How To Increase Revenue for Your Ecommerce Brand

As a business owner, you know how important it is to boost your bottom line. Revenue growth is the ultimate proof that you can attract new customers and stay competitive. But learning how to increase revenue is rarely about finding a single silver bullet. 

For Ricardo Larroudé, cofounder of shoe brand Larroudé, revenue growth is the result of relentless customer focus. “People look over their shoulders for the competition, but you’ve got to keep your eye on the ball—and the ball is the customer,” he says. By prioritizing direct-to-consumer (DTC) relationships and vertically integrated data, Ricardo has turned organic engagement into a consistent revenue engine. In this article, you’ll learn 11 ways to increase your revenue and how to decide which tactics are right for your business. 

What does it mean to increase revenue?

Within the context of business operations, revenue is the total amount of income a business takes in from sales, investments, partnerships, leases, and other business arrangements. It encompasses sales, which refers to the volume of products or services you sell to consumers, but sales volume is just one lever to consider when you’re striving to increase revenue.

Driving sales from new customers is also only part of the revenue puzzle. Often, the most sustainable way to increase the top line isn’t finding new customers, but increasing the customer lifetime value (LTV) of existing ones. This provides a predictable revenue lift.

How to increase revenue for your business

• Create a framework
• Optimize pricing strategies
• Leverage influencer gifting and partnerships
• Weigh the pros and cons of third-party marketplaces
• Expand into new markets
• Encourage customer retention
• Leverage data
• Increase your site speed
• Develop new products and services
• Ramp up digital ads
• Increase average order value (AOV)

Regardless of the size of your business, there are many ways to drive revenue growth. Here are strategies that successful ecommerce brands have leveraged, from optimizing product pricing to developing new bundles: 

Create a framework

To achieve revenue growth, Ricardo of Larroudé suggests a “10 commandments” approach over a rigid business plan. 

Rather than following a strict map, Ricardo relies on a framework of risk assessment and unit economics. For example, he rejects traditional, fixed marketing budgets in favor of real-time monitoring. Rather than asking if a team is on track to meet a monthly budget number, he asks: “What are you versus last year, and is your ramp of growth consistent?”

Your principles will depend on your industry, but Ricardo’s framework replaces vague goals with actionable guardrails. For Ricardo, these include:

• Verticalize radically. If doing it yourself adds more value to the customer than outsourcing, bring it in-house.

• Agile iteration. If a product does well over the weekend, have a new version ready to launch by Monday. 

• Direct over distribution. Prioritize DTC channels to own your customer data and protect your margins from third-party marketplaces.

Optimize pricing strategies

For your pricing strategy, you might try increasing prices to boost your average transaction value, decreasing prices to gain a competitive advantage, or offering promotional pricing to increase sales. 

Pricing is a lever for managing cash flow and demand, but it requires a strategic choice between volume and margin. While decreasing prices can boost sales volume and market share, increasing prices helps maximize your profit margins, ultimately leading to more cash flow. Tactics like promotional pricing can also help drive an immediate increase in sales. 

Study consumer spending habits in your category to understand how much wiggle room you have to work with in your pricing. Then, settle on the price that you believe could lead to the most increased revenue. Some trial and error may be necessary.

To drive up sales, consider these tactical pricing levers:

Pre-order discounts

Larroudé has seen up to 50% of their business come from pre-orders by offering a 30% discount. This not only increases revenue, but it also provides upfront capital to fuel production.

Vertical rushes

Instead of sitewide sales, run weekend rushes focused on a specific category, such as boots or flats. This creates urgency without making your entire catalog feel discounted.

Use scripts for segmented dynamic pricing

Consider implementing dynamic pricing through Shopify Scripts to reward specific behaviors. This segmented approach allows you to offer different prices to different customers automatically—for example, based on their membership length or past purchase trends. 

Tamburlaine Organic Wines used this tactic to increase its online sales by 88%. By using code to alter prices for specific segments, they created a personalized shopping experience that drove higher conversion without needing a site-wide sale.

Leverage influencer gifting and partnerships

Customer acquisition costs (CAC) on traditional paid social media platforms can be volatile. One potentially lucrative strategy: influencer gifting. Larroudé has driven growth through organic seeding to tastemakers. “It’s cheaper to gift products than to think about a customer acquisition cost where you pay paid media a lot of money,” he says.

Paid influencer partnerships can also lead to success. Noel Mack, chief brand officer for Gymshark, an athletic apparel company, advises taking note of which online platforms your audience uses if you want to widen your customer base. Gymshark partnered with several fitness influencers after Noel noticed they were promoting their daily gym outfits on TikTok. This move expanded the brand’s reach to potential new customers, helping to increase its following to 5.7 million users on the platform. 

Weigh the pros and cons of third-party marketplaces

Third-party marketplaces can be a double-edged sword for revenue. For some brands, they provide essential volume and discovery. For example, the founders of Distil Union used Amazon to launch their leather accessories brand, generating more than $2 million in sales. 

For Distil Union, Amazon acted as a “discovery engine,” putting their products in front of millions of ready-to-buy customers they couldn’t have reached on their own. By treating the marketplace as a parallel channel rather than their only storefront, they were able to manufacture at scale and build the initial capital needed to grow their independent Shopify site.

However, Ricardo warns that these intermediaries can actually become bottom line killers due to high rates of returned items and lost data. “Our organic return rate is typically less than 30%, but on some marketplaces, it was hitting about 70%,” he notes. “Anyone that sticks in the middle, saying that they add value, they should prove it. I’ve not seen value add by having intermediaries between myself and my client.”

If marketplaces do make sense for your category, the key is to view them as a supplement to your DTC channel. Brands like Distil Union use marketplaces for initial volume but prioritize their own site to own the customer relationship, data, and margins.

Expand into new markets

Once you’ve saturated your local audience, revenue growth often lies in geographic expansion into new markets—potentially international ones. This requires website localization. By translating your site, offering local currency through Shopify Markets, and tailoring your marketing to cultural nuances, you can unlock entirely new customer segments. 

Whether it’s expanding into Europe or using website localization to build trust, geographic expansion can allow you to replicate your successful model in a new territory.

Encourage customer retention

The most sustainable way to increase revenue is to increase LTV, or the total amount a customer spends with your brand over time. To drive this repeat business, focus on building trust. 

As Ricardo explains, once a customer finds a product they trust, the goal is to provide them with different variations of that experience. “Once people believe in the silhouette, it tends to be easier to sell the same silhouette in different colors,” he says.

A robust customer relationship management (CRM) system is essential for retention marketing. Using customer data, you can develop automated marketing campaigns that are tailored to specific customer behaviors, such as:

• Post-purchase. Use automated email or SMS flows to promote “follow-on” products (like different colors of a trusted shoe) within 30 days of the first purchase.

• Lapsed engagement. Use purchase history to send targeted loyalty rewards or “we miss you” discounts to high-value customers who haven’t shopped in a while.

Leverage data

Data analytics is most effective when it moves from surface-level reporting to predictive action. Many brands lose revenue because they cannot keep up with market demand for a bestseller. For example, Ricardo notes that he was out of stock on his popular sneakers for half of last year.

To solve this, he uses a vectorized data architecture—a system that uses AI to organize complex information (like customer feedback, add-to-cart trends, and material availability) so it can be searched and connected instantly. This allows for:

• Real-time demand planning. By connecting this data layer directly to production, the brand can respond to a sales surge in days rather than months. 

• AI as a revenue brainstormer. Ricardo uses AI as a thought partner to brainstorm new designs or scale content creation. By instantly imagining new styles based on high-performing traits of existing winners, the brand can find their next breakout hit faster.

• Inventory optimization. Better data means fewer slow-moving SKUs. This frees up capital to double down on products that drive the majority of the revenue.

Increase your site speed

Ricardo’s top tip for store owners who have reached a plateau is to improve their site speed. “We think the biggest correlation to conversion is site speed,” Ricardo says. He warns that “app bloat” often creates crossed wires that slow down the digital experience. 

To break through, he is planning to embrace headless commerce—an architecture that separates the front-end “head” of the store from the back-end commerce engine to ensure pages load instantly. The switch will also allow customers to toggle between shoe colors without triggering a full page reload. “It’s better to be simple and fast than to be highly customized and complicated,” he says.

Shoe brand Rollie Nation had a similar breakthrough. After examining its page load time, it observed that it wasn’t keeping up with the speeds of competitors’ websites, causing many customers to bounce and losing out on potential earnings. To counter this, the brand switched its online store to Shopify Plus, which led to an increased conversion rate of 3.5% and higher revenue. 

Develop new products and services

Developing additional products can be an effective way to create new revenue streams. Start by using available data to evaluate emerging trends or unmet customer needs. Ideally, you want your product to fill a gap your competitors haven’t yet. 

Ricardo has found that the 80/20 rule applies to Larroudé’s product portfolio, with 80% of sales coming from 20% of their products. To maximize revenue within this framework, you need two distinct speeds of development:

• The defensive play. Double down on your winning silhouettes. Once a customer trusts a specific fit, the easiest revenue win is offering that same trusted product in new colors or materials.

• The offensive play. You must constantly try “left-field” items to find your next breakout hit. “We see a winning thing over the weekend; we launch a new color of it by Monday,” Ricardo says. 

The secret to this strategy is vertical integration. By owning the production process, Ricardo can react quickly. This agility allows brands to capture viral revenue surges that competitors, stuck in long manufacturing cycles, simply miss. 

Ramp up digital ads

To protect your brand’s value, consider shifting your budget from price cuts to customer acquisition. Ricardo argues that true revenue growth is accretive—it should add value to the brand rather than training customers to wait for a sale.

“We’d rather spend on advertising than on discounts,” Ricardo says. “But that requires you to have the cash before you get the revenue in.” To make this work, brands need a technical infrastructure that maximizes conversion. By spending on high-quality content and paid media to drive traffic to a fast, optimized site, you can capture revenue at full margin rather than eroding your bottom line with constant promos.

Increase average order value (AOV) 

To grow revenue without increasing your traffic, you must maximize the value of every checkout. Increasing your average order value (AOV) involves using “nudges” that encourage customers to add more items to their cart before they hit the buy button.

Depending on your product type, you can use several tactics to drive this growth:

• Tiered incentives. As Ricardo explains, items like shoes require thoughtful purchase decisions, and they take up closet space. Customers may be hesitant to buy multiples, so he suggests using incentives such as free shipping or returns to nudge them toward that higher spend.

• Strategic bundling. For consumable or lower-priced items, bundling similar products at a slight discount encourages customers to buy more. This increases sales volume while providing the customer with a perceived deal.

• Free gift with purchase. Offering a freebie can be a large revenue driver. For example, Tropeaka, an all-natural nutrition brand, launched a promotion to include a free gift from its product line with every order. This increased the company’s average order value by AU$5 across 15,000 sales per month, leading to an unprecedented boost in sales revenue.

• Cross-selling lower-value items. If your core product is high-ticket, introduce lower-value add-ons, like socks for a shoe brand or filters for a coffee machine, at the checkout stage to increase the final tally without requiring a second big purchase decision.