With 500,000 active users, Shopify is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms on the market today. And that number steadily grows as more people decide to start their own dopshipping business. Newcomers may be confused about how to operate a dropshipping store using this eCommerce platform, thus the following will give some tips on how to get started.
Website Design
Buy a domain
When you initially set up your Shopify store, you will be given a free myshopify.com domain, so your store URL, here’s an example (http://sportshoes.myshopify.com) This doesn’t look great from the customer’s perspective and it also doesn’t help you build a strong brand. Your URL should be short, recognizable, simple to remember and easily printed on any material. Try coming up with a few names and see if they are already taken, once you have settled on a good URL you can purchase the official domain from GoDaddy or Namecheap and direct your domain to the Shopify store.
Design theme
Every Shopify theme is made up of four key elements, which are HTML files, CSS, Javascript (which is optional), and images.
There are a lot of templates available that you can customize within the settings, including the layout of your site, colors, typography, favicon, social media, and checkout page. Play around with different options and see what works best for your brand.
Try to make your site look as unique as possible, and consider developing a brand guideline before you start. If you’re highly skilled at web-designing then it’s worth looking at the partner program. That way you can design as many stores as you like for free and list them on the partner program for a price.
Add a phone number
Add a phone number on your header, footer, contact, and about us page. People calling in are trying to give you money. And having a phone number builds trust with your potential customers. Furthermore, it’s best that you return every missed call and voicemail ASAP.
Use Tidio live chat
This is a free live chat app in the Shopify App store. When someone live chats your store, it’ll push to your phone letting you respond wherever you are.
Add a FAQ page
With a FAQ page (Frequently Asked Questions), you can give the answers to the most commonly asked questions that your customers may have. Having this makes your site look more professional and can be useful in securing a sale.
Install privy exit intent
When your potential customer goes to click off of the tab, a pop-up needs to appear, typically offering a discount code. This can help you secure a sale when you might have lost a customer. Generally, when applying for a coupon the customer would have to enter their email, This helps with email marketing further down the line.
About Customer
Offer a free bonus gift
A free bonus gift means people can get more at the same price and makes people prefer to buy from you. Venders tend to offer a gift after a customer reaches a certain price point, for example, “free gift for order above $50!”
Feedback campaigns
It’s a good idea to use customer feedback to gather information on how to optimize your conversion funnel. A tool like Feedback Lite is excellent for this purpose. It’s a survey widget you can place on your Shopify that gathers information about your customer’s overall shopping experience.
Not only does this service offer 8 different types of feedback widgets (i.e. Multiple Choice, Open-Ended Answer, Rating Scale, Thumbs-Up/Thumbs/Down, etc) but allows you to customize the interaction you have with your audience by setting your feedback widget to show automatically, as a slide-out or popup campaign and even on page exit.
Provide more payment options
Give your customers as many payment options as you can. Here are some payment options you should provide:
- Shopify Payments (U.S. Based)
- Stripe Atlas (Outside of U.S.)
- Paypal
- Amazon Payments
- Apple Pay
CRM system
There’s widespread support for website integration with CRM systems such as Infusionsoft and Hubspot. And CRM allows you to store the details of anyone who provides you with their email address in a purpose-built sales funnel designed to increase the chances of the customer making a purchase from you. By consistently building the levels of information you have on your customer’s interests, you can run automated marketing campaigns specifically designed to increase expenditure.
Product Photos
Background
Using eye-catching high-quality images is essential to entice your visitors into making a purchase. Potential customers want the focus to be on your product, using a white background helps drive focus to the product itself.
Lighting
Lighting is a key component of taking quality pictures. Clamp-on utility lamps and painter’s lights are practical and affordable. They also ensure you have great lighting and are better than the flash located on your smartphone.
Uploading
Once you’ve got the product photos you can easily upload them to your Shopify store’s backend. If you are an Apple or Mac user then you can use the Airdrop feature to transfer your photos quickly and efficiently.
Ask suppliers
Ask suppliers for unique product photos is also a good option if you don’t plan on buying a sample or test purchase.
Use Photo Resize
Creating a clean, uniform look on your website should be your top priority. Sometimes you may need to resize images to achieve this goal. You can use Photo Resize, an app in Shopify, to make all your product photography look uniform automatically.
Product Review
Product reviews convert sales and are key to success. One of the best ways to boost your product review count is by incentivizing your customers to make a review on your site when they make a purchase.
An easy way to do this is by sending a follow-up email with a discount code when a customer makes a product review. Another great way to encourage reviews is by developing a community culture across your site so that your customers feel like they are helping other consumers.
However, when you implement this kind of selling strategy make sure you have a solid support system behind the scenes to assist any customers who provide a negative product review. Often times the review can be redirected unfairly to an eCommerce retailer and that’s the last thing you want.
Google Analytics
Having analytics on your website is one of the most important things when optimizing your website for sales. Google Analytics is the best tool to track your website’s performance. It has become a standard tool because of its ease of use, informative reports, and the fact that it is free. It will give you priceless feedback in regard to how visitors interact with your website and where they bounce off. Your sales data is also accounted for so you can see what genuinely works and what doesn’t.
SEO for Shopify
If you are new to SEO and need a crash course to get you up to speed on cutting-edge techniques I suggest this guide.
You should really pick your battles and know your competition when it comes to SEO. You will be able to profile not only the performance of your top competitors but evaluate the difficulty of ranking for key terms related to the products you are selling by Alexa. If you are just starting out, we recommend trialing these services first: Competitor Keyword Matrix, Competitor Backlink Checker, and Site Keywords.
Doing SEO on the Shopify platform is not much different than on any other platform. For the on-page SEO, you just need to know what to put in the proper places in the code of your page.
