According to Global Estimates 2025, the total number of E-commerce stores worldwide is 28 million. Especially after the pandemic, the number of online stores has more than doubled, from 9.7 million to 19 million, between 2020 and 2021.
This large number of online stores is proof that we are already in a generation of online shopping. But the problem is that not every E-commerce store can drive sales. Some struggle to get a single order, even after spending on Meta Ads. In this blog post, we will explore all the problems that E-commerce stores face and also some secret hacks on how to use Instagram to drive sales for your E-commerce Store.
Why can't an E-commerce store drive sales?
E-commerce sales depend on several factors like product USP, customer trust, competitive pricing, brand credibility, marketing strategy, etc. To understand the exact reason hindering your sales, you need to run many tests on Instagram.
Here are some common reasons why you can't drive sales from Instagram
- You don't have enough audience reach on Instagram
- You chose the wrong audience to promote your products
- Your audience still doesn't trust your brand.
- Your content strategy is not right.
- Your brand failed to create an Instagram Community
- Your marketing budget is not enough
Before moving to the solution, you need to find out the reasons that are affecting your sales. Once you figure out the reason, you can try one of these methods to start getting sales from Instagram.
Benefits of Using Instagram for E-commerce Success
Instagram's 2 billion active users make it a marketplace where you can sell anything to everything. Even the weirdest idea can go viral on Instagram and give you a million-dollar sales. Some of the important benefits of using Instagram for an E-commerce store are as follows:
- A large user base across countries allows you to sell globally.
- A diverse community makes it easier to reach the right audience.
- A Plenty of content management features help you be consistent in your planning.
- Cross-device support allows you to broaden your reach.
- Search engine visibility gives you an extra layer of credibility
- Building trust with a strong social media presence
Compared to other social media in Meta Universe (Facebook, Threads, WhatsApp, Oculus), Instagram has a higher percentage of genuine audience. It means that lead generation and conversion rate are much higher than on other social media.
How to Use Instagram to Drive Sales to Your Store
Articulating the reasons for fewer sales or no sales is the first step in this process. Next, we can move to the steps on how to use your Instagram business account to attract customers to your e-commerce store. We will discuss the following methods in the upcoming sections:
- Building your Business Foundation on Instagram
- Choosing the right audience.
- Content planning to build trust
- Sales strategies
- Conversion and Retention
- Expanding Sales on Automation
Building your Business Foundation on Instagram
Just like your physical business, your online business also needs a strong foundation on Instagram. It includes your Instagram Bio, Contact details, and Business Details. The more accurate details you have, the better its impact on your audience. It will not build trust among the audience, but it also helps Instagram find the right audience to show your content.
Key points to remember:
- Write a searchable Profile name, username, and Instagram Bio
- Don't miss any business details like email, phone number, website, address, or location
- Make a set of hashtags for your business to be used in content planning.
- Start making connections on Instagram that can be used for collaborations
These key points give you a good start, but if you want to learn deeply about each point, we recommend you read our article Instagram Marketing for Small Businesses: Ultimate Guide for 2025
Choosing the right audience
Choosing the right audience is necessary for a higher conversion rate and a higher ROAS. It's a golden concept of Demand and Supply that works on Instagram as well. You have to find the audience that needs your product, since selling a tasty cake in front of a diabetic person will never bring sales.
How to find your customers on Instagram?
Instagram algorithm groups people with similar interests together. You might have seen Instagram suggesting similar accounts when you follow one of them. Leveraging these Instagram features, you can find your audience in two ways:
1. Following brand influencers
Most new businesses make the mistake of following their competitors in the hope that they will get more followers. This works sometimes, but it's not good for building your business credibility. They are your competitors; you have to compete with them, not follow them.
The right choice is Brand Influencers. Following brand influencer targets your account to the right audience. For example, if you have an online bakery store so you can follow creators who post cake recipes, food tips, food vloggers, etc.
This will create an exchange of trust; the audience trusts a human more than a brand. They trust the influencer, your brand trusts the influencer, so they will trust your brand.
2. Following Hashtags
Instagram allows following hashtags just like you follow accounts. Following hashtags gives Instagram a signal that you are interested in that topic or niche. Hashtags' following list doesn't appear on your profile, so you can follow as many hashtags as you want.
Doing this benefits you in two ways: First, you will start seeing posts under those hashtags, which lets you keep an eye on competitors. Second, it brings your Instagram profile under that community, which helps Instagram decide your audience.
Content Planning
As usual, Content is Key. You will never grow on your Instagram organically if you are not willing to do content planning for your e-commerce store. Content planning keeps you consistent and active on your Instagram feed. There are a few key factors you should understand before starting your content planning:
Key factors for Content Planning:
- Finalize your Micro Niche for low competition
- Divide your content into two parts daily and weekly.
- Balance Quality and Quantity of posts
- Reuse and recycle your posts
- Utilize Business tools to organize and schedule
- Use AI tools like Perplexity, ChatGPT, or Gemini to speed up the process
- Don't duplicate, but innovate content
- Be the first to follow the trends.
How to create a sales-driven content plan for your online store?
Keeping in mind the key factors mentioned above, you can start your content planning by following these steps.
1. Mark your calendar
Use an online calendar like Google Calendar or Facebook Business Planner and mark down all Festivals, special events, and anniversaries, so you won't miss any. You can put a reminder 2-3 days earlier than the event to have enough time to think of creative ideas.
2. Micro Posting for Daily Updates
To always be in the feed of your audience, you should write down some creative topics. On which it's easy to create an engaging micro post. For example:
- Create a Poll
- High-quality picture of your product.
- Did you know Q&A
- Behind-the-scenes clips
- User reviews screenshot
- Audience comments
- How to use the steps
3. Weekly Boosters
Once a week, it's necessary to give a valuable content booster. This will give your audience a push to follow your account. For example, if you have an online toy store, you can create a Reel of budget toys anyone can buy under $100, or the Best affordable birthday gift ideas for kids.
You can post this type of reel once a week to boost your audience engagement with your account. If you cannot afford to create once a week, you can even do one booster post in 10 days.
4. Instagram Stories
Instagram Stories are short-term posts that last for 24 hours, but they're quite effective method to engage with your audience. Instagram provides many cool interactive features to make stunning stories. You can create polls, ask a quiz, Q&A to let your customers interact.
It's good to post Instagram stories daily. If you don't have new story ideas daily, you can even share others' content on your Instagram stories, giving them free credit. This way, you can build a relationship and also stay at the top of stories.
5. Choosing Content Types
Instagram provides three types of content: your post can be a static image, a carousel, or a Reel. IGTV videos got discontinued since Reels were introduced. Having a good mix of Video and Static is always beneficial, but it's not mandatory. You can go for either Reel or Static Image, depending on which one is easier for you to create and post regularly.
Instagram analytics shows that Reels are more effective than Static images and Carousel. If you can increase the number of reels in your content plan, your community will grow faster.
6. Building a community
Don't chase likes, work for building a community. A strong community will give your e-commerce store long-term growth in sales. You can sell your existing products with positive reviews, understand your customers' issues through feedback, and launch new products without wasting money on ads. A community not only buys your products but also helps you reach a wider audience.
Building a community involves a long-term strategy and planning, which is beyond the scope of this article. If you want to dive deeper, you can read our article Beyond the Likes: Building a Thriving Community on Instagram
7. Leverage AI Tools
In 2025, we will have hundreds of AI tools to make your life easier. You can generate a content plan with ChatGPT, Gemini, create eye-catching video ads with Google Veo, Runway, Kling AI, Sora, or you can even generate Static visual photos with Meta AI. Keep in mind you need to use AI as a supporting tool, not as a content generation machine.
Copying and pasting content will not accurately reflect your personal E-commerce brand, and it makes it difficult for people to trust due to a lack of authenticity. AI tools can be used to create attention-grabbing visuals, such as hooks for your reels and backgrounds for ads. However, when writing a prompt, ensure that you clearly explain your promotion goals and brand theme.
Sales Strategy
For an E-commerce store, the ultimate goal is to grow sales, not followers. That's why just being consistent in posting and getting more likes will not sell your product. You need something more, a sales strategy to drive conversion from your audience.
The purpose of creating content is to make people aware of your brand. They might click on your sales ad, but they will not convert unless they know you. In the sales strategy, we follow some tactics to make your content a lead generation magnet.
Follow the 80-20 Rule
The 80-20 rule says that your content should be 80% informative or entertaining and 20% sales-oriented. For example, your reel can explain natural remedies for pimples at home for 45 seconds, and in the last 15 seconds, about your aesthetic clinic.
Consistent Branding
It might seem negligible for an E-commerce store to have a branding, but it has a long-lasting impact on your customers. Your audience will start remembering your brand with the colors you use in your content, or a certain tagline, tone of writing, shapes, or photos. These minor details increase their trust in your brand because they found it familiar.
Listen to your Customer
Most online stores fail because of poor customer service. They try to hide bad reviews and buy fake good reviews to increase sales. These kinds of malicious practices could work for the short term, but they will destroy your loyalty soon. Learn to tackle bad reviews, don't hide them, and never buy fake ones. You can do a reward system to give genuine reviews.
Engage with Trends
It's not always necessary to create content to stay in the eyes of your audience. Sometimes all you need to do is participate in a discussion. You can check your niche influencer's post, give your genuine feedback, or ask a question to their audience. This will help you connect with more potential customers who might be buying your product in the future. It can also allow collaborating with other influencers if you succeed in creating a strong bond.
Try one thing at a time
Freemium Forever
Definitely, you have started an E-commerce store to earn money, but if they can't try, they don't buy. Make your online store a Freemium Forever store with a Free trial plan for first timers. This works well for service-based online businesses, but it can also be implemented on product-based stores. For example, if you are selling online groceries, you can give the first 3 times free delivery or a Free gift with every purchase, or if you have your own product brand, you can send them a free trial pack for review.
Giving free products might seem like a loss to business, but it's an inevitable sales strategy, and additionally, it saves a lot of money you would spend on ads without any returns.
Be patient
Just like real-world relationships, online relationships between you and your customer will take some time to nurture. You need to be patient with customers and keep building a healthy relationship with them, even if you are not getting anything in return.
On average, a potential customer takes 30 to 90 days to warm up and take action to buy anything. This time period depends on the cost of the product; an affordable product has a shorter conversion time than an expensive product.
Conversion and Retention
E-commerce store owners must be aware of the importance of a high conversion and retention rate for a profitable business. Several factors affect these on Instagram. Let's understand how you can improve them
Lack of Trust
Lack of trust is the first and foremost reason for no conversion. Depending on the product and the region you are selling, you need to find out the trust factors, which can be online TrustPilot reviews, Google Reviews, or Feedback from influencers, faster customer service, or a lower error rate.
Once you figure out your trust factors for your business, make them your priority. It's okay not to give a high percentage discount, but giving faulty products is critical. Once the trust is broken, it won't be coming back.
Balance of Quantity and Quality
There are two types of customers, one who looks for a value-for-money product and the other who cares about quality more. While promoting your product on Instagram, create a balance of the quantity you are providing, and there is no compromise in quality.
For example, instead of selling a single product promoting its quality, you can combine 2 to 3 products in a combo, to not only make it more valuable but also make it affordable for them.
Don't Forget a Single Customer
Most of the time, when a customer purchases something from your online store, you thank them via email or message notifications. But after a few weeks, your focus moved towards getting new customers. That's a big mistake.
The customer who already trusted you and bought something can become your FREE Brand Ambassador. He will bring other customers to your online store because he knows the authenticity of your business. Don't forget a single customer behind, keep on engaging with them, ask for feedback, or give them special offers, invite them to join your ambassador program to earn rewards.
Expanding Sales on Automation
If you followed this blog post sincerely, you have understood various tactics to follow to boost sales. But do you need to continue it forever? Can you put the sales operation on Automation? . The answer is Yes. but partially. Complete automation might be possible, but not recommended; adding a human touch is necessary.
How to Start Automating Your Sales Operations on Instagram
Instagram provides some extensive tools and features that let you automate your Instagram sales operations easily. This involves scheduling posts, automatic replies, Meta AI, Facebook Business Suite, Ad Manager, etc. Leveraging these tools and features, you can partially automate your day-to-day hustle on Instagram.
Scheduling Posts and Stories
Facebook Business Suite, the Instagram app, and the Facebook App all let you schedule posts for later. If you don't get time every day to post it, you can schedule the whole week or the whole month in a day. Read this blog on the Instagram help center to learn how to schedule a post.
Automatic Reply
Facebook Business Suite lets you create an automatic reply for new enquiries. It saves your time and creates a positive impression on new customers. You can learn about setting up an automatic reply in this Facebook help center article
Meta AI
Meta AI is not integrated with all apps in the Facebook metaverse. You can use it inside Messenger, business suite, and ads manager. Though it won't help you automate the process but it helps in reducing the time spent by being an assistant. You can use it for Post descriptions, Ad images, Message Translations, Message replies, Audience research, Keyword research, etc. Its applications are limitless.
Facebook Business Suite
Facebook Business Suite is a collection of many automation tools within it, including Ads Manager, Planner, Cross Channel Inboxes, and many more. You can utilize these features to control not one but multiple business accounts together.
Conclusion
Instagram is a growing social media platform to drive sales to your E-commerce store. Throughout this blog post, we saw a step-by-step strategic process on how to put a strong foundation for your online store on Instagram, convert and retain customers, and put everything on automation. There is no overnight success or magic wand to boost your sales instantly; you need to work hard and be patient for your E-commerce success.
If you found this article helpful, let us know your feedback in the comments. If you have any other e-commerce strategy, you can email us.