You invested in a company’s entire line of e-liquid to carry in your vape shop. It seemed like a good purchase at the time. Maybe you liked the packaging or the names of the flavors, or perhaps your distributor just offered you a great deal. Either way, you were convinced that your customers would like the e-liquids and that you’d be able to turn a profit. After several weeks, though, there’s barely been a dent in your stock levels. You thought you’d grabbed the best vape juice, but the line isn’t moving at all. For whatever reason, it’s just not resonating with your customers. Never fear! In this article, we’ll discuss five simple and actionable tips that’ll help you get an unsuccessful e-liquid line moving and prevent it from becoming dead inventory.
Offer a Coupon Code
People love saving money, but sometimes just marking a product’s price down is a bad idea. Research has shown that, for online retailers, a product can sometimes languish in the clearance area for months without selling if its price is too low. That’s because marking a product’s price down too far in an attempt to sell it quickly can sometimes have the opposite effect because the low price cheapens the product in customers’ eyes and makes them think it’s of subpar quality. Rather than simply marking down the e-liquid’s price, promote it with a coupon code. That way, customers will see the original price and will be less likely to conclude that the e-liquid is cheap or low quality.
Sell the E-Liquid in a Bundle
One way to encourage customers to buy an unsuccessful e-liquid line – and to reduce the price of that line without losing money – is to sell the e-liquid as part of a promotional bundle. The way to earn money with this strategy is to bundle the unsuccessful e-liquid with a product that’s extremely profitable. If the profit that you earn for selling a particular product is greater than the wholesale price of the unsuccessful e-liquid line, that’s ideal.
Let’s say, for instance, that you paid $8.00 per bottle for the unsuccessful e-liquid line. Let’s also suppose that you carry a popular tank, and the profit margin on that tank is $10.00. If you bundled the two products together while only charging the wholesale price for the e-liquid, you’ll still earn a total profit of $10.00. This technique works for both online and brick-and-mortar vape shops.
Move the E-Liquid to the Front of the Store
People who buy vaping products are always on the hunt for whatever is new and novel. You’re not creating that sense of novelty if you’re displaying the unsuccessful e-liquid line in a locked case next to better-known e-liquid brands. One extremely effective way to build a bit of excitement around a product is to display that product in a more prominent location. If you move the e-liquid line to the front of the store, for instance, it’ll instantly make the line look more appealing because people will assume that it is new. When your stock begins to dwindle, you can move the e-liquid back to its original location or put the remaining stock on clearance.
Raise the E-Liquid’s Price
Earlier in the article, we discussed the fact that an unusually low price can cheapen a product in the eyes of potential buyers and may actually drive them away. Did you know that raising a product’s price can sometimes do the opposite? Study the e-liquid line with a critical eye. Is the packaging nice enough that people could potentially think of it as a premium or luxury product? Could the flavor names come off differently if the e-liquids were a bit more expensive? Try raising the price until the unsuccessful e-liquid line is one of the most expensive ranges of juice in your vape shop. If the tactic works, customers will begin thinking of the e-liquids as luxury or premium juices rather than inexpensive budget vape juices. When you change the price, it’s also a good idea to move the e-liquid range and display it next to the most expensive e-liquids in your vape shop. Remember that positioning an e-liquid brand as a line of premium or luxury products isn’t going to happen on its own; it’s going to take some work from you.
Create Original Product Descriptions
If your vape shop is an online business, remember that you have two ways to sell any product. One way is by directing customers to that product when they’re already on your website. If you’re considering the e-liquid line a failure, though, chances are that you’ve already tried to do that. Either your website’s product discovery features haven’t been successful in getting people to click through to the products, or people haven’t bought the products after viewing them.
The second way of selling the e-liquid line is by driving traffic directly to those products from Google. Your product pages won’t get any traffic from Google, though, if you’ve done what so many other vape shop owners do and copied the text descriptions for those e-liquids from other websites. Would you like to know why Google is extremely unlikely to ever send traffic to a page with a copied product description?
Put a sentence from your product description in quotation marks – that technique returns only pages with text exactly matching what’s in the quotation marks – and search for it on Google. You might find hundreds of pages with the exact same description text that you’re using. Why should Google send traffic to your page if it already has hundreds of pages indexed with the exact same text? If you want any page on your vape shop’s website to have any chance of generating organic traffic, the page must have text that doesn’t exist anywhere else. Take the time to write original descriptions for your products – especially the ones that you really need to sell. The more helpful and keyword-rich your descriptions are, the more likely those pages will be to receive traffic from Google.
Jason Artman is the owner and author of eCig One. A professional freelance writer and SEO consultant with more than a decade of experience, Jason works with vaping companies around the world to increase their targeted web traffic and improve their revenue.