Selling on Shopify: How to Create and Launch Potentially Successful E-Commerce Store
If you are just taking the first steps in the field of e-commerce or want to get a small and profitable online store, then Shopify eCommerce is the right solution. This is considered a beautiful and convenient CMS, with the help of which it is easy both to start a business online and to improve an already successful offline project.
In this article, we will talk about how to create a store on this platform from scratch, and what key points you need to pay special attention to.
Statistics to Prove That Shopify Is Worth Your Attention
Shopify is a very popular solution, and this fact has a good reason. This platform is used by more than 600 thousand companies in more than 175 countries. Its functionality allows you to withstand frantic loads, so you can not be afraid of the influx of rampant buyers on holidays or special days like Black Friday. In total, more than one billion orders were processed in stores created on the basis of this platform. Well-known brands such as Red Bull, Pepsi and Nestle use this technology, so we suggest you join them using our simple but extensive guide.
What Shopify Can Offer to Your Business
Shopify is about features that you can easily use if you know about them. Below we list the main ones.
Mobile Version
Probably, we should not talk about the fact that the mobile is still in trend, and this situation will most likely not change, but will only progress. The ability to conveniently interact with the brand using a smartphone is an indicator for potential buyers, so give them this opportunity with Shopify.
Analytics
No action makes sense without analyzing the results. Shopify gives you the opportunity to receive comprehensive reports on your successes, find sore points, and improve your strategies based on this.
Customer Preference Analysis
Big data is already here, and it is extremely unprofessional to build a modern business without collecting and processing data about your customers. Shopify allows you to receive, store and process all the most important information, track user behaviour on the site, analyze their habits, and develop individual strategies on this basis.
Blog Essentials
The blog is designed to solve two main problems. It is to advance in organic search with the help of key queries, as well as provide really useful information to your visitors. Shopify provides these features, but use the following tools to improve the performance of your blog and the content you publish. These are TrustMyPaper in case you don’t have the opportunity to write the content yourself, Studicus to create trending content and analyze new research in your niche, KeywordsPlanner to collect the most relevant semantic core.
Various Loyalty Programs
This feature is already built into the platform. You just have to customize the settings, analyze what the best offers you can make to your customers, and also automate these tasks.
How Shopify Works
In fact, Shopify has already done everything you need, and you just have to get the best. In simple words, this is an analogue of an online site builder such as Wix. Only Wix is about everything and immediately about nothing, and Shopify is ideally grounded for e-commerce. There is nothing superfluous, but only what you need to create and fill your store with the necessary functionality, and begin its promotion.
Getting Started
So, we already understood the functionality and advantages of Shopify, so now let’s move on to the practical steps to create your store.
Find a Niche That Will Work for You
The initial stages of starting a business are the most important. A good foundation will help you expand your business in all possible directions. When searching for a suitable niche for a Shopify store, you need to keep a few things in mind.
Do not start with expensive goods — the highest price for a product should not exceed $20. As you are just getting started, it’s best to sell products that most people can easily afford. For example, beauty products, t-shirts, jewellery and other items of clothing. Middle-income buyers will make up the majority of your target audience because they will have no problem paying for your product.
However, this advice has a downside. If you find a really high-quality product, have done some cool research and realized that it will suit the high-income segment of customers, do exactly the opposite.
Starting to Create a Store
In general, the process of creating a store on Shopify is intuitive. This platform is smart enough to tell you what you need to do and in what order.
Everything starts as standard — with the registration process. After registering you will receive a few questions about your business. Since you don’t have one yet, select the option that says that you don’t have a store at the moment. This step also requires no explanation, after filling out your registration form, you will be redirected to a page that allows you to proceed to the creation of the site.
After answering all the questions, you can proceed to the choice of the tariff plan. We recommend starting with a base rate, as you can always change your mind as soon as your business begins to grow and require more additional features.
Come up with a Unique and Catchy Name
Most likely, you already have certain ideas in this regard. But if there are no specific ideas yet, then keep in mind that the name of your store should be concise, understandable, as simple as possible, but at the same time creative. It would seem that it is impossible to meet all these requirements at the same time.
Therefore, come from the values of your brand, the uniqueness of your offer and the general idea of your business.
Choose the Most Suitable Design
Shopify offers you to choose from the topics developed, as well as complement the existing template according to your preferences. However, creating an e-commerce store design, it is important to realize not only your preferences but also the preferences of your potential customers.
The easiest way to paint at least the big picture is to learn the basics of the psychology of colours in marketing. And do not forget about your corporate identity.
Add Your Products to the Online Store
If you are satisfied with the design of your online store, you can proceed to add products to it. Shopify has already provided you with clear instructions on how to do this. Therefore, you only need to make sure that you have added all the necessary information to the description of your product.
Photos, videos, and descriptions are the most important points in this task. Of course, the photos of the goods must be of high quality, but true. We all know how to use Photoshop and sketch shortcomings, but with this approach, it will be pointless to wait for good reviews. Therefore, try to show your product in the best light, but do it truthfully. Choose a background for the product so that it is in the foreground. It is also possible to supplement the photo with details to show the actual size.
Plus, it would be really cool to make a video about your product. This will immediately increase the number of page visits, and the time spent on the site. And users will be able to see your product almost live.
And don’t forget the description. Remember, we gave a list of tools above that will help you with your blog? Use them here. Find the most relevant keywords for descriptions, write the text that will really sell and make sure that you made no typos or grammatical errors.
Start Selling
So, we are done with the basics. Now it’s time for selling on Shopify. However, it is not so simple. You will have to use a whole range of tools to launch the first sales. Here is a phased strategy.
- Start with contextual advertising on Google. To do this, you need to register in Google Ads, segment potential users, and run several test advertising campaigns.
- After that, it makes sense to switch to social networks. Facebook and Instagram with its opportunities for storytelling for brands are quite responsive platforms for selling goods, so if you know that most of your audience is there (and most likely it is), start advertising your store on these sites.
- Guest posting. In order for Google to evaluate your site as more authoritative, start gradually increasing the link base.
- SEO. If you have inserted keywords in the descriptions of your products, and are also constantly working on filling out a blog on the same principle, then very soon Seo promotion will start working for you.
Final Сheck Sheet
So we are almost there. Let’s make sure again that the basics were completed first. This includes:
- “Main Pages” (Contact us, Terms of Service, Return Policy and Privacy Policy)
- Delivery information (if you want to offer free delivery, set the “free delivery zone” setting)
- Payment Gateways (PayPal Express, Stripe)
- Integration with Google Analytics
- Facebook Pixel Integration
- Buying Your Own Domain
- Application Installation.
Conclusion
As you can see, not everything is so simple, but not everything is so complicated. In e-commerce, all factors matter. Therefore, the most valuable advice that we can give you is to develop a comprehensive strategy before start selling on Shopify.