How to Get More Customers for Your Ecommerce Store
“How do I get more customers” almost always gets answered with a single channel recommendation, usually whichever one the person answering happens to sell. The honest answer is that the right channel depends on your margin, your price point and how much time you have before you need results, and picking the wrong one for your situation is how acquisition budgets get burned without anything to show for it.
Short answer
Match the channel to your margin and your patience. Paid channels (Shopping, Meta, TikTok) produce customers fast but need margin to absorb the cost. SEO and content produce customers slowly but for free once built. Creators, affiliates and referrals sit in between: faster than SEO, cheaper than cold paid traffic, but requiring real relationship management rather than a budget you can just turn up.
CAC vs LTV: the number that should decide everything below
Before comparing channels, know what a customer is actually worth to you, not just what a single order is worth. A €40 first order with a real chance of two more purchases over the year is worth acquiring at a real loss on order one. A €40 first order that is genuinely a one-off is not. This single number, lifetime value against acquisition cost, determines how aggressively you can spend on any channel below, and getting it wrong in either direction either starves growth or burns cash on customers who were never going to be profitable. The full mechanics are in CAC vs LTV: the ecommerce guide.
A channel comparison
| Channel | Speed to first customer | Needs margin? | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Shopping | Fast | Moderate | Products people already search for by name or category |
| Meta ads | Fast | High | Visually distinctive products, impulse categories |
| TikTok / TikTok Shop | Fast, format-sensitive | Moderate | Brands able to produce native, unpolished content consistently |
| SEO | Slow (months) | Low ongoing | Every store, as a long-run compounding channel |
| Creators | Medium | Low-moderate | Products that benefit from demonstration or genuine use |
| Affiliates | Medium | Low (performance-based) | Stores with margin room for a standing commission |
| Referral | Slow to build, then compounds | Low | Products people are genuinely happy to recommend |
When paid acquisition is not the answer
Paid traffic to a store with a weak conversion rate just loses money faster, and it is the single most common way “we need more customers” turns into a wasted budget. If your funnel is not converting the visitors you already get, more visitors makes the problem more expensive, not more solved. Check whether your conversion rate is actually healthy for your category before increasing spend on any channel above.
Paid is also the wrong first move if you do not yet know your real margin after ad spend, returns and fulfillment cost. Spending to acquire a customer whose true contribution margin you have not calculated is a bet, not a strategy.
If you are not sure whether the constraint is traffic, conversion, or margin, that diagnosis is exactly what an ecommerce audit is built to answer before you spend a quarter’s acquisition budget on the wrong lever.
A 90-day acquisition plan
| Days | Focus | Do this |
|---|---|---|
| 1-30 | Foundations | Calculate real CAC and LTV. Fix any conversion problems that would waste new traffic. Clean the Google Shopping feed. |
| 31-60 | Test two channels | Pick two channels that fit your margin and price point from the table above. Run small, measured tests, not a full budget commitment. |
| 61-90 | Scale what worked | Increase spend or effort on whichever channel showed a real, sustainable CAC. Cut or pause the one that did not, and start SEO content regardless, since it is the only channel here that compounds for free. |
Most stores do not have an acquisition channel problem, they have an acquisition sequencing problem: too many channels run at once, none funded or measured well enough to know if it is actually working. Pick two that fit your economics, run them properly, and let the data decide the third rather than guessing at all of them simultaneously. For the full channel-by-channel playbook, the complete ecommerce marketing guide goes deeper into each one.