

[beasty]

Travelling from cyprus to cook might be a bit expensive

Without wishing to pi%% in your chips

Your set up is a little bit nutty

You have a UK website selling food from Cyprus at massive delivery costs?

500g pasta (Which i would by from Italy or a supermarket for the record) 2.89, more than the Italian speciality shop I use in the UK and way more than Italian stores, plus over 10 quid delivery taking 500g of nothing special pasta to 13quid!!!

You are actually hoping to ship this from Cyprus to the UK?


I did a second transaction to see if the shipping would at least be fixed, I added a bottle of spirits 70cl and the shipping rose to a total of 17.50!

Oh yes, a tiny message flashed up saying if you are not 18 do not buy, but does not really seem sufficient (No expert) but I know on other alcohol selling sites they are a lot more in your face with warnings, and probably require i.d. or reserve the right to ask if they are unsure


I think you have a nice idea and have a nice site but have not really though through how you will actually find and retain happy customers


QUICK DELIVERY
we ship internationally within 48 hours via the Cyprus Post Office Parcel Service

The above is neither quick nor delivery, it should say AVERAGE despatch with SLOW delivery, when you fluke a customer they are going to be seriously pissed off at the slow delivery, you are setting yourself up for no repeat business, food specialty shops exist on repeat customers, the same folk buy over an over from these places, but not if you say QUICK DELIVERY then they wait 2 weeks for things to arrive, also you know food will be held at customs and parcel force will slap a bit of tax, potentially duty, and either an 8 or 12 quid handling fee on it.

I see this, someone orders as they just NEED this stuff, it takes 3 weeks to arrive costs 20 or more quid in tax and handling fee extra, they realise they could have flown to cyprus on ryanair for the same price

 

[puresilva]

I've had a look at your site and I agree with beasty in that the shipping prices seem very disproportionate to the actual product prices. Perhaps it's worth bumping up your product prices a bit and lowering the shipping costs considerably - I can see a lot of abandoned carts when people think they're buying something at a certain price only to find in some cases that 200% of the total price is added on at the end. It can send a message that it's better to source these products in the UK than have them individually shipped out from Cyprus.

In terms of advertising, I'd always advise to pay for advertising first of all and have at least a modest daily budget towards it. You need traffic to see how your market reacts to your products and prices. Google Adwords are a good way to see which keywords are the most popular and you can adjust your product range accordingly. Maybe there's a much bigger demand for specific types of Cypriot food products while 70% of your other items hold little interest for your market (perhaps because they're already easily available in the UK). Working with just a trickle of traffic is no way to find out how you can best serve your target market.

 

[Food From Cyprus]

Why not run a once weekly/monthly cooking masterclass or demonstration? You could show people how to cook great food from Cyprus (if that's what you sell).

There is a Whisky shop in Edinburgh that runs a monthly Whisky club where they hold tastings and are a ton of fun and extremely informative! Of course they give attendees special offers while there and people buy a ton of stuff on the way out.

You could demonstrate three national dishes then offer a discount on the ingredients... just a thought.

Hi Ryan,

Thank you for your suggestion. It is a good idea but would be rather expensive to implement (free samples plus their shipping cost, venue, etc.). At present I would prefer to avoid overspending on marketing/advertising as our budget is limited.

 

[Food From Cyprus]

Travelling from cyprus to cook might be a bit expensive

Without wishing to pi%% in your chips

Your set up is a little bit nutty

You have a UK website selling food from Cyprus at massive delivery costs?

500g pasta (Which i would by from Italy or a supermarket for the record) 2.89, more than the Italian speciality shop I use in the UK and way more than Italian stores, plus over 10 quid delivery taking 500g of nothing special pasta to 13quid!!!

You are actually hoping to ship this from Cyprus to the UK?


I did a second transaction to see if the shipping would at least be fixed, I added a bottle of spirits 70cl and the shipping rose to a total of 17.50!

Oh yes, a tiny message flashed up saying if you are not 18 do not buy, but does not really seem sufficient (No expert) but I know on other alcohol selling sites they are a lot more in your face with warnings, and probably require i.d. or reserve the right to ask if they are unsure


I think you have a nice idea and have a nice site but have not really though through how you will actually find and retain happy customers


QUICK DELIVERY
we ship internationally within 48 hours via the Cyprus Post Office Parcel Service

The above is neither quick nor delivery, it should say AVERAGE despatch with SLOW delivery, when you fluke a customer they are going to be seriously pissed off at the slow delivery, you are setting yourself up for no repeat business, food specialty shops exist on repeat customers, the same folk buy over an over from these places, but not if you say QUICK DELIVERY then they wait 2 weeks for things to arrive, also you know food will be held at customs and parcel force will slap a bit of tax, potentially duty, and either an 8 or 12 quid handling fee on it.

I see this, someone orders as they just NEED this stuff, it takes 3 weeks to arrive costs 20 or more quid in tax and handling fee extra, they realise they could have flown to cyprus on ryanair for the same price

Thank you for the constructive criticism.
You are absolutely right. The shipping cost from Cyprus to the UK is quite high as Cyprus is an island and almost all small parcels from Cyprus to anywhere have to be air freighted. We operate in a niche market and offer Greek and Cypriot products that are difficult (or even impossible) to find abroad. Even the pasta that you mentioned as an example could be purchased by Cypriot students studying abroad and who are willing to pay extra for an item from home. The freight is high if you add only one or two items in the cart as we also need to cover some fixed handling charges per order. For larger orders, say above £150, the shipping cost as a percentage on total cost becomes more reasonable.
Regarding alcohol we do not sell to minors and we have the warning that you mentioned on the site. A customer would normally declare his/her age at registration and we double check this before we ship. If a customer refuses to disclose his/her age we will not ship and will simply refund their money.
The customers that we do find are happy (some email us back with their thanks after they receive their parcels) and we also have repeat customers. The issue here is to find more customers
Thank you for pointing out the issue on 'QUICK DELIVERY'. I though it was pretty obvious what we meant but obviously our wording could have led to misunderstandings and unhappy customers. I have now amended the wording along the lines of your suggestion. Again thank you for that. In addition though to this brief delivery message that a customer sees at the order placement stage we list the full delivery details, including approximate shipping times, under our DELIVERY tab.
As Cyprus is part of the EU there are absolutely no taxes (either import duties or VAT) to pay when shipping within EU countries. There are some taxes to pay when orders are despatched to non-EU countries and we mention this in our terms and conditions.
On Ryanair I think you are allowed only one piece of hand luggage not more than 5 kg so I guess our customers would be better off placing their orders with us and then sitting in the comfort of their own home in the UK and just wait for their orders to arrive at their doorstep

 

[Food From Cyprus]

I've had a look at your site and I agree with beasty in that the shipping prices seem very disproportionate to the actual product prices. Perhaps it's worth bumping up your product prices a bit and lowering the shipping costs considerably - I can see a lot of abandoned carts when people think they're buying something at a certain price only to find in some cases that 200% of the total price is added on at the end. It can send a message that it's better to source these products in the UK than have them individually shipped out from Cyprus.

In terms of advertising, I'd always advise to pay for advertising first of all and have at least a modest daily budget towards it. You need traffic to see how your market reacts to your products and prices. Google Adwords are a good way to see which keywords are the most popular and you can adjust your product range accordingly. Maybe there's a much bigger demand for specific types of Cypriot food products while 70% of your other items hold little interest for your market (perhaps because they're already easily available in the UK). Working with just a trickle of traffic is no way to find out how you can best serve your target market.

Thank you for your advice.
As I explained in my previous post our shipping cost gets more reasonable when more items are added to the cart. I guess we need to make this clear to our customers somewhere on our website.
We use Google Analytics and we have run Google Adwords campaigns on a couple of occasions but this was proven to be an expensive way of getting new customers. This is why I was asking for any alternative ideas to conventional marketing.

 

[BeMarketed]

Surely you would be better off shipping the goods to the UK as a bulk quantity and using a shared storage, pick & pack facility.

Many companies will offer you 10 pallet spaces for like £3 per week, plus picking and packing fees.

This would bring your delivery cost down significantly and allow you to use the free traffic off of E-bay and Amazon to greater effect.

This would also allow you to sell to the wholesale market as well.

 

[Food From Cyprus]

Surely you would be better off shipping the goods to the UK as a bulk quantity and using a shared storage, pick & pack facility.

Many companies will offer you 10 pallet spaces for like £3 per week, plus picking and packing fees.

This would bring your delivery cost down significantly and allow you to use the free traffic off of E-bay and Amazon to greater effect.

This would also allow you to sell to the wholesale market as well.

Thank you for your suggestion. It is a good idea but we need to get a bit more of a critical mass with our UK sales before we can consider shipping pallet loads over to the UK. We need to be careful especially with expiry dates to avoid issues with goods expiring in a warehouse in the UK.
We are already selling both on eBay and Amazon but again with shipments effected from Cyprus.

 

[LewisBG]

Social media can be used very effectively in marketing. Creating a facebook page and getting your existing clients to like it will promote your business. All you have to do is post fun and attracting posts and the awareness of your business should rise.

 

[Maple Sourcing]

Have you tried LinkedIn? Become membership for some good groups, and you can post some good information and let more people be aware of you. Good luck.

 

[Food From Cyprus]

Social media can be used very effectively in marketing. Creating a facebook page and getting your existing clients to like it will promote your business. All you have to do is post fun and attracting posts and the awareness of your business should rise.

I agree with your suggestion. We use social media quite extensively. We have a facebook page, twitter, pinterest and a tumbler blog. We get a lot of 'likes' and followers but few of them bother to actually visit the website and even fewer to place an order. We monitor the traffic we get to our online shop via Google Analytics and other software on our cPanel hence we can see the effect that social media have in terms or referring customers to our site.

 

[Food From Cyprus]

Have you tried LinkedIn? Become membership for some good groups, and you can post some good information and let more people be aware of you. Good luck.

Thanks for your suggestion. Yes, I forgot to mention Linked In in my previous post. We are there as well!

 

[fisicx]

Traffic from social media rarely converts. If you want to sell more then you need to sell in the UK and sell via advertsing.

At the moment you don't have anytrhing I can't already get in the UK. This means there is no value to me in buying from you. You need to change your whole businesss model if you want to supply UK customers.

 

[Food From Cyprus]

Traffic from social media rarely converts. If you want to sell more then you need to sell in the UK and sell via advertsing.

At the moment you don't have anytrhing I can't already get in the UK. This means there is no value to me in buying from you. You need to change your whole businesss model if you want to supply UK customers.

Thanks for your advice.

I know that the more you advertise the more you could sell. I was just trying to see if anybody else on this forum has found alternative ways of advertising/promoting an online business without having to pay a fortune for it.

We sell products that are either completely not available in the UK or very hard to get. By this I mean the specific brands of products that we sell and not a generic category like biscuits. For example you could buy a McVities Digestive in the UK but it would be very difficult (or impossible) to get a Frou Frou Digestive in Tesco's or Sainsbury's.

Some of our UK customers have included British tourists who have visited Cyprus and are willing to pay a bit extra for a product they liked, British Military who have spent time in the British bases in Cyprus and British expats who lived in Cyprus and have now returned to the UK. The issue here is how do you make our online shop known to more people in order to boost sales :|

 

[iBusiness Forums]

Well, you can set up a Facebook business Page which is simply for free!

Facebook is the most popular social network today, and you should make the most of it. Always appeal to your audience by uploading interesting and exciting posts on regular intervals.

There's also Twitter that's for free. Make the most of these. Good luck

 

[Food From Cyprus]

Well, you can set up a Facebook business Page which is simply for free!

Facebook is the most popular social network today, and you should make the most of it. Always appeal to your audience by uploading interesting and exciting posts on regular intervals.

There's also Twitter that's for free. Make the most of these. Good luck

Thanks for the advice
We have both facebook & twitter and we upload new content regularly. We have 'likes' and followers but few of them convert to customers.
It seems that consumers do not directly associate social media with online purchases. For example if somebody is looking for Greek Coffee he would probably do a search on eBay rather than on facebook.

 

[beasty]

Well, you can set up a Facebook business Page which is simply for free!

Facebook is the most popular social network today, and you should make the most of it. Always appeal to your audience by uploading interesting and exciting posts on regular intervals.

There's also Twitter that's for free. Make the most of these. Good luck

FACEBOOK AND TWITTER ARE NOT FREE

THEY are time consuming...

You can get a programme that tells you how much time you spend on it.. i forget the name but will find it later...

Lets say you are online and have 8 hours a week on fb and twitter combined.. there is a cost there of 8 hours doing something else, if you might have made 500quid in that time then your interesting posts on fb better earn you 501 or you are losing money

 

[iBusiness Forums]

You can always take advantage of a Facebook Page--it's free and popular. Not to mention Twitter and G+.

These are social networks are free and if used strategically, can be amazing tools to boost your marketing efforts! So explore these tools and make the most of them.

If you don;t have the time to do it, then you can always hire a Social Media Manager to do this for you.

 

[fisicx]

You can always take advantage of a Facebook Page--it's free and popular.

See beasty's post above.

If you don;t have the time to do it, then you can always hire a Social Media Manager to do this for you.

Which isn't free.

SM rarely brings in new business. Might be good for brand awareness but hopeless for selling food from Cyprus.

 

[Food From Cyprus]

SM rarely brings in new business. Might be good for brand awareness but hopeless for selling food from Cyprus.

Yes, I would agree with this. As I explained in a previous post we get a lot of interest and interactions via SM (mainly twitter and facebook) but rarely these convert into sales.
This is why I asked the original question on any new ideas on how to attract new customers.