After watching multiple YouTube videos, and countless motivational reels to start your online business and become your own boss, you are finally here! You’ve created your Shopify store! But you are not yet done, the goal is not just to start an online business but to start a successful one.
Let’s break down the list of the important steps you need to take after setting up your Shopify store to make it successful.
Choose a Niche and Populate Your Shopify Store with Products
Once you’ve built your store, it’s time to pick your niche- identifying the target audience you want to serve. This allows you to allocate your resources properly, and create an effective marketing budget. For example, if your niche is maternity personal care products, you’ll only market to customers that match this profile, which reduces the amount you would have spent marketing to everyone.
Selecting your niche also helps you to create a compelling brand story, preventing you from trying to be everything to everyone. It allows draw in your customers by telling them the problems you want to solve for them with your products. This also helps you choose the right products, instead of filling your store with random products that might not resonate with your target audience
Talking about choosing the right products for your store, here are some best practices to help you choose the right products for your Shopify store:
Product Research
Research your target audience’s preferences and add them to your online store. You can do this by monitoring your ideal customers’ social media feeds, and search engine queries, as well as seeing the products your competitors are promoting.
Another alternative to doing guesswork with your product research is to use the trendhijacking strategy, it helps you identify viral products in your industry and helps you market your store as the top place to get them.
Also, while most people will say go for winning products (high-demand products), I’d say every product can win, it all depends on how well you market it. This doesn’t mean you should stock products inconsistent with your brand, you still have to sell products in your niche to build loyalty and brand consistency.
Inventory Management
Decide on the business model you want to run, dropshipping, or physically holding your inventory. It all depends on your budget, storage space, and shipping preferences.
If you are planning on handling your inventory yourself, make sure you have storage space, an inventory tracker to know when your stock is high or low, and a reliable delivery partner to ship your products to customers.
However, if you’re planning on drop shipping, there are three things to consider- reliability, pricing, and speed. Choose a reliable supplier with good shipping and delivery practices to ensure your customer order doesn’t go missing, delayed, or canceled. Also, suppliers with low shipping fees help you to minimize costs and sell at competitive prices.
Reliable Supplier
After coming up with solid product ideas for your store, the next step is to find a reliable supplier who can provide you with high-quality products at affordable prices.
You can use platforms like Alibaba, DHGate, Spocket, or Oberlo to find and import products from thousands of suppliers around the world.
Product Pricing
Pricing can make or break your sales. You need to competitively price your products in a way that gets you reasonable profits but doesn’t send your customers running.
One tip for pricing your products competitively is to find affordable suppliers. When you buy things at a lower price, it’s easier to offer competitive prices without losing money.
Don’t forget you’re a business. Don’t price your products too low just to stay competitive, or you will be part of 90% of e-commerce businesses that fall in their first year.
Bundles and Upsells
Instead of simply stocking single products, create bundles at a discounted price, this will increase your average order value. You can use apps like Bold Bundles to create and display bundles and on your Shopify store.
Make Your Shop Shine: Optimizing Your Shopify Store Design
A major reason customers avoid some e-commerce and flock to some is how trustworthy your website looks and feels to them. Your store design, navigation, and product images are the first things visitors see when they look at your store; if your website loads very slowly, has too many pop-up notifications, or uses low-quality images, it looks spammy and most people will leave your store.
Also, you would be wasting your carefully crafted ad campaigns if your website isn’t optimized. When potential customers come to your store after seeing an ad, you’ve only got seconds to capture their attention and interest. If your site design isn’t optimized, or your product images and descriptions aren’t clear and engaging, they’re more likely to walk away, significantly reducing your ad spend.
So, How Do I Choose the Right Website Design for My Store?
Think about who you’re trying to reach and the niche you’re in — what colors or brand design aligns with your target audience and is popular in your industry? A shortcut to doing this by looking at other merchant stores in your niche to see the designs that work for them.
However, just because you want to use a theme that resonates with your target audience doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stand out. Yes, you can follow the industry trend but tweak the layout, fonts, and colors a bit to make it uniquely yours.
Some Best Practices For Your Store Design and Optimization
Avoid Low-quality Product Images- blurred images make your products look unoriginal and cheap; most people would be wary of buying them.
Prioritize a Smooth User Experience- use Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Pingdom to check your loading speed and find out what you need to optimize to make it load faster. For example, you might need to compress and resize your images to increase your website’s loading speed.
Use Interesting Product Description- carefully craft your products’ names and descriptions to intrigue customers to learn more about the product.
Make Your Store Navigation User-Friendly- provide a user-friendly navigation experience to help visitors find what they’re looking for in your store. This means categorizing your products, search filters, search bar, product recommendations, etc.
Also, optimize your checkout process by offering multiple payment methods, and making your checkout process as simple as possible.
Ensure Your Store Is Mobile-Friendly Design- most people use their smartphones for online shopping, so ensure your store design is responsive to different screen sizes and orientations.
Tell your Story- selling online isn’t stamping buy now on your product pages; tell an engaging story behind your brand using your About Us page, blog content, social media content, email newsletters, and more. This compelling story is what differentiates you from the competition and helps build a loyal customer base.
Add Testimonials/Trust Badges- Add feedback from your previous customers that showcase your product quality, customer service, and overall satisfaction. They help you build trust and credibility with your potential customers, and boost your conversion rate.
Be Consistent with Your Branding - Consistent branding is what builds your brand image and helps customers connect with your brand.
Regardless of how much you’d like to switch things up, stick to the same colors, logo, brand tone, and image type across your store page. For example, if you’re using 3D animation for products X and Y, don’t use pencil illustrations for products A and B.
Boost Functionality: Essential Apps and Integrations for Your Shopify Store
You can boost the functionality of your Shopify store by integrating marketing, sales, and customer service apps. For example, you can use email marketing tools like Mailchimp or Brevo to keep your customers engaged with product releases, discounts, and special offers.
Here’s a piece of advice- don’t go for high-end marketing and customer service tools like Intercom, Zendesk, and others. Start with a simple but comprehensive marketing tool like Vitals. It has all the features you need to build a trustworthy website and create irresistible offers. For example, you create bundles to upsell your products, add product reviews, view user journeys through your website, and more.
Payment Processing
The last thing you need as a new business is payment hiccups and customers complaining about payment failures. You need to have multiple and seamless payment options for your Shopify store.
There are so many reliable payment options available on Shopify, including PayPal, Stripe, debit/credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, etc. View the full list of available payment gateways.
Also, if you are planning on selling to a global target market, use Shopify’s custom pricing to display your prices in multiple currencies. This way, your customers can see the product prices in their local currency.
Go Live and Get Noticed: Launching Your Shopify Store and Marketing It to Success
Marketing Campaigns to Reach Your Target Audience
Since you’re starting fresh and haven’t built an email list yet, your options are social media and search engine marketing. You go organic, paid, or both.
You can build your email lists by giving special deals to people who sign up for your email list, this motivate more customers to subcribe to your emails.
If you are going for organic marketing e.g. creating engaging social media content and writing blogs around your product and its value, it would take a while (about 4–6 months) to see results and to be honest, you might not have that luxury, if you are planning to run a successful e-commerce business.
The most advisable thing to do is to use both paid and organic marketing. For example, instead of just creating engaging content and expecting people to follow simply because of how great your content is, promote your post with paid social so more people can see it and be interested in your products.
One of the best marketing strategies is the trend hijacking strategy. Rather than just blindly promoting your products, trend hijacking helps you to spot trending products and marketing strategies, and makes your store the first option people see when they search for those products on search engines or social media.
You can also have paid partnerships with influencers/ content creators in your niche and ask them to promote your products to their audience. When choosing a creator/influencer to partner with, make sure it’s someone who has the same target audience as you and has an affordable rate.
Promos/Special Offers
Create marketing campaigns for your first-time customers, this could include discounts or gifts. Give them an incentive they can't resist, for example, free shipping or 20% discounts on their first order.
Another thing you can do is to incentivize people spending more, for example, if a customer spends above $80 in your store, they get free shipping or a special gift. This will motivate people to buy up to that threshold, increasing your average order value.
Measure, Learn, and Grow: Analyzing and Optimizing Your Shopify Store Performance
After successfully launching and promoting your products, the next step is to monitor how well your store is doing in terms of traffic, conversions, sales, revenue, and customer satisfaction. You can use tools like Google Analytics, Shopify Reports, and customer surveys to collect and analyze these data.
Using the data you collected, analyze it to find patterns, trends, and gaps in your performance. You can also compare your store with your competitors and industry benchmarks.
FAQs about Creating and Growing a Shopify Store
What to Do After Setting Up Shopify?
Focus on optimizing your store design, populating it with winning products, and marketing your products to your target market.
How Do I Know if My Shopify Store Is Successful?
Go through your sales, conversion rate, customer engagement, customer lifetime value, and website traffic. This will help you gauge how well your store is doing and identify growth opportunities.
How Do I Find Shopify Stores for Sale
You can contact existing store owners directly, or work with a verified marketplace like Trend Hijacking that allows you to buy e-commerce business at affordable rates.
How to Migrate one Shopify Store to Shopify Store
You could migrate data between Shopify stores manually by exporting and importing data, or using a migration app like Bulk Transporter or Matrixify.
Conclusion
Creating your Shopify store is a major step, but it’s not your last step in running a successful online business. You need an optimized website and a solid marketing strategy.
Having an effective marketing strategy like the trend-hijacking strategy. It helps you figure out the right products for your target audience and allows you to effortlessly attract and convert them.
Book a free call with the Trend Hijacking team to get personalized recommendations to create successful marketing strategies for your Shopify store. I hope this guide helps you to build your Shopify store to become a highly profitable one.
