How to get your first ten orders

The shop's been live for eleven days. Around two hundred people have opened it. Nobody has bought anything, and you're starting to wonder whether the problem is the price, the photos, or you.

It's usually none of those. It's that you're waiting.

Your first ten orders almost never arrive on their own. They come from people who already know you, asked one at a time, by name, in a message you typed yourself. Traffic comes later, and it comes because of those ten, not before them. So the honest answer to "how do I get my first online order" is that you go and ask for it, roughly forty times, over about two weeks, and about ten of those asks turn into money.

That's the whole method. The rest of this is how to do it without feeling like a nuisance, and without burning the goodwill you'll need in month three.

Your first ten orders are a list, not a funnel

A funnel needs volume to work. Ten orders at a 2% conversion rate needs five hundred visitors, and you don't have five hundred visitors, you have a WhatsApp contact list and a following of 340 people who mostly know you from school.

A list works differently. You don't need a rate. You need names, and a reason to message each one. Rates only start meaning anything once the denominator is big enough to be stable, which is a while away yet, and what conversion rate you should expect explains why the numbers you'll read on this are mostly worthless at your size.

The mistake almost everybody makes is treating the first ten like the hundredth ten. You post once, you tag the shop link, and then you refresh. Posting is broadcast. Broadcast works when there are enough people listening that a small fraction is still a number. At your size, a small fraction of not many is zero.

So stop posting and start writing to people.

Write the list of forty

Open a notes app. Write forty names. Not forty ideal customers, forty actual humans whose names you know and who could plausibly want the thing.

Sources for the forty, in the order they're worth:

1. People who have already said "let me know when you start" or something like it. These are your first three orders and you probably have four or five of them.
2. People you've bought from, hired, or done a favour for in the last year.
3. Family who can afford it. Not all family. The ones who can afford it.
4. Group chats you're actually a member of, counted as individuals, not as a group.
5. Colleagues and former colleagues.
6. People who commented on the post where you announced you were starting.

Forty is the number because it's achievable in one sitting and because ten out of forty is a believable hit rate for a warm list. If you can only get to twenty-two, use twenty-two. If you get to seventy, don't message all seventy in one day.

Now here's the part that decides whether this works. Next to each name, write the reason that person would want it. Not the product's benefit. The reason for them. "Sade's sister just had a baby." "Tom always complains his hands crack in winter." If you can't write a reason, that name doesn't get a message, and that's fine, cross it off.

What the first message actually says

It says one specific thing, addressed to one specific person, and it ends with a question they can answer in three words.

What it does not do: open with "Hey! Hope you're well :)" and then paste a paragraph you clearly pasted forty times. People can tell. They can always tell.

A version that works:

Hey Tom, I started making the hand balm properly, the unscented one you kept nicking. £9 a tin, I've got about thirty made. Want one?

Three facts, one price, one question. Under forty words. It names the thing, it names the price, and it puts the buyer one word away from an order.

A version that doesn't work:

Hi! Excited to share that I've launched my small business! I'm passionate about natural skincare and I'd love your support. Check out the link in my bio!

Nobody knows what to do with that. It asks for support rather than a purchase, it hides the price, and it makes the reader do the work of finding out what's for sale. Support is not a transaction. Support is what people say instead of buying.

One more thing the first message shouldn't do: offer a discount. The temptation at zero orders is to knock 20% off to get things moving, and it works, and then you've taught forty people what your product is worth and it isn't the number on the label. If you're going to discount at all, do the arithmetic first, because running a discount without losing money is a margin problem before it's a marketing one.

Get one product ready, not twenty

The instinct before launch is to build the whole catalogue. Twenty products, all photographed, all priced, all described. It feels like preparation. It's mostly avoidance, and it's the single most reliable way to spend six weeks not selling anything.

Your first ten orders will be the same one or two products. Almost always. You cannot predict which, but you can predict that it'll be a small number, because a warm list buys the obvious thing.

So: one product, photographed properly, priced properly, with the delivery cost written down. Then start messaging. Add the rest while orders are already coming in.

There's a practical argument for this too. Photographing twenty things badly takes an afternoon and produces twenty listings you'll redo. Photographing one thing properly takes forty minutes, near a window, on one plain surface, and produces a listing that works.

Orders one to three: the people who owe you

The first three are the easiest and the least informative. Your cousin, the friend who's been waiting, the colleague who'd feel bad saying no. They will buy. They will also tell you it's great regardless of whether it's great, so do not read anything into their feedback.

What they're for is proof and practice. You need to run the whole thing once, end to end, with real money: take the order, take the payment, pack it, hand it over, follow up. Doing that three times will surface every broken step in your process, and there will be about four of them.

Common ones, all of which you will hit:

• You didn't write down which variant they wanted, and now you're not sure.
• You quoted a price that didn't include delivery, and now you're eating the delivery.
• The payment came in under by a small amount and you don't know if it's a fee or a mistake.
• You forgot to ask for the address until the day you were meant to send it.

Fix all four before order four. The whole point of the easy sales is that they're cheap places to make mistakes.

Orders four to seven: the people who watched it happen

This is where it gets harder and where most people stop.

Orders four to seven come from your second ring: people who saw the first three happen, or who know one of the first three. They're warm but not obligated. They need a reason beyond loyalty.

The reason is usually evidence. Not a testimonial page, just visible proof that this is a real thing other people have paid for. A photo of three parcels packed and labelled. A screenshot of a message saying the balm arrived. Your cousin holding the tin, posted by your cousin, not by you.

Ask for that photo explicitly. It doesn't happen otherwise. When you hand over order two, say "if you get a second, send me a photo of it at yours, I'm trying to build up some pictures". Roughly half will.

Ask for a sentence at the same time. Not a review form, a sentence, in their words, that you have permission to screenshot. Three of those under your first product listing will do more for order eight than another week of posting, and how to collect reviews that convince is about getting the specific ones rather than the polite ones.

Then message ring two, individually, same as before. Not a broadcast post. The broadcast post is for ring three.

Orders eight to ten: the first strangers

The last three are the ones that tell you whether you have a business.

A stranger has no reason to be kind to you. They're deciding on the photos, the price, the fact that someone they half-know vouched for it, and how much friction there is between wanting it and paying for it. If they buy, something real is working.

Strangers arrive through three routes at this stage, and none of them is advertising. Paying for traffic before you know that a stranger converts is buying visitors to a page that doesn't sell, and when to spend money on ads is mostly an argument for not doing it yet. The three routes:

• A referral. Someone from ring one or two sent them. This is the highest-converting traffic you will ever get and it is free, and asking customers for referrals is a specific ask with specific wording, not a vibe.
• A comment or a share. A post got out of your immediate circle, usually because somebody tagged someone.
• A local search or a group. A neighbourhood group, a WhatsApp community, a Facebook group for the specific thing you sell.

Your job at this point is to make the path from "I want that" to "I paid" as short as it can physically be. Price visible. Delivery cost visible. One tap to order. Every extra step between the post and the payment loses people you already worked for, which is the whole argument in why your link in bio is costing you sales.

Where Chidera's first ten actually came from

Chidera makes shea butter body cream in Lagos. A 250g tub is ₦4,500, delivery inside Lagos is ₦2,000 by dispatch rider, and she started with one product in two sizes.

Her first ten, in order, over nineteen days:

#	Who	Value	What triggered it
1	Cousin	₦4,500	Direct ask, day one
2	Ex-colleague	₦9,000 (2 tubs)	Direct ask, day one
3	Friend from church	₦4,500	Direct ask, day two
4	Church friend's sister	₦4,500	Saw the tub, asked for the link
5	Neighbour	₦6,500 (tub + travel size)	Saw the parcels in the corridor
6	Ex-colleague's wife	₦9,000	Referral, order 2
7	Instagram follower	₦4,500	Comment on a packing video
8	Stranger, WhatsApp group	₦4,500	Neighbour shared the link in an estate group
9	Repeat: cousin	₦9,000	Ran out, bought two
10	Stranger, referral	₦4,500	Order 6 sent her

Total: ₦60,500 in nineteen days, from one product.

Two things in that ledger matter more than the total. Six of the ten trace back to the first three orders, through referral, through being seen, or through a share. And order nine is a repeat, from the very first customer, on day sixteen. That's the number that tells her the product is fine. Somebody who could get it free from a relative bought it again with money.

The unglamorous detail: three of those ten paid by bank transfer and one of them paid ₦4,300 instead of ₦4,500, because their bank took ₦200 in charges at their end. Chidera did not chase it. She wrote it off, and then she added "₦4,500, transfer charges are yours" to the payment note, and it never happened again.

The question that kills the sale is "how much?"

You'll get a lot of "how much?" messages that go nowhere. Not because the price is wrong, but because of what happens next.

The seller replies "₦4,500 for the 250g". The buyer reads it, thinks about it, gets distracted, and never comes back. There was nothing to do in that message. It ended in a full stop.

Answer the price and give them the next step in the same message:

₦4,500 for the 250g, ₦2,000 delivery inside Lagos. I've got four left from this batch, want me to hold one?

That's still honest if it's true, and it converts far better, because the buyer now has a decision to make rather than a fact to file. Never invent scarcity you don't have. Buyers remember, and there are only so many times you can have four left.

Don't build a checkout you don't need yet

Ten orders do not need card payments. They need a way for someone to pay you and a way for you to know they did.

For the first ten, the rails that already work are bank transfer, cash on delivery, and whatever your buyers already use to send money to each other. In Lagos that's a transfer. In Manila it's often cash on delivery, and in Nairobi it's an M-Pesa till. None of that needs a gateway, an application, or a monthly fee.

Card payments become worth it when you're selling to people who don't know you and won't send a transfer to a stranger's account. That's usually somewhere north of order thirty, not order five. How to take payment as a small seller covers the rails that need nothing but a note on the page.

Here's where Sailo's own limits are worth saying out loud rather than burying. The free plan caps you at 10 products, which is plenty for a first catalogue and not plenty for a real one. Card payments carry 1–3% of the goods on each card order — 3% on the free plan, 1% on Business — and at ten orders a month the rate is small either way. And there is no mobile money rail. If your buyers pay you by M-Pesa or GCash, Sailo will carry the catalogue and the order and the address, and you will still be the one checking your phone for the payment confirmation. That's a genuine gap, not a positioning statement.

What to do if you get to forty asks and nothing happens

It happens, and it's worth naming rather than pretending it doesn't.

If you've messaged forty warm people individually with a clear price and a clear ask, and fewer than three bought, the problem isn't the asking. It's one of three things: the price is wrong for that audience, the product isn't solving anything, or the people on your list were never buyers of this category.

None of those is fixed by messaging harder. What to do when nobody is buying is the diagnostic, in order, from cheapest thing to check to most expensive.

When the first ten are done

Ten orders is not a business. It's a signal, and the signal is only useful if you read the right part of it.

The part to read is order nine in Chidera's ledger. The repeat. One person out of ten coming back inside three weeks is worth more than fifty new followers, because acquiring the second sale from an existing buyer costs you a message, and acquiring the first from a stranger costs you everything you just did.

So the next thing you do, today, isn't to plan a campaign. Open your notes app and write the forty names. Then send the first five messages before you close it, because the list you write and don't send is the most common way this stalls.

After that, the job changes shape: it stops being about finding new people and starts being about making the ones you have come back. How to get repeat buyers is where that starts.