Online retail offers a ton of great opportunities. With an online store, a small to medium-size business can reach a global market. Along with that, you can use a range of tools to make your business competitive in a crowded field.
While eCommerce does have its benefits, it can be a lot of work. You will have to build a website, you might need iPhone app developers to help with building an app and you will have to consider marketing your products online.
Shopify happens to be one platform that can help to streamline much of the process of building and running an online store. With Shopify, eCommerce businesses have a platform that makes it easy to set up an online store and sell products. With that said, you need to do what you can to put your business ahead in a crowded field.
In this post, we are going to cover a few tips that can help you set up and run a more successful eCommerce store using Shopify.
Choose the Right Theme
The theme is going to have significant impact on the presentation of your online store. This is a decision that should not be taken lightly, so you need to spend a little time to find the right theme for your store.
Think of the kind of experience you want to offer customers when they go to your store. How do you want your products to be presented? What features does your store need? There are more than 100 themes to choose from, so you should be able to find something that meets all of your needs.
Optimize for Search
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is still one of the keys to driving traffic for an online store. If you want to make the most of search engine traffic, you should do some keyword research and find ways to use keywords on your site. Use keywords in page content, titles, and meta descriptions.
Once you have your site set up, you should also make sure to upload your sitemap to Google Search Console. This will guarantee that your site and all of its pages get crawled and indexed by the Google search engine. Once the pages are indexed, they will be there for Google to retrieve when users search for things relevant to your products.
Aim for Faster Loading Times
A fast website isn’t something that is just nice to have. Sites that load faster provide a better experience for customers and it has been shown to improve sales. Along with that, search engines prefer sites that load faster, so it can impact your search ranking.
There is a lot you can do to improve the speed of your website. With that said, one of the simplest steps is to look at the images you have on your pages. If the file sizes are large, it will slow down the loading speed of the page. If you take steps to optimize the images, it can go a long way toward speeding your site up.
Reduce Checkout Friction
Items get abandoned in carts more than you may think. In fact, some research suggests that most items placed in online shopping carts don’t get purchased. The best way to bring your cart abandonment rate down is to make the checkout process as quick and easy as possible.
Even with the best checkout process, a lot of carts will still be abandoned. However, you can win some of these customers back by engineering cart abandonment campaigns. Use automated emails to remind customers of items they left in their carts. This can be a good strategy to get some of these customers to come back and complete the purchase.
Leverage Social Media
Social media offers some of the most effective marketing opportunities for eCommerce stores. You should definitely have an account and post on the platforms that are relevant to your business, but you should also consider the paid advertising options. These platforms have large audiences and they offer a range of advertising tools that can be great for promoting your products and reaching new audiences.
Facebook is an obvious starting point for most eCommerce businesses. It has the largest audience of all social media sites and it has some of the best tools. With that said, you should also consider platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Start Blogging
Blogging can be useful for helping your brand raise awareness and sell more products. With that said, you don’t want to make your blog a place for the hard sell. Instead, you should focus on creating content that offers value to the consumer. Make yourself an authority in your industry and create posts that can offer inspiration for new ways to benefit from your products.
Create a schedule to make the content creation process easier. Set up a schedule that includes all of your blog ideas, when they are going to be written and the date you plan to publish. Along with planning all of your blog content, you could also consider adding all of your social media posts to the schedule.
Offer Order Tracking
The shipping experience can be critical for the success of an online store. This isn’t just true for speed. Customers also want to be able to track their orders to know when to expect the item.
Shopify offers features that make it possible for customers to track the status of orders from your site. You can even create a branded tracking page to provide updates.
Use the Right Shopify Apps
Shopify apps are plug-ins that you can use to add features to your site. If you want to have success with Shopify, you need to investigate the available apps and add the ones you need to your online store. You can find Shopify apps that help with marketing, customer reviews, inventory management, running promotions, and more. While you might need to pay for some of the apps you need, many of the best tools come from free Shopify apps.
As a final point, you should test various features of your eCommerce store. Test different images, landing page text, layouts, CTAs, and prices. With a little testing, you will be able to find the features and elements that offer the best results. You can even make the process easier by using one of the Shopify split-testing apps.
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