If Your Shop’s Sales Always Flop, You Might Be Making These Easy Mistakes

If your sales and promotions aren’t bringing in the orders you hoped for, a few seemingly harmless mistakes could be holding back your potential to earn big.

Running a sale seems pretty straightforward. You choose a few products to discount, announce the promotion, and hope the lower prices encourage customers to buy. But what happens when you’ve put time into planning and promoting a sale, only to end up with a handful of orders or none at all?

It’s frustrating, especially when you’re a small business owner doing most of the work yourself. The good news is that disappointing sales don’t always mean your products are too expensive or that customers aren’t interested. Sometimes, a few simple mistakes in how you’re planning and promoting your sales can make a bigger difference than you realize.

Mistake 1: Announcing the sale only when it starts

People have overcrowded email inboxes, busy algorithmically controlled social feeds, and plenty of other things to think about besides your shop. If the first time they hear about your promotion is the morning it begins, you’re asking them to notice it and decide to buy from you immediately, and simply put – that just doesn’t work.

For best results, let people warm up to your sale slowly by mentioning the upcoming sale a few days in advance. Show a product that will be included, invite customers to join your email list for reminders about the sale, and make the start date super easy to remember. You don’t need weeks of hype, just enough pre-sale excitement to make the actual sale feel like the main event everyone’s been waiting for.

Mistake 2: Making customers do detective work

A pretty graphic that says ‘BIG SALE’ might earn a glance, but it doesn’t answer the questions a buyer has. What’s included? How much will they save? When does it end? Where do they go?

Choose one clear offer to lead with. For example: ‘Our weekly desk planner bundle is $12 through Thursday, normally $18.’ For even more success, pair it with a direct link to that exact product instead of sending everyone to your homepage. The fewer hoops a person has to jump through, the easier it is to focus on what they want to buy (instead of how hard it was to buy it).

Mistake 3: Discounting products nobody wants

A markdown can make a wanted product more appealing, but it won’t necessarily create demand out of thin air for an item your audience has never shown interest in. Before picking sale items, look at your bestsellers, saved products, customer questions, and repeat purchases. Those are the items to focus on if your sale is to have value to buyers and earn the most.

A stationery seller might have more success featuring a popular notepad set than a collection that rarely gets clicks, even if the slower collection has the bigger discount. This is because the popular notepad set has greater value to their audience.

Mistake 4: Posting once and hoping for the best

In a world where your business is competing with thousands of other advertisers for attention, one sale announcement from you can be easy for your customers to miss. That doesn’t mean you need to post every hour like a crazy maniac. It means giving people a few more opportunities to notice, like an early preview, a launch announcement, and a final reminder.

You can also change what you talk about each time. Show how a product is used, answer a common question, or highlight a customer favorite instead of repeating the same graphic over and over again. You’ll reach more potential customers if you vary the images you use, the products you feature, and when you post them.

Try this with your shop

Open your last sale announcement and read it as if you’ve never heard of your business. Can you tell what’s included, why it’s appealing, when it ends, and exactly where to buy? If one answer is missing, you’ve already spotted a few ways that you can improve your approach for next time.

Ready to put this into practice?

Our free Five-Day Sale Kit helps you turn those small fixes into a plan, including choosing offers and deciding what to share before each one goes live. Create a free Curatery account to download the guide and start mapping out your next promotion.