Getting people to visit your website is one thing. Getting those people to actually buy from you is another.

You could be getting hundreds or even thousands of website visitors and still struggle to turn that traffic into sales. The bigger issue is whether your website makes it easy for those visitors to become paying customers.

If you are wondering how to get customers to buy from your website, we have broken down seven step-by-step strategies you can use to start turning more of your website visitors into sales.

If you are currently getting website traffic but no sales and want to understand why that is happening, first read our guide on Getting Website Traffic but No Sales? 7 Reasons Why and How to Fix It before you continue.

No need for long talk about “check out our latest menu,” “see the face behind the brand,” or “where we started from.”

Keep it simple. Customers get on the website, see the most popular items people buy, and get a buy button instantly. Make it a list or grid format. See, add to cart, buy. Nothing else that distracts them.

Browse, Cart, Pay.

For a food business:

For a fashion business:

Every additional unnecessary step between wanting something and paying for it creates another opportunity for the customer to stop.

A customer should not have to spend several minutes on your website trying to understand what you sell or how to buy it.

Your products should be easy to find, especially the products people buy most frequently. If you sell food, customers should quickly see the meals available. If you sell clothes, they should be able to find the products and categories they want without searching through several pages.

The goal is to make the buying process obvious from the moment someone arrives on the website.

If customers constantly have to message:

“Price?”

“Do you deliver to Ikeja?”

“Does this come in medium?”

“Is this available?”

“What exactly comes with this meal?”

Then some of that information probably belongs on your website.

Product pages should answer the questions customers need answered before making a decision.

Delivery information is especially important.

If I want to buy a ₦15,000 product, I may want to know whether delivery is ₦2,000 or ₦12,000 before I decide whether the purchase makes sense.

Do not make customers reach checkout before discovering information that could change their decision.

A customer who reaches checkout is already much closer to buying than someone casually browsing your homepage.

Do not make the final part unnecessarily difficult.

Your checkout should therefore ask for what you actually need and make the next step clear.

Check whether:

And test it yourself.

Do not only test the website on the laptop you used to build it. Open it on your phone and actually try to buy something.

If people are adding products to their cart but disappearing before payment, our guide on Why Shoppers Add to Cart but Do Not Buy (And How to Fix It) goes deeper into what could be happening at this stage.

This is particularly important if your customers already have another way of buying from you.

Imagine a food business that accepts orders through WhatsApp, a third-party delivery platform, and its own website.

The customer is already comfortable with the delivery app. Their address may be saved. Their payment information may be saved. They know how the platform works.

Why should they suddenly start ordering directly from your website?

Sometimes the answer cannot simply be:

“Because we have a website now.”

Give them a reason.

You could test:

This does not mean throwing discounts at customers every week.

Not everyone who visits your website today will buy today.

That does not mean the visit has to become useless.

Someone might discover your business while commuting, add something to their cart, and get distracted. Another person may want the product but be waiting until payday. Someone else might simply need more time.

If they disappear and you have no way of reaching them again, you are depending on them to remember your business and return by themselves.

This is why customer-data capture matters.

For example:

This is where your website begins doing something Instagram or a third-party marketplace cannot completely do for you.

Getting the first website order is good.

But getting the same customer to order again is even better.

Think about a food business.

If somebody orders lunch today and loves it, should the business have to pay an influencer or Meta again before that same person remembers to order next week?

Ideally, no.

That is why the website should not only be designed around:

Visitor, Purchase

It should eventually support:

Visitor, Purchase, Customer Data, Repeat Purchase

You could bring customers back through loyalty rewards, useful email communication, relevant offers, new-product announcements, personalised recommendations, or win-back campaigns.

The exact strategy depends on what you sell. Someone may buy lunch several times a month but buy a wig only occasionally, so the same retention strategy will not work for both businesses.

The important thing is that your relationship with the customer should not automatically end when checkout is complete.

If you want to know how to get customers to buy from your website, start by looking at the whole journey rather than one button or one page.

A simple version looks like this:

That is the bigger goal.

You are not simply building a website.

You are building a system that turns attention into customers and gives those customers a reason to return.

And once that system works, bringing more people into it starts to make much more sense.

Make the buying process clear and easy. Customers should quickly understand what you sell, find products, see the information they need, add products to their cart, and complete payment without unnecessary steps. You should also give customers a reason to choose your website if they already have other ways of buying from you.

Start by looking at what happens between the moment someone lands on your website and the moment they pay. Improve your product pages, calls to action, product information, cart and checkout, and identify where people are leaving before completing a purchase.

Focus first on conversion rather than simply increasing traffic. Make products easy to discover, provide enough information for customers to make decisions, remove unnecessary checkout friction, test incentives, and create ways to bring interested visitors and previous customers back.

Make ordering directly from your website easier and give customers a reason to use it. Let them browse products, see prices, understand delivery, add items to their cart, and pay without waiting for a reply. Website-exclusive offers or loyalty rewards can also encourage customers to change their usual ordering behaviour.

Give customers a reason to come back through relevant offers, loyalty rewards, new-product updates, post-purchase communication, and win-back campaigns. Capturing customer information with permission makes it possible to communicate with previous customers instead of relying on them to rediscover your business.

Till next time,

Team Thrive

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