Who here has knows Ecommerce marketing?

You'd almost certainly get better advice in the ecommerce forum, paid ads forum or both. This is for offline marketing.

Good luck!

This type of site is what I basically specialize in. Commerce for me just makes more sense than lead gen. a good part of the strategy I use is content based. I break down the cycle of purchase. Lookers, comparison, and buyers. If you look at 1 single product, you see that you would need 3 pieces of content to touch each of those bases.

you want lookers to look, and maybe pull a free report or the like that sets you as an authority and also keeps you in their mind. ( I will hit this in a minute, but I release this type of content with as little friction as possible.. as in no opt-in generally ) Comparison content in the way I use it sets value. The use of USP and Value Proposition start to come in to play here. there is a push at the sale at this point, but again you are looking for the stickiness. The last being the sales aspect, and here it is all about the USP right down to cost and shipping.

If you start really looking at commerce visitors you will see that in most cases the majority of "Buyers" are repeat visitors. I think of this as the it takes 7 impressions of your business before people buy kind of thing. by attracting people at the different stages of purchase, you are introducing, and repeating your site, to those folks.

So bringing in some growth hacking type principles you want to focus on Acquisition, Retention, and Referral. the above section is basically my acquisition process. Retention after that point has to do with after sale communication etc. but more importantly I think it is looking at the site as a whole, and how does it assist those that are buying, and then moving forward how does it assist those that have bought.

the referral aspect plays a lot with how authoritative your site is. if you have a customer buy from you once.. they probably wont refer your site. you get them coming back with multiple purchases? that becomes a whole other ball game. So the key in overall design and Message is consistency, and being mindful to the end users potential buying cycle. So going back to the Acquisition phase, you want to entice the first time buyer as much as you want to entice the more advanced buyer.

The next phase if you will, is getting into the Conversion Rate Optimization ( CRO ) aspects of the business. basically using the visitors that are already there, and converting more of them.

So some questions... In their social attempts were they selling a specific product, or selling the idea? ( hey we sell solar stuff ) Broad selling, landing them on the shop page or home page simply does not work.

Looking at the SEO efforts... How do they fit into the buy cycle above? is the content general in nature, or is there a progression in educational based material and implementation of product use?

Opt-ins are great... ( I will catch heat here I am sure) but in commerce, I am overly not a fan. don't get me wrong here, YES I do build lists. but NO I do not use the list as a primary selling source.

Looking at how I break the sales process down giving away a free report or what ever you are targeting the "Looking" category of your sales cycle. In the case of commerce.. you are basically targeting the group of people the furthest away from purchase. Can you get sales this way.. sure you can. But breaking it down this way are you using 80/20 to your advantage?

I would say in this market PDF's can only be your friend. Spend the time and produce high quality looking pieces ( Any PDF from unbounce.com would be a good example ) you want to add the social and site sharing ability in the piece as well - I use the footer section general every other page to do this with a very specific message " please share this material "

I would be more than happy to look at the site for you and give some more specific suggestions just let me know.