E-commerce
Ten simple steps to scale and build your Shopify business
Rich Willner
Published: January 1, 1970
Once you have established the basics of an ecommerce business, it’s time to start thinking about scaling and building it. One of the easiest ways to do this is with Shopify, which provides a host of effective ways to give your business a much-needed boost online. With Shopify, you can increase your revenue and get your business firmly situated amongst market competitors. Of course, doing so will mean making a few changes to your Shopify store to ensure that it’s perfectly set up for the ecommerce world. Below, we have taken a look at some of the key ways that you can scale and build your business with Shopify.
Being an online business, all the interaction between you and your customer happens through your website. When you improve your Shopify store website, you improve their entire shopping experience. A good and effective online shopping experience is the foundation of building a loyal customer base, which in turn builds your business. There are a number of ways you can do this on Shopify, which is why it’s such a popular ecommerce platform for businesses of all sizes.
- Update Your Listings and Add More Products – Though you might want to specialise in very niche products, this could limit how many customers you attract. Consider adding more products or adding a wider range of designs or versions of existing products. The more products you offer, the more people will find what they are looking for on your website. Adding new products also ensures that existing customers continue to come back time and time again, as there’s a constant supply of new products for them to check out.
- Pay Attention to SEO – Search engine optimisation, or SEO, helps your Shopify store to rank highly in search results. It can help you to be seen by new customers, reach new markets and increase traffic to your website. This allows you to scale and build your business by spreading the word about who you are and what you do and boosting leads and sales.
- Take Advantage of Shopify’s Automation Features – There’s a lot that goes into running an ecommerce business, but Shopify allows you to automate many things. The more you automate, the more time you have to focus on other aspects of building your business. For example, Shopify Inbox makes communicating with customers via a live chat much more manageable. Plus, automation reduces the chances of customer service lacking in any way.
- Take Advantage of Paid Advertising Online – One of the best ways to get people to your Shopify store website is to advertise online. You could do this via paid advertising on social media or by utilising Google Ads, both of which are effective ways of targeting, ensuring that the right people see your website. With paid advertising, you are paying for the privilege of being ranked above your competitors online.
- Improve Your Loading Speeds – Customers will likely take their business elsewhere if everything takes a long time to load on your website, as waiting around is inconvenient. So, ensure that your loading speeds are optimal. Compressing large image files, removing redirects and broken links, and keeping animated content to a minimum can make a big difference. A customer wants to go on your website and have everything happen instantly, without delays.
- Optimise for Various Devices – Shopify is a great platform to use as it makes products easily accessible to customers, regardless of where they are. However, this only works if the website is optimised for various devices. A lot of shoppers use smartphones and tablets to buy products online, showcasing how important it is to have a mobile-friendly website. Your Shopify store should be responsive depending on the type of device it’s being seen on.
- Improve Your Product Descriptions – Descriptions tell customers everything they need to know about your products, but search engines also use them to generate ads and rank the pages on search results. You can build your business by ensuring all of your product descriptions are informative, engaging and written with SEO in mind.
- Change Your Website Layout – The way that your pages and products are organised on your Shopify website makes a big difference. Customers will likely venture elsewhere if the website is hard to navigate and the products are difficult to find. If you want to scale your business successfully, you need to make it as easy as possible for customers to buy your products. The entire website should have a logical, simple and easy-to-understand layout.
- Combat Cart Abandonment – Though you might have a flawless Shopify website, customers might be abandoning their carts at the last minute, losing you a sale and sending them elsewhere. This could happen for a lot of reasons, such as they notice high delivery costs or the payment process being too complicated. Cart abandonment is bound to happen occasionally, but combating too much cart abandonment can help you to give your business a much-needed boost.
- Outsource Your Digital Marketing – When a business is just starting out, it’s relatively easy to keep on top of your digital marketing, but this can become more difficult as the business grows. Finding the time to keep up with social media posts and blog content is difficult, but these are vital aspects of ensuring your business gets the advertising it needs. To give your business the best chance of growing, consider outsourcing your digital marketing to a team of experts.
Shopify is one of the largest ecommerce platforms out there, and it’s a fantastic place to host your online shop. As you can see, there are a lot of ways that you can scale and build your business with Shopify. Get in touch with the Quickfire Digital team to learn more about our Shopify websites.