Building a successful Shopify store requires dedication and hard work. Research shows that approximately 20% of new businesses fail in the first two years, and 45% fail within the first five years. Becoming a successful brand online requires a mix of planning, creativity, and smart strategies. Whether you are new to the business or growing your existing one, you need effective strategies to create a profitable Shopify store.
In this guide, we will walk you through the key steps to build and manage a profitable Shopify store. From designing your store to choosing the right products, marketing, and promoting your store, you’ll learn the essentials needed to thrive in the competitive online marketplace.
Strategies to create a Successful Shopify Store
Creating a successful Shopify store requires three main phases, the research and planning stage, the creating stage and launching stage and the growing stage. Here, we’ve prepared the best strategies to enable you to have a successful Shopify store.
Decide on a Target Audience
Decide on a target audience before creating your store, Knowing who your audience is and how to market to them is the first step to success. When starting your store, knowing who your ideal customers are simplifies the process of finding new customers and drawing interested buyers to your website, leading to increased conversion rates and sales.
How to know your audience?
Ask yourself who will likely buy your products. What age range will your product cater for? What are their preference etc? Collect that information and create a buyer persona. This will be useful when planning your marketing.
Here are three focal points to identify your target audience:
- Demographics: Consider age, gender, job, education, and income.
- Location: Consider where your audience is so you can target a specific area.
- Interests: Focus on what your audience likes, their attitudes, personality, opinions, and lifestyle.
Choose Products to Sell
Your choice of products matters when you want to become a successful Shopify store. Products that are high in demand, and require less maintenance with high turnovers and profit margins are the best too.
Also, consider your target audience and how the products resonate with their needs. Aside from that, there are other ways to choose the best products for your store, they include:
Capitalize on trends. For example, searching for “clothes” on Google Trends provides interest in products over time and regions with a high interest in the product.
Go for your passion. Sell what you love to do in your Shopify store. For example, if you can sell your custom-made handcrafted items, clothes or decorative items for the home. Also, you can sell baked products or any other items you love to create. See this guide for low-capital products to try on Shopify.
Source for high-demand products on online marketplace
Go for trending products on the online marketplace such as Amazon and AliExpress. Products with the highest number of sales on Amazon are products you should consider selling in your Shopify store. Here, are some of the best dropshipping products to sell on Shopify
Analyze Your Competitors
Competitor analysis is an important process in becoming a successful Shopify store. When you analyse your product market and competitors it helps you to understand what other businesses like yours are doing so you can improve your own.
How to analyze your competitors?
Identify Your Competitors: Start by listing the companies that offer products or services similar to yours. These are your direct competitors.
Research Their Products and Services: Look at what they are selling, how they price their products, and what features they offer. This helps you understand what makes their products popular.
Check Their Online Presence: Visit their website, social media pages, and online stores. Pay attention to how they market their products, what kind of content they share, and how they interact with customers.
Read Customer Reviews: See what customers are saying about your competitors. Look for both positive and negative feedback to understand their strengths and weaknesses.
Analyze Their Marketing Strategies: Observe how they advertise their products. Notice what platforms they use, the types of promotions they run, and how often they communicate with their audience.
Study Their Strengths and Weaknesses: Identify what your competitors do well and where they fall short. This will help you find opportunities to do better in those areas.
Compare Their Customer Experience: If possible, try buying from them or using their services. Experience firsthand what it’s like to be their customer and compare it to your own business.
Keep an Eye on Their Innovations: Stay updated on any new products, services, or changes your competitors introduce. This helps you stay ahead in your industry
Set Up Your Shopify Store
Your Shopify store needs to be organised and easy to navigate. Use the right themes and apps that are compatible with all device types. Use a structured layout and display important information to your customers. Here are detailed steps on how to set up your Shopify store.
Create a Shopify Account
First and foremost, create an account on Shopify. To begin, go to the Shopify website, click on the “start free trial”, answer the required questions and follow the steps to create your first store. This step is quite straightforward and only takes a few minutes to set up your store.
Choose the Right Theme
After installing the Shopify app, next to choose a theme. Shopify themes are necessities as they enable you to create a store design that can wow your customers. Shopify offers lots of these themes—free and premium— to add to your store.
When choosing the best theme for your store, you should consider these factors to create an appealing and functional Shopify store.
Design and Aesthetic: Choose visually appealing and engaging themes that align with your brand’s look and feel. Consider colours, fonts, and overall design. This makes further customisation easy.
Feature and Functionalities: Consider the features included with the theme. Themes with features such as product sliders, quick view options, wishlists, or mega menus are more preferred than the rest. In addition, ensure the theme is compatible with key Shopify apps that you may want to use.
Speed and Performance: Go for the fast-loading theme. Theme with high performance will positively impact your site plus it’s crucial for user experience and SEO. Slow loading theme can affect your site performance which in turn drives away your customers.
Mobile Responsiveness: Ensure the theme is fully responsive, meaning it looks good and functions well on all devices, especially mobile phones, as a significant amount of online shopping is done on mobile.
Conversion Optimization: Check themes with the best optimization features such as a seamless and straightforward checkout process to minimize cart abandonment. See our guide on the best free themes for Shopify.
For example, VISION is one of the Shopify themes that are best for jewellery and accessories brands. For $300, you can use this theme on your website.
Add Important Pages to Your Store
Next is to add pages to your store. Landing page apps such as PageFly can help you elevate your store’s design using their drag-and-drop editor.
It offers an extensive template library to set up your page within minutes. Remember to optimize your pages including relevant keywords that target your audiences.
Here are some of the important pages to add to your Store
Home Page: This is the font page of most websites. The first page your visitor sees on your website. It tells a visitor about your store at a glance. To become a successful store, you’ll need an informative, engaging home page that inspires action.
About Us Page: This page tells your visitors all they need to know about your store including the history, your values and mission. Also, you can describe your products and services to visitors and how your brand can be useful to them.
Terms and conditions: This page outlines the legal agreement between the store owner and customers, covering important aspects like payment terms, return policies, and limitations of liability. It provides clarity on customer expectations and protects the store from potential legal disputes.
Optimize Your Product and Collection Pages
How you display your product matters a lot to your customers, blurry and undefined products will lead to loss of customers. On the other hand, high-quality product images with clear descriptions are key to a successful Shopify store. Surprisingly, statistics show that 90% of online customers believe the quality of product photos matters while 56% say they are more likely to purchase from an online store if the picture looks perfect.
To make high-quality and SEO-friendly product images for your Shopify store to make them irresistible to buyers, here are a few things to remember:
Use clear and descriptive Title
Use simple, clear titles for your products and collections. Your title should contain keywords that target your audience. Also, ensure the title perfectly describes what you’re offering.
For example, Chubbies described their short as the “The Morrocan Nights”. Also, included in the title is “Original Stretch Shorts” and a sub-title that perfectly describes the product.
High-Quality Images
Your product image is the first thing your customers will see on your site, therefore it needs to look great and engaging. Take professional photos of your products and further edit them to improve quality. You may want to show the different angles of your products so that customers can see the entire product at a glance.
Add detailed Product Description
Your image description should be clear and concise, with no room for ambiguity. Add keywords your audience will likely use when they search for the product. Use analytic tools like Google Keyword Planner to determine keywords your customers typically use.
Using descriptive image names is very important for optimizing your product images. Your image name is the primary way to inform Google and other search engines of what your product image is all about. Also, you need well-written product descriptions that give all the details customers need. This includes things like size, weight, care instructions (especially if they’re unusual), and how your product compares to others.
For example, Chubbies, a Shopify Shorts brand uses clear images and text to describe their products. Plus, they added the different variations, colours and angles of each product to provide detailed information about their products.
Resize Your Product Images
One way to make your product images smaller is to resize them. Keep in mind that bigger images take longer to load on your website, which might make customers leave. It’s best to know the standard Shopify image size and resize your images to fit the sizes. Too large images may be too ambiguous to view and too small size will be insignificant to customers. Try as much to keep your images in uniform. For extensive reading, see our Product Image Optimization Tips for Shopify.
Include Reviews and Ratings
Ratings and reviews are ways to build customer’s trust and confidence. Customers are inclined to purchase products based on reviews and testimonials. Therefore, adding reviews to your product and collection page is a great strategy for becoming a successful Shopify store.
Have a clear call to action
Every product and collection page must have a clear call to action. This shows your customers the next line of action to take. For example, “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” are some of the commonly used CTAs. Your CTAs should be clear and visible to make it easy for customers to take the next step. Also, ensure, that they are properly linked to avoid confusing your customers.
Promote and Drive Traffic to Your Shopify Store
To become a successful Shopify store, you need to have increased site traffic. And the best way to get shoppers to your store is through marketing. Shopify brands who market their store are more likely to become successful than others who do not. Here are some of the marketing strategies to drive traffic to your Shopify store.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the oldest marketing strategies with a high conversion rate. Research shows that email marketing has the highest conversion rate at 4.29%, followed by product search at 3.04%. This proves it to be the best marketing strategy to promote your business. The truth is that email conversion does not come easy unless you have the right strategies in place. This article provides detailed tips to grow your Shopify store with Email Marketing
Search Engine Optimization
Optimizing your Shopify store for search engines is a crucial strategy you shouldn’t overlook. When executed effectively, it can significantly boost your store’s visibility and drive up traffic by as much as 53%. Unlike other marketing strategies, search engine optimization (SEO) is highly cost-effective, making it an attractive option for businesses of all sizes. However, it comes with its own set of challenges. While SEO generally requires less financial investment than paid advertising, it demands a well-thought-out plan and meticulous execution to deliver meaningful results.
To ensure your store is fully optimized for success, it’s important to take specific actions that will enhance your SEO efforts. These actions include:
1. Plan an SEO Strategy:
Define your goals (e.g., more traffic, sales), understand your audience, and study competitors. Create a comprehensive plan that includes on-page, off-page, and technical SEO.
2. Do Keyword Research:
Identify relevant keywords using tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or Semrush. Focus on keyword intent to ensure your content meets user needs.
3. Create Relevant Collection Pages:
Build and optimize pages around the keywords you’ve researched to improve your site’s search rankings and attract the right visitors.
4. Focus on Link Building:
Acquire backlinks from reputable sites through guest posts, partnerships, or high-quality content. More backlinks can boost your search ranking.
5. Optimize On-Page SEO:
Ensure each page has optimized titles, meta descriptions, headings, and content. Use internal linking to guide visitors and search engines.
6. Improve Technical SEO:
Enhance site speed, mobile-friendliness, and site structure. Fix crawl errors and create an XML sitemap to help search engines index your site.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is best to create awareness for your business. As it is currently, there are over 5 billion global social media users according to Smartinsight research, which means over 5 billion potential customers for your store.
Social media channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok are best for marketing your store. Additionally, they offer platforms such as the Facebook marketplace, Instagram and Tiktok shops were your can market your products and stores. Statistics show that Instagram is the favourite platform among Shopify merchants in the UK and 52.9% of them use and rely on Instagram to market their product. This marketing strategy is best for new and growing businesses to promote their stores.
Partnership and Collaborations
Brands that know how to market well understand that working together is key to success on social media. This can be done by partnering with influencers or teaming up with other brands that sell products that go well with yours.
Collaboration can involve sharing content, running sales campaigns, or organizing giveaways and promotions together. These partnerships help get your products noticed by more people. You can also use influencers—people with large followings—to promote your products. They can showcase your brand on their pages in exchange for free products or payment. Influencer marketing is a fast-growing trend and has proven to be one of the best ways to promote products as 69% of consumers trust product recommendations they get from influencers. See the guide to gain more insights about social media marketing tips to grow sales.
Run Ads on Google
Running ads on Google helps businesses reach potential customers online. Over 1 million companies are estimated to use Google ads to advertise their products. Advertisers can target specific keywords that people search for. Google Ads allows you to set a budget and only pay when someone clicks on your ad. You can create different types of ads, like text, images, or video. Ads can be shown on Google Search, YouTube, and other websites. The platform provides tools to measure the performance of your ads. Running ads on Google can increase website traffic and sales. Here is how you can run ads on Google
- Create a Google Ads account: Visit the Google Ads website and click on “Start Now.”
- Define Your Objective: This is where you set your advertising goal. Google Ads offers various goals such as increasing website traffic, generating leads, driving sales, or promoting your app. Selecting the right goal will help Google optimise your ads for the desired outcome.
- Choose Your Target Audience: Select who you want to see your ads based on factors such as location, age, interests, and keywords they search for.
- Set a Budget: Decide how much you want to spend on your ads daily or monthly.
- Create Your Ad: Write the text for your ad, add images if needed, and include a link to your website or product page.
- Choose Keywords: Pick the words or phrases people might use to search for your product or service on Google.
- Launch Your Ad: Review all the details and start your ad campaign.
- Monitor and Adjust: After your ad is running, check how it’s performing. You can make changes to improve its effectiveness.
To track ad performance, you can add Analytics to your store. Google Analytics is an analytic tool businesses use to track and record useful insights on their websites. It gives you real-time data on your website traffic, customer behaviour, customer demographics, profits and conversion. Read more on how to set up your Shopify store.
Use PopUps to increase sales and Conversion
Popups are small windows that appear on the screen when a visitor or customer is on the page. They are used to promote and offer special deals to customers or act as reminders for customers to take action.
Popups are important strategies to make a successful Shopify when done right. On average, popups have an 11% conversion rate and reach as high as 42.5% at its best. Just what you need for your store.
Shopify offers great popup apps for your store and one such app is Adoric.
Adoric enables you to create compelling and engaging popups for your Shopify store. It offers fully automated ready-to-use templates to promote special deals or offer discounts for your customers. Some of the Adoric key popup features include:
Email Popups: This is best for lead generation. Use this popup to collect customer’s emails in exchange for a coupon reward or discount. Additionally, it provides templates to choose from. Also, it has a design wizard for customization.
Product Recommendations: Use Addoric’s recommendation popups to suggest related or complementary products to customers. Furthermore, you can use popups to cross-sell and upsell products to customers. This helps improve the customer shopping experience and also boost sales.
Discount Popups: You can offer special deals to your customers to motivate them to buy more. Use Adoric’s gamification popups to offer coupons to your customers. This helps to increase customer satisfaction and increase conversion.
Additionally, Adoric offers cart recovery popups to remind customers of their cart items and minimise abandoned carts for your Shopify. See Adoric’s updated guide to learn more about its features.
Set Up Your Payment Gateways
Add your preferred payment option
This is crucial for accepting payments from customers. To do this, go to Settings >> Payments in your Shopify dashboard. You’ll need to provide some important details about yourself and your business, including your name, address, the last four digits of your Social Security Number, and your banking information.
Shopify makes setting up your payment gateway straightforward, as it supports the most popular payment methods. If you opt for Shopify’s payment gateway, Shopify Payments, you can accept payments with no additional fees. Alternatively, you can choose from other third-party payment gateways like PayPal and Stripe.”
Setup your Exchange and Return Policy
Adding return and exchange policies to your Shopify store. Richpanel research shows that 62% of consumers are more likely to buy from your store if they can return an item. Also, about 49% of retailers have added free return shipping for their stores. Adding this policy to your store is a good strategy for a successful Shopify store.
For example, here is Zappo’s shipping, return and exchange policy page on their website. It provides detailed information on their return and exchange rules and regulations.
Analyze Your Data
Data analysis provides you with the insight you need to improve your store’s performance. Insights from sales, customer behaviour and website traffic will help you make better-informed decisions.
Sales Data Analysis
Gather sales data on product performance. Identify best sellers and underperformers, Analyze trends and take actions like promoting high sellers or discontinuing low-demand items.
Customer Behavior Analysis
Understand how customers interact with your store. Collect data on page views, session duration and bounce rates. Identify popular pages/products and high bounce rate issues. Map customer journey and segment by behaviour. Improve user experience by optimizing content and addressing bounce rates.
Website Traffic Analysis
Gain insight into visitor demographics, referral sources and landing page. Track website traffic and analyze sources. Study visitor demographics to refine targeting. Evaluate landing page performance, optimize traffic channels and enhance content for better engagement.
How Much Does It Cost to Set Up a Shopify Store
Briefly explain that the set-up depends on the business needs and budget. Also, add that Shopify offers different pricing plans that cater for all business sizes. Show with screenshots the pricing plans that Shopify offer its users.
Conclusion
To make a successful Shopify store in 2024, start by choosing a clear niche and understanding your target audience. Design your store with a clean, user-friendly layout and high-quality images. Use effective marketing strategies, like social media and email campaigns, to reach customers. Optimize your store for mobile devices. Finally, analyze your sales data regularly to improve and adapt your strategies for better results.
