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Did you know that over 90% of ecommerce stores fail in their first year of business? There are hundreds of reasons why businesses fail but one big one is they get on the wrong ecommerce platform or don’t understand how to make ecommerce profitable. Why do Shopify stores fail? What can you do to become profitable on Shopify? So on today’s guide, you will learn everything you need to know about Shopify to make a profitable ecommerce store and what makes a Shopify store successful.
Shopify Store Tips – What You Need to Know Before Starting
Shopify is a great ecommerce platform but it’s a little different than others. Instead of sinking your time into a bunch of tasks that might not help you stay profitable, check out these tips to a more profitable ecommerce store on Shopify.
Don’t get too crazy with Customization
The biggest mistake first time Shopify store owners make is trying to over design their website. Remember, you want people to purchase, not to ‘hang out.’ make sure your design is simple and straightforward.
A simple hero section with a well made image, a call to action and a button to shop or purchase is perfect to start.
The rest of your landing page should be simple, straightforward and have opportunities to give snippets of information that might be relavent.
Let Shopify do the Hard Stuff
Unlike Wix or WordPress, Shopify uses a template language called Liquid Web. What you need to know is it’s a combination of a mix of programming languages that is designed to be fast, secure and stable.
Although you CAN use an app like Pagefly to make custom landing pages and make pixel perfect adjustments, you are usually better off finding a good Shopify theme that works for you and learning how to customize your theme instead.
Far too often, Shopify store owners get too caught up on the design of their home page and don’t spend enough time working on their products or ads. Which leads to the biggest mistake many ecommerce businesses make.
What is the Biggest Ecommerce Mistake?
Taking too long to go to market. You have a cool idea thY you think will sell, but if you haven’t tried to sell it yet, you simply don’t know how well it will do.
Especially in the product development phase, many businesses get stuck redesigning, changing, iterating and developing the PERFECT product. But what most ecommerce businesses fail to realize in time to save their business, is it’s not up to them to make the perfect product.
Unfortunately, many ecommerce businesses overdevelop their products – meaning their built on too many features, or over emphasized the little things and neglected big problems.
The first product you release should not be to make money.
The problem of over engineering a product can be solved by releasing your product to market sooner. The first time you release a product, it should be to get feedback from customers.
Do you need to lose money? No. But you do need to release a reasonable product that solves a problem. Then through iteration and feedback, make appropriate changes when necessary.
Additionally, make sure you have appropriate methods of gathering customer feedback so your first market release isn’t a waste of money or time.
How to Go to Market on Shopify?
The best go-to market strategy is to build hype for your product before its ready to sell.
How to build hype for a new Shopify product?
Before you release a product, a good strategy is to build a Shopify Landing page with a “coming soon!” Handle. This page should only achieve 2 goals in total.
1- briefly describe your product in development
2- capture interested customer information.
A simple landing page will offer a description of what product you plan on bringing to market and an idea of what problems it solves.
A good example looks and reads like this:
The Metaverse Marketer Digital Shopify Guide is a tutorial guide in development to help your business become more profitable.
While currently in development, you can receive an early bird discount by submitting your email address below.
Here’s what you can expect from our guide:
SEO TIPS FOR SHOPIFY
SHOPIFY DESIGN OVERVIEW GUIDE
LIQUID WEB FUNDAMENTALS FOR DUMMIES.
Once this page is live and ready to gather customer information, you should run ads on Facebook, Google, Instagram and more to get as many potential interested emails as possible.
Then, when it comes time to launch, you can email all your interested customers and get some initial sales!
Best Shopify Marketing Strategies
Once your Shopify store is ready to sell products, the next hardest part of keeping yourself profitable is marketing.
Before even thinking about your store, consider your marketing budget. Is it $50. Month? $500? $5000?
Whatever your budget is, make sure it’s sustainable. Especially with new digital business, your biggest hurdle is to find your audience. Your second biggest hurdle is helping them find you.
I recommend spending the first 3-6 months running ads on platforms to narrow down your audiences. Start first by casting a wide net to see what comes in.
Run ads on every platform you find reasonable and see which ones preform the best. In our experience, Instagram ads are best for ecommerce conversions.
Best Shopify SEO Strategies
You should know there are only 2 ways of bringing people to your store. 1) you can pay for them to visit with ads and 2) you can create content to help them find your store.
Shopify is a great platform for building a search engine optimized website for ecommerce. But that doesn’t mean you can expect to rank your website on Google your first day.
Shopify SEO Strategy – Rank 1 product.
SEO strategy comes with a lot of research, learning and writing. So if you have a lot of products, consider working hard to rank 1 product instead of your whole catalogue.
Find a product you want to rank and start researching keywords, key phrases and pathways people may take to find your product.
Make sure that product has an SEO title and SEO description as well as alt tags on your images.
How to Write a Good Meta title and Met description for Shopify Products.
On the product page, at the very bottom is the option to customize your product title and description. By default, Shopify fills these up with your product title and product description.
Your product title will be your product pages H1 tag and it’s best SEO practice to keep the title and H1 tag the same if possible.
But your meta description should include keywords specific to your research you have done on your product.
Why You Should Write Blogs on Shopify Products for SEO
Blogs and pages are important tools in your tool belt for ranking your website on Google SERP. If you are having trouble getting organic traffic to your store, you should consider writing a blog about your product to help gain additional traffic.
In the most basic terms, if Google and it’s users consider your blogs helpful, they will show your blog pages in Google searches more often. If your website generated enough helpful content, Google will recommend your products to more people.
What does a good product blog look like on Shopify?
A good Shopify blog post is not to show off your product or display your product features. Instead, a good product blog will mention your product as a side note while addressing common problems your target audience will have.
For example, a Shopify store that sells stencils might publish guides on how to get the best stencil every time.
A Shopify cookwear stores blog might publish instructions on how to make the best burger in 10 minutes on a Budget.
With your blog, remember to be creative and don’t make selling products your first priority. Make your customer needs and their problems your first priority and the sales will come.
Best Shopify Store Ads Strategy – Free Template
A good digital ads strategy for an eCommerce store will focus on solving 2 problems.
1- bringing customers to your store to purchase
2- help identify new target demographics.
Like mentioned earlier, make sure you have a budget set month to month about what you are willing to spend on ads. It’s more important to be consistent with your ads than it is to spend a ton every month.
Because a dollar spent on ads without knowing who your target audience should be, is a dollar wasted.
So I recommend using an 50/30/20 rule of ads. What’s the 50/30/20 rule?
• 50% of your ads should go to targeting who you think your audience is
• 30% of your ads should be spent on experimenting with new demographics
• 20% of your ads should be spent on a wide range of audiences to help you identify potential audiences to experiment with.
The 50 30 20 rule is a good rule of thumb but is also worth adjusting accordingly based on the data you receive.
Over time, you will learn who is the best audience to target with ads, and the best way to target them on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Google, and more.
How to Reduce Shopify Costs for Better Profitability
For better profitability, it’s always important to measure your cost of doing business.
For ecommerce stores, the primary cost of doing business is usually shipping. Customers increasingly demand 2 day shipping on products and that gets pricy fast. So there are a couple ways you can reduce your shipping costs.
1. Make sure you are getting the best rates on shipping – if you have boxes, Shopify prints out your shipping label and all you need is the box to package your product.
2. Calculate your cost of shipping labor – outsource if possible. How much does it cost you to manually ship your products on both time and money?
3. How often do products get returned or refunded because they don’t shop on time?
Taking your shipping seriously is a big advantage for Shopify Merchants. Using an app, you can help streamline your product delivery, fullfillment and reduce your cost. Consider using any of the following apps below to improve shipping costs on your end.
Thanks for reading! As a Shopify ecommerce store designer and digital marketing enthusiast, I spend a good portion of my time helping store owners just like you become better equipped for ecommerce success. If you found this article helpful, please consider subscribing.
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Disclaimer: None of the information presented on this site constitutes legal, business, tax, or medical advice. In each scenario, it’s recommended to first chat with a medical, legal, business, or tax professional before making any decisions.
