How to Get More Ecommerce Customers

1. Get in front of the right people with targeted ads

The fastest way to reach new customers is usually paid advertising, but the key word is targeted. Rather than blasting your products at everyone, focus your budget on the people most likely to want them — based on their interests, their behaviour, or their searches. Platforms let you show ads to audiences who resemble your existing customers or who are actively looking for what you sell, which makes every advertising pound work harder.

Start small and let the data guide you. Test a few audiences and ad variations with a modest budget, see which combinations bring customers at a reasonable cost, then put more behind what works. Track the cost of acquiring a customer closely, because a campaign that looks busy but acquires customers too expensively is quietly losing money. Done with discipline — targeting well, testing, and doubling down on winners — paid ads are a reliable way to introduce your store to new shoppers who did not know you existed.

2. Earn free traffic with SEO and content

Paid ads bring customers as long as you pay; search visibility brings them for free, over and over, once you earn it. Optimising your store and creating helpful content around what your customers search for is one of the best long-term investments in getting more customers. When someone looks for a product like yours, or for advice related to it, you want your store to be what they find.

This means writing clear, keyword-relevant product descriptions, and publishing content — guides, answers, and useful articles — that attracts people researching before they buy. Someone who finds your helpful guide and trusts your expertise is well on their way to becoming a customer. Search traffic compounds: the content you create keeps working for months and years, bringing a steady flow of new shoppers at no ongoing cost. It takes patience to build, but a store that ranks for the terms its customers search enjoys a durable advantage that paid competitors have to keep buying.

3. Borrow trust with influencers and partnerships

People are more influenced by those they follow and trust than by brands they do not know. Partnering with influencers or complementary businesses lets you borrow that trust and reach an engaged audience quickly. When someone your target customers already follow features your product genuinely, their recommendation carries weight a cold ad never could — it arrives as advice from a trusted source rather than a pitch from a stranger.

Look for partners whose audience matches your ideal customer, and prioritise genuine fit over sheer follower count; a smaller, highly relevant audience often converts far better than a huge, mismatched one. Send your product, build a real relationship, and let them share an honest experience. Similarly, partnering with non-competing businesses that serve the same customers — a cross-promotion, a bundle, a shared campaign — can introduce you to exactly the right people. Both approaches get your store in front of new audiences with a built-in layer of trust that makes them far more likely to buy.

4. Convert visitors with social proof

Getting people to your store is only half the job; you also have to convince them to buy, and new visitors are cautious because they do not yet know you. This is where social proof does its work. When a first-time shopper sees genuine reviews, strong ratings, and signs that others are buying, the risk of trying an unfamiliar store drops and they are far more likely to convert. Traffic you worked hard to earn is wasted if nothing on the page reassures the visitor enough to purchase.

So make trust visible on the pages new customers land on. Display real reviews and ratings prominently, and show genuine recent activity so shoppers see the store is alive and others are buying. A tool like Proofly makes this easy, adding real reviews, recent-purchase notifications, and a live visitor counter to your store, all drawn from your actual activity — so the new visitors your marketing brings in are more likely to become customers. You can start with a free Proofly account to turn more of your hard-won traffic into buyers.

5. Turn customers into a source of more customers

The most sustainable way to get more ecommerce customers is to make your existing ones bring you new ones. A happy customer is a potential referrer, reviewer, and repeat buyer all at once. Encourage referrals by making it easy and rewarding for customers to introduce friends. Invite satisfied buyers to leave reviews, which then reassure the next wave of shoppers. Keep in touch by email so customers come back and spread the word.

This turns customer acquisition from a treadmill into a flywheel. Instead of paying to attract every single customer from scratch, you let the goodwill of the ones you have earned generate more — referrals bring new buyers, reviews convert them, and those buyers refer in turn. Over time this becomes one of your cheapest and highest-quality sources of customers, because people who arrive through a friend’s recommendation already trust you. Delighting your existing customers, and giving them easy ways to share that delight, is a growth strategy that compounds.

It also protects you when other channels get harder or more expensive. Ad costs rise and algorithms change, but a base of loyal customers who refer and return is yours to keep. That is why the smartest stores treat retention and referrals not as an afterthought to acquisition but as a core part of it — every happy customer is both a sale today and a source of sales tomorrow.

The takeaway

Getting more ecommerce customers takes a mix of reaching new people and convincing them to buy. Use targeted ads to introduce your store, earn free search traffic with SEO and helpful content, and borrow trust through influencers and partnerships to get in front of the right audiences. Then convert those visitors with genuine social proof, and turn your happy customers into a flywheel of referrals and reviews that brings even more. Combine acquisition with conversion and retention, and you build not just a spike of customers but a steady, compounding stream of them.