Most small business websites have a sales problem they can't see
When sales slow down, most small business owners do the same thing first. They run a discount.
I understand the instinct. Price is easy to change, and a sale feels like action. But after nearly a decade in ecommerce growth, working with brands from early-stage startups to companies doing tens of millions in revenue, I can tell you price is rarely the real problem. Most of the time, the site is getting in the way of the sale. Shoppers can't find the button, can't tell what the product is, or give up waiting for the page to load.
The good news is that these problems are fixable, and most of them don't require a redesign. Fixing them is a big part of what I do at The Growth Chick, where I take the growth strategies that worked at large startups and right-size them for small businesses.
Start with your phone
The first thing I look at on any website is how it works on a phone. That's where most of your shoppers are, and it's where most sites quietly fall apart. Owners tend to review their site on a laptop, because that's where they built it. Their customers are scrolling on a phone in a checkout line.
Pull up your own site on your phone right now. Better yet, hand your phone to a friend who has never seen your site and watch them try to buy something.
The four problems I find most often
Your buy button is below the fold
This is the most common issue I see. On a phone, the "Add to Cart" button sits under a large photo gallery, a long description, or a stack of badges, so the shopper has to scroll to find it. Many won't.
On one site, I moved the buy button so it appeared on screen without scrolling. Add-to-carts went up 20%. Nothing else about the page changed.
Fixes like this are easy to overlook because they feel small. In my experience, they often move sales more than new ads do, and I explain why in why landing pages beat creative testing.
Your product names only make sense to you
Small business owners love naming their products, and I get why. But a cute name doesn't tell a shopper what they're looking at, and it doesn't help them find you in search.
Say you sell hair accessories and you've named a product "The Dolly." Nobody knows what that is. Call it "The Dolly 80s Style Scrunchie" and people immediately know what it is and whether they want it.
On one Shopify store, I rewrote the product titles to be descriptive and easy to understand. Revenue went up 10%.
Your pages load slowly
Every second a page takes to load is a second for a shopper to give up. Oversized images, too many apps, and heavy themes are the usual causes. You often can't see the problem on your home Wi-Fi, which is one more reason to test on your phone over a cellular connection.
Customers can't find your products
If a shopper has to open three menus to get to what you sell, you're losing people. Your products should be one or two taps from the home page. If you sell a handful of things, show them right away. If you sell a lot, make your categories match how customers think about your products, which may be different from how you organize them in the back office.
Why discounting usually isn't the answer
Discounting trains customers to wait for a sale, and it cuts into the margin you need to run the business. Worse, it often doesn't fix anything, because the people who would love your product either can't get through your site or never find it in the first place.
If you have a great product, there are people who will happily pay full price for it. Your job is to make sure those people can find you and understand what you're selling.
Start with your ideal customer
Before you change anything, get specific about who your ideal customer is. Then put yourself in their shoes and walk through your site. Ask yourself:
- Would they understand what I sell within a few seconds?
- Am I describing my products in the words they would use?
- Does the look and feel of the site match what they expect from a brand like mine?
Use their words everywhere, including your meta descriptions
This is where positioning and SEO meet. Your product titles, page copy, and meta descriptions (the short summaries that show up under your link in search results) should use the words your ideal customer cares about and searches for. The scrunchie example applies here too. A shopper searching for "80s scrunchie" will never find "The Dolly."
Get more from the customers you already have
Once your site is working, one of the fastest ways to grow sales is to help each customer buy a little more. Showing relevant add-ons or "pairs well with" products at the right moment does this without any extra ad spend.
On one Shopify store, I added cross-selling with Rebuy, an app that recommends complementary products. Average order value went up 25% month over month.
What to do if you only have one hour this week
You don't need a big project to start. Here's where I'd spend the hour.
Step 1: Check your page speed
Go to PageSpeed Insights and enter your website. If it flags any glaring errors, fix those first. They're usually the cheapest wins you'll find.
Step 2: Shop your own site like a stranger
If nothing major comes up, pick up your phone and go through your site pretending you're a brand-new customer. Look for one thing that customer would enjoy more or interact with more if you changed it. Maybe the button is hard to find, maybe a product name is confusing, maybe it takes too long to get to the shop page.
Step 3: Decide what you'll measure before you change anything
Pick one number that should move if your change works. If you move the buy button, watch add-to-cart rate. If you rewrite product titles, watch conversion rate or revenue for those products. If you add cross-sells, watch average order value. Write down where that number is today.
Step 4: Make the change and give it time
Make the one change, then leave it alone for a week or two. You want enough traffic that you can reasonably expect the pattern to hold. A small shop may need the full two weeks. A busier one may see a clear signal sooner.
Then do it again. One change, one number, one or two weeks. That's how small improvements add up to real sales growth, and it's how you learn what your customers actually respond to.
If you'd rather have someone else find the first few fixes, that's what the Growth Test is for. It's a fixed-price diagnostic, so you can see the quality of the work before you commit to anything bigger.