How to get your first 100 orders for a new online store

A new store gets no traffic by default. Publishing it changes nothing on its own, because nobody is waiting for it. The first hundred orders come from work done in a particular order, and doing that work in the wrong order is how a lot of new stores stall.

The first hundred matter for more than the money. They are where you learn which products sell, whether your packaging survives the courier, how many COD parcels come back, and whether strangers — not just friends — will pay. By order one hundred you should know what to do more of.

Here is the sequence: fix the store first, then sell to the people who already know you, then WhatsApp, content, a launch offer that moves people to prepay, reviews and sign-ups, search — and ads last. There are no benchmarks in this guide. Anyone promising you a conversion rate hasn't seen your product.

Before you tell anyone

Every stage below sends people to your store. If the store leaks, each stage wastes the attention it earned — and you only get to launch once.

• Photos and descriptions that answer questions. Five photos per product and real measurements — see product photos without a photographer and product descriptions that sell.
• COD plus at least one prepaid option — EasyPaisa, cards or bank transfer. Some buyers will only pay one way.
• Delivery charges and a realistic delivery time, stated on the product page rather than discovered at checkout.
• A return policy a buyer can find before ordering — how to write one.
• A way to ask a question. A WhatsApp chat button on the storefront catches buyers who want to check before they pay.
• One real test order, placed and paid by you or a friend and taken all the way to delivery. The launch checklist covers the rest.

Stage 1: the people who already know you

Your first orders will almost certainly come from people who already know you: friends, family, colleagues, existing followers, anyone who has bought from you in the DMs. That isn't cheating. It is how nearly every store starts.

Message them one at a time rather than forwarding the link to every group you're in. A personal message — I've started this, here's what it is, here's the link — gets read; a forward gets scrolled past. Ask for two things: an order if it's genuinely for them, and a share if it's for someone they know. The share is what reaches strangers.

Keep the price real. A deep friends-and-family discount teaches you nothing about whether the product sells at a price you can live on.

Be clear about what these orders prove. They test your operations — packing, delivery, COD collection, your messages — with the most forgiving customers you will ever have. They don't prove that strangers will buy. Ask these buyers for blunt feedback on everything from the photos to the parcel, and fix what they tell you.

Stage 2: WhatsApp, to people who said yes

Your WhatsApp contacts are the warmest list you have, and the easiest one to burn.

Build a list of people who have asked to hear from you. "Shall I message you when the new stock arrives?" is enough. Ask past buyers, anyone who asked about something that was out of stock, and followers who have messaged you. In the WhatsApp Business app, broadcasts have traditionally reached only people who saved your number, so ask them to save it — and check how broadcasts work in the app today, because it changes.

When you send, make it worth opening:

• One product or one offer per message, with a photo, the price and the link.
• A reason to act that is actually true — new stock, or a launch price that ends on a stated date.
• Rarely. A message when something is new beats a daily "check out our collection".

Post on WhatsApp Status too. It reaches your contacts without you messaging anyone, which makes it the least intrusive channel you have. Never message people who didn't ask, and never buy a list: numbers that get blocked and reported risk being restricted, and it is the same number your real customers use. More on running WhatsApp as a sales channel is in WhatsApp for online sellers.

Stage 3: content that shows the product working

Instagram and TikTok are where discovery happens for most consumer products in Pakistan, and they cost nothing but your time.

• Show the product being used, not just sitting on white: worn, carried, switched on, applied.
• Film your first orders going out. A packing video shows a real business sending real parcels, which is exactly what a stranger doubts. Blur the labels.
• Turn every repeated question into a post. If three people asked whether it runs small, the answer is your next video.
• End every post with how to buy: the product's name and "link in bio", not "DM for price".
• Post steadily. A regular run of honest posts builds a page that looks like a shop; one viral video followed by silence doesn't.

Don't buy followers, and be wary of giveaways that ask people to follow and tag three friends. Both grow a number that doesn't buy, and a big page nobody engages with looks less trustworthy than a small one people actually talk to. The full Instagram playbook is in how to sell on Instagram.

Stage 4: a launch offer that moves people to prepay

A launch offer has two jobs: give people a reason to order now, and move them off COD. A prepaid order can't be refused at the door, and in the first hundred, a few returned parcels can cancel out the margin on a lot of good ones.

Offers that work without hurting you:

• Free delivery on prepaid orders. Often cleaner than a percentage off, and instantly understood.
• A small discount for paying online, sized against what a returned COD parcel costs you.
• A launch code with real limits — a usage cap and an end date — so it can't run away with your margin. A minimum spend protects small baskets.
• A free-delivery threshold, which lifts the size of each order as well as the number of them.

On Storecrafto, discount codes can be a percentage, a fixed amount or free shipping, with a minimum spend and a usage limit, and automatic cart incentives handle spend tiers, free-delivery thresholds and bundles without a code — see discounts and promos.

Do the arithmetic before you choose a number. Say, with made-up round numbers, that a returned parcel costs you Rs 500 all in and one COD order in ten comes back. That is Rs 50 of expected return cost on every COD order. An incentive smaller than that, on an order that would otherwise have been COD, pays for itself before you count the cash arriving sooner. Use your own courier's rates and your own return rate.

Never fake urgency. A countdown that quietly resets, or "only 2 left" when there are twenty, is the kind of thing buyers screenshot and share.

Stage 5: reviews after delivery, sign-ups from every visit

A few habits turn one-off orders into something you can build on.

Ask for a review after delivery — a day or two after the parcel arrives, when the product is in use and the buyer is happiest. Make it one tap: a short message and a direct link. On Storecrafto only verified buyers can leave a review and you decide what gets published, so every review a stranger reads comes from someone who bought. The full method is in how to collect customer reviews.

Collect an email from visitors who aren't ready yet. Plenty of people look and leave. A welcome popup collects sign-up emails; pair it with a small first-order code and you have a way to bring them back when new stock lands — see where sign-up emails go.

Let stalled carts remind themselves. Abandoned-cart recovery sends automatic reminder emails with a link that resumes the cart, for the buyer who got distracted rather than changed their mind. Why carts stall in the first place is in abandoned carts: why buyers leave.

A thank-you card in the parcel with a code for the next order is about as cheap as repeat business gets — see packaging for online orders.

Later: search, then ads

Search compounds. It is slow, it starts from zero, and it doesn't stop once it works. If people look for your product by name, clear titles, real descriptions and a store Google can read keep bringing buyers long after a post has scrolled away. Start early, even though it pays late: verify your store in Google Search Console, submit your sitemap, and work through your SEO score. The small-store version is in e-commerce SEO for a small store.

Ads come last, and only once organic sales work. An ad multiplies whatever your store already does. If the people who know you and the people who found you on Instagram are buying, ads can find more people like them. If they aren't, ads just lose money faster.

Signs you're ready:

• Strangers, not just friends, are ordering without being asked.
• You know which product sells and which post sold it.
• You know your return rate and can live with it.
• You know the most you can pay to get one order and still make money.

Start small: one product, the post that already worked organically as the ad, and orders rather than likes as the measure. The setup is in Facebook and Instagram ads for a small store.

Keep count from order one

Write down where every one of the first hundred orders came from: a friend, the broadcast, a post, your Status, search, an ad. Add whether it was prepaid or COD, whether it was delivered or came back, and whether the buyer left a review.

By order one hundred, that list tells you which channel to double, which product to push and which to drop. Put the orders you take in DMs or on the phone into the store too, so the count includes them — on Storecrafto those are manual orders. And analytics shows your traffic sources and the conversion funnel, so you can see where visitors come from and where they drop off.

The short version

• Fix the store before you tell anyone; every stage sends people to it.
• Your first orders come from people who know you — they test your operations, not your market.
• Message on WhatsApp only the people who asked, and rarely.
• Post the product in use, film orders going out, and end every post with how to buy.
• Make the launch offer reward prepaying, with real limits and a real deadline.
• Ask for a review after delivery, and collect emails from visitors who don't buy yet.
• Start on search early; it pays late and keeps paying.
• Run ads only once strangers are buying without them.
• Record where every order came from — that list is the real output of the first hundred.