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Shopify Sales Funnel: How to build a sales funnel [Practical Guide]

6 minutes

Shopify sales funnel: The importance of a sales funnel cannot be overstated. This immensely powerful tool helps you evaluate and scrutinize every aspect of your customer acquisition process. By being savvy and implementing tactics to improve each step of the funnel, you can dramatically improve your business. Read on to learn the ins and outs of sales funnels, and why they are crucial to your e-commerce success.

What is Shopify sales funnel?

Simply put, a sales funnel is a marketing term that describes each of the steps or stages a potential customer takes on their journey to making a purchase. A sales funnel is (obviously) funnel-shaped. It has a very wide top, which represents every potential store visitor. It tapers through the middle, which represents customers at various stages within your store, and has just a very narrow opening at the bottom, representing your sales.

Basically, and for optimal business success, you need to push as many customers through the funnel as possible.

Who should create a Shopify sales funnel?

If you are a merchant on Shopify, you absolutely must create a Shopify sales funnel, regardless of your industry. E-commerce is crowded – as a merchant, you already know just how many competitors you have, fighting for the same customers. A well-designed sales funnel gives you a head start over your competitors, helps you to set benchmarks and goals, and keeps you on track to meet those goals.

Why is it important to create a Shopify sales funnel?

It’s impossible to run a successful business without strong marketing strategies and a solid business plan in place. These will be crucial tools to help you develop advertising campaigns, find new customers, and boost your sales. A sales funnel is a very important part of this process. The right sales funnel can help you understand what your customers are thinking during their purchasing journey, and helps you invest in and create relevant marketing strategies. Ultimately, a sales funnel can help you convert prospects or leads into loyal, paying customers.

Shopify sales funnel stages

Understanding what Shopify is and the various stages of the sales funnel is incredibly important when it comes to ensuring the success of your e-commerce venture.

From the wide entry, to the tapered middle, and finally the narrow end – a sales funnel has several stages. Here’s a breakdown of the main stages of a sales funnel.

#1 Store visits

Driving customers to your store is the first place you need to start when it comes to a sales funnel. You can’t expect people to find your store on their own – you need strategic advertising campaigns that are targeted to your specific audience. Utilize social media platforms, SMS/email campaigns, and any other strategy you think may be effective.

#2 View products/offers

Once you have customers inside your store, the next step is to ensure they spend their time genuinely looking at your products. One of the most effective methods of encouraging customers to view your products is by offering attractive deals. With PickyStory, you can create upselling deals and offer your customers discounts for purchasing multiple products. These types of deals can dramatically increase your store traffic and make a big difference to customers when it comes to making a purchase.

#3 Add to carts

Getting your customers to view a deal is a great start. However, you don’t really benefit from this unless a customer adds products to their cart. There are many different methods to improve the number of add-to-carts your store generates, and upselling deals/sales is one of the most effective ways. Check out PickyStory’s deals to learn more about upselling and cross-selling in your Shopify store.

Research shows that customers will actually spend more for bundle deals – the perceived discount is a highly effective method of upselling. You can also utilize a visible call to action, quality product images, and an easily navigable store to increase your ATCs.

#4 Checkout

Cart abandonment is a huge problem for many e-commerce merchants. Funneling your ATCs to the checkout is one of the most difficult steps to making a sale, but there are several strategies you can employ to help. Ensuring that your customers are aware of their savings is a huge driving factor of making a sale – show them how much they are saving, or remind them that their discount will be applied once they are at the checkout.

#5 Thank you page

As soon as your customer makes a purchase, you need to do everything you can to ensure they come back to your store. Studies show that you’re up to 70% more likely to sell to an existing customer, and there are a few things you can do to help secure this number. One great way to do this is with a post-sale thank you page, which gives your customer an incentive (such as free shipping, or 10% off) for their next order.

Keep in mind, that even after the sale you’ll want to be on hand to provide your customers with excellent customer service when they reach out to you, DelightChat is one of our favorite apps for that.

Grow your sales with high-performing deals.

How to measure and optimize your Shopify sales funnel KPIs

When designing your sales funnel, you need to start at the end and work your way backward (see the example in the table below). Here’s an idea of how to design your Shopify sales funnel:

#1 Start with an end goal

Your “end goal” will be actual customers who purchased from your store. You should already have an idea of the amount of revenue you need to generate to make your store successful, and from this you can extrapolate the number of sales you need to meet these goals.

#2 Calculate how many store visits you need

Once you have a number of sales in mind, you can estimate how many store visits you need to achieve this goal. Calculating your target number of store visits is incredibly important when it comes to developing advertising campaigns, tracking their performance, and ensuring your goals are being met.

#3 Start driving visitors to your store

Until you have real customers viewing your store, the middle stages of the funnel can be difficult to calculate. Once you have some real sales data to work from, you can establish your own metrics – how many store visits result in product views? How many product views result in ATCs? What is your rate of cart abandonment? These numbers will truly help you optimize your Shopify sales funnel.

#4 Optimize stages based on your conversion rates

Scrutinize your sales data at every step to determine where your store can improve. Driving more traffic to your store can be challenging, but improving your conversion rate is often an easier place to start. Based on your actual conversion rates, optimize your funnel to determine the number of ATCs, product views and store visits to meet your goals.

Here’s an example of a Shopify sales funnel that can be applied to your store – start by filling out the assumed visits you’re looking for, then once you have some actual sales data you can complete the third column and optimize your store in order to meet your goals:

How to optimize your Shopify sales funnel with PickyStory’s irresistible deals

PickyStory can help you generate more revenue from every store visit by encouraging your customers to add additional items to their cart before they check out. If you need a Shopify sales funnel app that can help your store’s performance, explore the great deals on offer with PickyStory. PickyStory deals can be added to any page in your store – check out these examples to see how your store might benefit from PickyStory deals.

#1 Homepage deals

Adding deals directly to your homepage is a great way to first capture your customers. If you have a targeted campaign, this is a great way to focus the attention of new customers and encourage them to visit specific collection or product pages – anyone who lands on your homepage will be driven directly towards these deals.

#2 Combo products

Are you looking to sell multiple products in your store as a single item? With combo products, you can upsell to your customers, offer a discount, and encourage them to add multiple items to their cart all with a single click. Combo products are treated like every other product in your store, with their own product page and inventory tracking at SKU level.

#3 Product pages

Upselling on product pages is an important part of improving your Shopify sales funnel. PickyStory has several deals that work perfectly on product pages, including kits and bundles. Kits offer pre-defined packs of products with tiered pricing, while bundles allow you to show your customers related products and offer a discount when additional items are added to their cart.

#3 Deal pages

Creating specific pages in your store to display deals is a highly effective sales strategy, especially if your customers tend to browse throughout your store. For fashion, beauty, or home design merchants, giving your customers the option to “shop the look” and showing multiple, unique looks is a great way to help customers find what they’re looking for and also encourage them to add entire looks to their cart. Alternatively, bundle builder deals are a great option if you’re looking to allow customers to create their own bundle of products, which can be incentivized with a discount.

PickyStory: the ultimate Shopify sales funnel tool

With a Shopify sales funnel app, you’re in a better position to ensure your store is performing to meet your standards. PickyStory can help you create deals that boost revenue and help you make the most of every store visit.

Add PickyStory to your store today and see the difference immediately!

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Shopify Sales Funnel: How to build a sales funnel [Practical Guide]

What is Shopify sales funnel?

Who should create a Shopify sales funnel?

Why is it important to create a Shopify sales funnel?

Shopify sales funnel stages

#1 Store visits

#2 View products/offers

#3 Add to carts

#4 Checkout

#5 Thank you page

Grow your sales with high-performing deals.

How to measure and optimize your Shopify sales funnel KPIs

#1 Start with an end goal

#2 Calculate how many store visits you need

#3 Start driving visitors to your store

#4 Optimize stages based on your conversion rates

How to optimize your Shopify sales funnel with PickyStory’s irresistible deals

#1 Homepage deals

#2 Combo products

#3 Product pages

#3 Deal pages

PickyStory: the ultimate Shopify sales funnel tool

Grow your sales with high-performing deals.

Generate more revenue from every store visit.

Offer irresistible deals across your buyer's journey.

MOST POPULAR

Platform

Main tools

By use case

By industry

Resources

Company

PickyStory is the complete e-commerce upsell platform. PickyStory enables e-commerce brands to make personalized offers by helping customers to discover more products.

Not enough sales?

Capture every drop of revenue with PickyStory's complete upsell platform.

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Why are brands using it?

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Offer shoppers the ability to create their own bundle of products by selecting from a range of available options

What is Build Your Own Bundle?

Build Your Own Bundle scenario provides shoppers with the flexibility to select specific items or features that best meet their individual needs and preferences. The selection is based on a pre-curated set of products by the merchant.

Why are brands using it?

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