Starting a Shopify store isn’t a cakewalk. Surely, it is something of an experience, to begin with, your entrepreneurial journey.
It can be really daunting if you are not very efficient with the platform for the optimum online store creation.
Shopify does quite a heavy lifting for you already but there are a lot of things that might seem complicated.
List of Best Shopify Tips
So, for small businesses, online store owners, and entrepreneurs to excel, here are the 50 best Shopify store tips you need to learn.
Use Shopify Themes To Build An Attractive Shopify Store
The online store needs to be highly attractive, eye-catching, and visually-appealing to your potential customers.
Bringing the visual on the relevancy is also something that makes your store more relative to the target customers.
It means to use visual elements, graphics, font, a layout that aligns with the niche or the kind of product you have selected.
Image Source:Xperteria
Shopify offers you over 100 awesome themes which you can customize to elevate your Shopify store.
Even if you have no experience in designing websites, using these themes, it will be very obvious for you to get done with a stunning website at the end.
You won’t have to struggle a lot to give that “professional” and “credible” look or vibe to your online store with these themes.
Just take your time and go through all themes and see what fits your store and customize accordingly.
Make Sure Your Check For Theme Reviews Before Selecting
One of the best ways to improve in the right direction for a business, especially when you are in the digital space, is to check the reviews.
Since you know there are more than 100 beautiful Shopify themes to choose from, not all of them are going to be suitable or efficient enough to customize.
The reviews are definitely going to be from other entrepreneurs like you who are using or have used the theme.
Image Source:Digital
They give their feedback in detail on
- Whether to go for it or not.
- For which industry it will be more suitable?
- Whether the theme is easy to customize
- Are there any glitches?
These can be helpful insights in selecting an ideal theme for your online store.
Selecting the wrong one can definitely affect your sales, customer retention, lead generation, and every other aspect as well.
If not, you will waste a lot of time and energy on trying and testing on every other theme getting exhausted in the process as well.
Customize Your Theme As Least As Possible
You are surely going to get an extensive level of customization capabilities in the Shopify theme you choose.
Shopify allows you to customize your theme as much as possible. And that’s really a benefit to enjoy for any Shopify store owner.
But, having the feature, doesn’t mean that you should do it.
If you are starting out your Shopify store recently, one of the best tips to follow is to customize your theme only when or where required.
Shopify themes are created by professional designers which look extremely professional and suitable for a certain kind of product.
Too much customization is only going to ruin the design and its appearance. It becomes important about which things to change actually and how.
Like you change the images that suit your brand but taking care of how it aligns with the overall color scheme of the theme.
It is better to rely on the theme designer’s skills than yours unless you are confident about your designing skills.
The best conversion for sales has been seen in the stores where designs are moderately modified to respect the original design and layout as compared to others.
Also, the fonts used in the theme also need to be the same as they go best with the rest of the design elements in your theme.
Have a Competitive Advantage Through An Effective Keywords Research
Search Engine Optimization (SE0) is an essential skill to learn, at least on a certain level for an entrepreneur or Shopify store owner.
It is what helps you reach your target audience and get your store more and more exposure for the potential sale.
Keyword research is an integral part of SEO that helps the buyer-intent relevant prospective customer reach you organically.
Shopify, fortunately, gives you many chances where you can leverage quality keywords to get more traffic.
You can basically add relevant keywords to your Shopify store. There are free tools such as Google Keyword Planner and paid tools such as SEMrush to get keywords.
You can also hire someone for doing keyword research on a project basis if you can invest some.
But for that, you definitely have to do keyword research
Where to find relevant keywords for your online store?
You can use Google’s Adwords Keyword Planner, which is a free and easy-to-use keyword research tool.
Image Source: AVADA Commerce
It is a free and a good start for finding some relevant keywords for your online store.
There are four ways you can add keywords to your e-commerce store in order to boost search engine optimization :
- Add keywords in the Page Titles of your e-commerce store
- You can use keywords as ALT tags in the web pages and product posts.
- You can incorporate a relevant set of keywords ( more than one) in Meta Descriptions of the store page links.
- Add multiple keywords in the Content of your website on different web/product pages.
Get Valuable Data For More Effective Targeting By Installing Facebook Pixel
Social media marketing is certainly going to be a highly effective tool to build your brand, boost your sale and increase your reach as well.
Apart from the organic growth, paid-advertisement is the game-changer for making your product visible to the targeted audience.
So for that two things are crucial –
- Find your target audience, and define it as much as possible
- Getting the best results from your ad campaigns
In both cases, Facebook Pixel can be of great help. You need to install a Facebook Pixel for your Shopify store.
What is Facebook Pixel?
Image Source: Neil Patel
Well, it is a piece of code that you can install on your store website. Facebook pixel records all the crucial data that helps you target your ads efficiently and more accurately.
The date you gain from it will :
- Allow you to investigate the factors that can help you reach more to your target audience.
- Reach more to customers who already have shown interest in you.
- Allow you to show ads to customers who already visited your online store.
- Help you to create similar audiences to your existing targeted audiences to increase the range of the reach.
- You track the characteristics of your target audience to improve your ad campaign.
Blogging Is Way To Reach Committed Targeted Prospective Customers
Content is the value you can offer to stand out even before selling your product. Direct selling is not something that always works or the best approach.
You need to publish relevant content in your industry to prospective customers.
This is the way where you establish your brand as an industry expert or an authority for the niche or industry.
Image Source: Shopify
Giving people value and helping them in their pursuit of a solution, you hold utmost credibility where your product can come across as an obvious helpful asset.
Blogging is the business’s best foot forward in order to establish authority in the niche where your product will lead the way for the solution.
Image Source: Content Powered
You don’t need to make all your blogs a sales pitch or market your product. Instead, you need to focus on offering extraordinary and helpful content.
If you go by the book, you are going to position yourself as a brand creating content worth sharing all over social media bringing huge traffic back to your store.
Utilizing the Images & Video To Create Highly Engaging Content
Adding more visual elements to your content is a big step towards the next level.
Humans tend to respond and engage faster and more effectively for visual content or visually-aided content.
So, you can elevate the level of your content creation using the images. Also, Visual representation is the key to your copy for the product.
Create visually-stunning images to capture, advertise, demonstrate and promote your products to your target customers.
Image Source: Theme Junkie
Use Shopify’s Image Editor to edit the product images to improve the look as required.
Just select the product you want to edit, click on the image file, and then click “Edit”.
You have various features to choose from :
- Crop
- Resize
- Change Orientation
- Enhance (Instant Improvement)
- Change Colors
- Change Orientation
- Change Contrast, Highlights, Brightness & Shadows
- Change Aspect ratio
- Add text to image
- Change colors
Using these image editing options, you can improve your image and when you are happy with the results, click “Apply”.
Encourage Customer For Product Reviews
This can be a huge deal-breaker for your Shopify store. Social proof can entirely bring your brand into a new light, something you would want to see your brand as.
The negative product reviews are something you cannot control completely, however, there is whole another science to deal with and make better things out of it but that’s another story.
You can most certainly encourage your customers, especially those who seem to be satisfied or happy with your product.
37% of online shoppers rely heavily on customer reviews from review websites to make their purchasing decisions.
87% of consumers agree that they won’t buy from the business with negative reviews.
Then, there are other tons of statistics proving the significance of customer reviews for e-commerce stores.
People will be more inclined to buy from your Shopify store if you have positive reviews on multiple review platforms.
Image Source: ShopStorm
So the minimum you can do is ask your customer to leave reviews after they get the product.
Be suggestive in telling them to share the pleasant experience with you.
You can send follow-up emails after a while and even incentive them by offering a coupon code or free percentage discount on their next purchase if they leave a review.
Changing Product Pricing From 27.99 To Exact 28
This is more of an appearance game to the pricing strategy for the e-commerce industry today.
You see most of the online retailers who want to appear affordable for their user base add cents to their product prices.
Image Source: modernmami
Walmart is a good example to go for where the store ends their prices with .97 as compared to other online retailers ending their product pricing with .99 at the end.
Adding cents to your product pricing makes your brand more on the bargaining side. So you can all go for something if you wish to position your brand in that way.
It will definitely make your brand look more affordable from a customer’s point of view.
But here comes the real play!
Instead of representing your brand on the bargaining side which might attract some kind of audience, and that too for a while, you can focus on the long-term game.
Image Source: Blue Stout
Like a lot of other Shopify stores or known brands such as Zara or Nike, you can also decide to not play this budget game.
Rather position your brand on the more reputable side by using solid pricing, for example. Making 27.99 to 28.
Now if you want to make those changes to all of your current products, you don’t have to manually change all end pricing on Shopify.
Luckily, you can just do it for all just by changing the currency formatting.
Just follow these steps :
- Step 1: Go to the Shopify Setting
- Step 2: Click “General”
- Step 3: Go to “Story Currency”
- Step 4: Click “ Change Formatting”
Update Your Inventory On Monthly Basis
You need to change the inventory count for one or more than one product variant on the inventory page of your Shopify store.
Image Source: Easycom
Follow these steps to update your inventory on regular basis :
Step 1: Log in to your Shopify Admin
Step 2: Go to “Products”
Step 3: In products, click “inventory”.
Step 4: In the inventory section, you will see the inventory counts for your product variants on this page.
Step 5: You can make changes in the “Quantity” section of the column respective to a certain product. Increase the number of products in inventory accordingly.
Step 6: There are two ways you can make changes to your inventory, either “add” or “set”
Step 7: You can click up or the down arrow to add or reduce the number in the inventory.
Step 8: You can also add the quality to be added.
Step 9: To enter a total new inventory, click “set”. Enter a number or use arrow keys to set a new inventory quantity.
Step 10: Click “Save”. You can see the changes done here.
You can adjust the inventory count using these steps for all products.
Never Use A Free Domain
No matter how short you are on your budget, nothing justifies using a free domain for your new set online store or business.
You are definitely getting a free custom domain from Shopify but it is not really wise to go for that.
Image Source: Shopify
In fact, it is something like “yourwebsite.shopify.com”, so it’s actually a sub-domain of Shopify, saying it out loud that you are not really a professional seller.
Also, not suitable for building a brand without giving out your full effort in the presence of your e-commerce store.
Do not wait to start earning money from your online store to get a domain. Invest in it, it is nearly $20 a year, totally worth it.
Staying Authentic To Your Niche
Going to niches for your online store is a tricky play. It does have its long-term sustainable benefits and trust-building but things can be a bit rocky before it takes off.
Submitting your Shopify store to a specific niche makes you more credible and instills trust within consumers.
They see you having specialization and dedication towards a specific kind of product or niche.
On other hand, you might feel restricted and often leaving out potential opportunities at the table considering if you would have gone for a broader range.
Well, experts suggest, if your niche up, be authentic and true to your niche. Any kind of compensating or change of path might breach the trust of your existing customers.
Also, it can take some time to capitalize on your specialization but it will happen over time when customers overlook your competitors and other alternatives in that niche.
Spying On Your Competitors
This can do more for your online business than you think. If you see things clearly on what works and what doesn’t, there are a whole lot of mistakes you can prevent yourself doing.
Even if you do not really understand everything, you can still progress just by spying on your competition and uplifting their strategies by doing it differently or better.
Keep track of your competitors along with the top brands in your industry, and see what steps they are making in their advertisement, branding, products, customer acquisition, inventory, and every other aspect.
Over time you will be able to notice what they keep and what they discard, and you might be able to decode something for your own as well.
Promote Your Products On Free Marketing Channels If You Are Short On Budget
If you have just started your Shopify store, you might be tempted to start earning as soon as possible, and you want to invest money where it seems to give you the best results.
Well, even though the ambitious approach is appreciated, you need to have a bit more patience on where you invest your money and how you expect your returns as well.
Experts suggest even though you don’t have an advertising budget to run ads on Facebook or have to take a financial leap to do so, may don’t do it then.
Image Source: Medium
You have to be very careful about where you spend your money. Running Facebook advertisements requires a fair share of experience and expertise to get higher ROI and other constraints as well.
But there are other ways to do marketing, less expensive and then even free as well. Why not start promoting your products on free marketing platforms?
Don’t rush to the ‘paid ads’ wagon especially if you don’t have a budget.
Avoid spending too much money on the ineffective and incompetent ad campaign. As mentioned earlier, make sure you install Facebook Pixel on your website.
Use the retargeting ad campaign to bring the best conversion to the table.
Focus on what works, and rather spending money on every platform.
Use Pinterest For Free Marketing
Pinterest is a game-changer free marketing platform for eCommerce store owners if you use it effectively.
Image Source: Pinterest
Post your product images on Pinterest as many as you can and be consistent with content creation.
Make sure you also pin other similar or value-based images too, so Pinterest doesn’t see you as a spam account.
Content Marketing is the Best Free Marketing
If paid ads are not your strong foot to put forward, content surely can be. Content marketing is the most effective free marketing. It is organic and highly convertible.
The idea is to create content targeting the audience that might be your potential customer as well. You need to create content that helps them in the same niche your product falls.
Image Source: The Drum
Instagram is again a great social media platform for free marketing especially when you want to reach out your product to target customers.
Then, you can always create a blog for your online store to target the interest group around that product.
You can also use retargeting ads from data you receive on your website or blog.
Image Source: LittleData
Retargeting ads can bring you free traffic that has a way more conversion rate as compared to any other ad conversion at an early stage.
You have to cultivate the skill of promoting your products online for better ROI, and that takes a bit of a learning curve.
So till then, you can take things slow and focus more on content marketing and maybe occasional ad campaigns.
You also have to focus on preventing overspending or taking credit for investing more. It is a long-term sustainable model to work rather than exhaust after few paid ad trials.
Don’t Move From Shopify Hosting
Web hosting plays an integral role in the efficiency of a website, and eventually in the success of it as well. So, do not underestimate its significance.
Web hosting affects your page loading speed and if your website is loading slow, users are more likely to leave the website before your website loads.
It is only 10 seconds that they can hold on to before they bail on your website. It is highly recommended to have Shopify hosting only as they are incredibly fast and have their own CDN.
Do not go for any other hosting plan for your Shopify store.
Keep Testing The Mobile Settings Of Your Online Store
You don’t have to fall into the trap of failing in the basics of running an online store.
Being a digital entrepreneur, you must know the fact that more than 53 percent of the total web traffic is on mobile.
So how can you even forget to test mobile settings for your website?
It is crucial to examine how optimized your website is for consumption on mobile. You need to see how your ads are looking on the mobile.
Image Source: Instamobile
For example, if you just created an ad for your online store ad campaign, your first concern should be to test it on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.
You might be able to notice that the image is not resized properly or the text might be appearing differently than on the laptop.
The cropping of images can be changed and different from what you have done on a laptop. So, all these things must be tested before you put your advertisement out.
Focusing On Customer Retention For Your Store
65% of sales come from your previous customer on an average basis.
Now, what does that tell you? You need to focus more on retaining existing or previous customers.
Also, there is more return-on-investing on targeting existing customers for potential sales rather than acquiring new customers.
Image Source: Shopify
The customer acquisition cost with retargeting customers is less than converting entirely new leads.
A customer is more likely to buy from a store where he/she have
- previous purchasing experience
- More aware of
- Instill more trust
It is dramatically powerful for online stores to utilize customer retention strategies to get better sales.
According to a study by Bain & Co, just 5% of improving customer retention can increase 75% of profitability.
If you are not retaining your existing customers, you would have to invest hugely to get new customers.
This certainly disbalances the current revenue status of your business, and also affects the cash flow.
Using Facebook Messenger
Nothing better for customers to interact with the business anytime they want where they get a reply within a few minutes.
Here comes the Facebook Messenger for Shopify store owners, heavenly utilized for communicating the customers and prospective customers on Facebook.
According to research, 79 percent of consumers prefer to go for a live chat rather than email simply because it’s faster and more convenient.
Image Source: Medium
Shopify allows you to combine two different channels that is your online store and Facebook messenger.
Customers can directly connect to the business about any doubts, queries, or complaints they are having.
Chatting is easy, convenient, and faster to get information. It also helps your prospective customers to make decisions faster.
Not just you can chat on Facebook Messenger with your customer but also set a chatbot for an instant reply to your customers.
Image Source: ElfSight
You can answer the most asked questions for your business and the bot will answer them if any user asks anything around that topic giving them a quick solution.
It gives your business more credibility since you show on social media platforms and also with this instant reaching-out platform, messenger.
Even it gives you more time to deal with more customers in a day rather than answering the same thing to everyone.
Well, the best part is yet to come, it’s totally free!
Consider Offering Free Shipping
Shipping cost is a big chip on the shoulder for customers to bear and that happens most of the time with some specific kind of products or niches too much.
However, everyone loves free shipping. It actually sounds like a coupon or discount on the product, and a fat one if you ask any customer.
Image Source: Shopify Store
So, free shipping can be a barrier-breaker for your Shopify store. If you see all the successful e-commerce stores are doing free-shipping in one way or another.
It also helps in customer retention and attracting people to your store as well.
Now if you choose to go for free shipping, what would happen is if anyone goes for buying anything but gets put off for the extra $8 shipping fee on a 13$ item, they might find your website and buy the item just because you are offering free shipping.
Even if you are pricing your product a little higher than the other or adjusting around without customers getting known, in either case, your offer is more appealing than the existing one.
Avoiding The Duplication Of Content On Your Online Store
You need to be very careful about content duplication on your Shopify store.
Especially if you also have a blog, you need to check if there is any duplicate content or very similar content as well.
Duplication of content is not just about plagiarism but also a reiteration of similar content, multiple same-slug web pages, and repeated products.
Being a small business owner, you need to check thoroughly for any such possibility.
Make sure all the web pages on your website are unique, have different URLs, and publish unique content only.
Also, it goes to putting a unique product description. Many Shopify store owners get lazy with adding descriptions, so they often put the same or similar.
Create A Mobile-Friendly Design For Your Store
I/c Tips for Creating Mobile-Friendly Design For Your Shopify Store
- Simplify your website navigation by limiting the menu to one level of nested content
- Make your menu invisible to save the website space.
- Use large fonts
- Focus on using conventional fonts
- Declutter your website content
- Avoid long paragraphs
- Make sure your CTA Button is always visible
- Reduce the size of images
You get a great web designing tool with Shopify to customize your online store accordingly. It has a drag-and-drop feature allowing you to change elements very conveniently.
Since more and more people are browsing through their mobile phones, it is essential to make your online store web design more mobile-friendly.
How does your website look on a mobile device?
Image Source: Pinterest
According to research from Adobe in 2015, 8 out of 10 people would not choose to browse on the website if it doesn’t display properly on their device.
That means, right there is a possibility of losing 80% of the traffic.
However, Shopify does their bit to improve the website appearance on mobile but you have to be sure on your front as well.
Make sure you check your online store on multiple mobile devices to see if there is any visual anomaly.
There are somethings you can do with mobile-first website design :
- Make sure you create a bigger CTA button
- Use a fixed header
- Avoid too many elements on your homepage
- Reduce the number or amount of text as much as possible
- Optimize your website for various screen ratios
- Use high-quality optimized images to bring focus
- Use the AMP feature on your website
Prefer To Use Drag & Drop Store Tools
If you have just started your Shopify store or going to, the idea of designing a website might have hassled you a bit.
The certain reason for this is definitely the lack of experience and skill in designing websites. But most of the time people connect it to coding knowledge.
And if you are thinking about it too, you are missing one of the best features with Shopify you get, and that is Drag-and-drop tools.
Image Source: getshogun
There are various built-in tools and features that are at disposal for Shopify store owners but most of them rest unused because they aren’t aware enough.
Make sure you select the Shopify theme that aligns with your brand and products where drag and drop tools can do the job.
These tools are very easy to use where you just have to drag and drop to the website to place them and it is editable in real-time as well.
Providing Multiple Payment Options
The more, the merrier! Try to integrate different payment options to your Shopify store as many and varied as possible.
Setting up a payment gateway is one of the critical aspects for Shopify stores. Well, obviously it is about you getting paid for your products.
Image Source: Shopify Help Centre
Also, it is about making the payment process faster and more convenient for your customers, so much so that they might prefer you over others just for how easy to checkout, surely among other reasons.
Provide enough payment options so there won’t be any customers who might drive away just because their preferred payment option is not listed in yours.
You can take it further by offering people to make a quick account on the website. This will allow them to save their payment information, making the process even faster.
Also, having an account on your online store makes them get back to you.
There are plenty of payment options you can offer such as :
- Debit Cards
- Credit Cards
- PayPal
- Cryptocurrency
- Wire Transfer
Sell More Products
Well, this might be contradictory with the idea of specialization or enough sound too simplistic for a notable tip, but stay here.
If you want to make money with your Shopify store in the long run, it appears to be an obvious expansion strategy.
Amazon is a great example of an e-commerce website starting out with selling only books, then becoming a retail giant.
What made Amazon noticed and successful in the first place was selling books! Well, not exactly that!
They became an e-commerce website selling almost all the books at that time. Even if they sold many books in a very low volume but since the number of books was so high, it worked for them in the long run.
Image Source: Princess Fashion Studio
Amazon further applied the expansion towards other products as well, and now it is a one-stop store for almost every item.
If you are impressed with this, well don’t be too much because you shouldn’t follow this exactly the way Amazon did, also not realistically possible.
The idea to learn from here is to sell more items, so there will be more sales, even if not from your one item. Also, it will be more engaging.
Now, this is not exactly the opposite of niche online stores. You can apply this for bringing all the range and variety of products in your niche or maybe expand a little bit around.
Don’t rely too much on your singular or a set of products unless there are other strong proofs of success with them.
Even there is, you still have to expand in one way or another over time.
Building An E-mail List
One of the great advantages of building an e-mail list is that once you have built-in, you can keep bringing the engagement from forever.
A good email list must consist of the lead conversions that are highly relevant and active as well.
You cannot be too reliant on organic web traffic and social media platforms such as Google, Facebook, or others.
With an email list, you will be able to drive a significant amount of targeted and highly potential traffic to your website consistently by just a few clicks.
Image Source: Whole Design Studios
Email marketing is one of the profitable marketing channels available for any online store or Shopify store.
Make sure you use a powerful lead magnet and an attractive pop-up to get more e-mail contacts.
Use email-marketing tools to capture the leads and create quality content for your email marketing campaign.
An email list allows you to control the retailer-customer relationship from your end and offer your subscribers regular updates and discounts on your products.
Optimize MetaData On Your Online Store
If you want your products to be found on the search engines, you need to optimize your content on Shopify accordingly.
Especially, the title and meta description on your website requires to include the keyword you want the content to optimize with.
For Example, if you sell puppy dog toys, you need to include keywords such as “dog toys for puppies”, “kong toy for puppies” etc
Image Source: DigitalDarts
You have to think about the search terms through which your potential customer will or can reach you.
You need to edit the metadata of your website. However, make sure you choose a Shopify theme that allows you to edit the metadata.
Here’s the process how you edit your metadata on the Shopify store :
- Step 1 : Go to “Online Stores”
- Step 2 : Once you reach there, see the option for “Preferences” and click on it.
- Step 3: Now, edit the metadata accordingly
You can do the same process with the other pages as well by going through “Online Stores”, then go for “Pages”, choose the page and edit the metadata.
If you want to edit the metadata of an individual product on your Shopify store, select the product you want to edit.
Now go to “Edit Website SEO”, and click on Edit the metadata
Storytelling Is The Next-Level Marketing
The success of any brand doesn’t only depend upon their products and customer service but also on what do they represent.
What story a brand tells to their customer connect them to their products emotionally.
Brand storytelling is the most powerful tool in marketing and branding today which develops a personal connection between the consumer and the brand they buy from.
According to studies, people are more like to rely on their emotional instincts and likeness for brands to buy from them in comparison to pure logic.
The studies further tell that stories engage the human brain more than facts and figures.
Clearly, if your content has a storytelling aspect, and so the brand identity, people will be not just more attracted but also more connected and engaged.
Content or content marketing is how you can tell your brand story.
You tell customers what your brand stands for, how and why you started it in the first place, and what they mean to you.
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“Business, marketing, and Branding – these three words describe me the best. I am the founder of Burban Branding and Media, and a self-taught marketer with 10 years of experience. My passion lies in helping startups enhance their business through marketing, Branding, leadership, and finance. I am on a mission to assist businesses in achieving their goals.”