Using Shopify’s range of tools and packages can be highly beneficial to your e-commerce company, saving you valuable time and creating a sleek storefront for your business. Find out how you can optimize your sales and e-commerce strategy with these nine Shopify expert tips.
Top 9 Shopify Expert Tips
1. Make your store more SEO-friendly
Some of the biggest technical SEO headaches in e-commerce come from duplicate and thin content.
Product filtering can create too many URLs (pages) that are needlessly indexed, or it can create no URL changes at all (making it harder to rank for product category keywords). It’s OK to have loads of unique URLs in the index – but only if search engines have something useful to index on those pages.
You can fix any common e-commerce problems in Shopify with a little bit of patience and technical know-how (ask a qualified Shopify Expert for help if you get stuck). The most important thing you have to do is to identify whether you need to get more or less, pages in the index.
- Try to follow best practice and organize your products according to guidelines to avoid any needless indexing issues.
- Use an SEO tool like Screaming Frog to crawl through all your site’s URLs – it mimics the behavior of search engine bots and will show you how they go about indexing your online store.
- Optimize all your image alt tags with your keywords. This will really help you rank in both image searches and normal search results. By doing this, you’ll be adding hundreds of more keywords to your site and helping people with screen readers.
- Give all your product pages good SEO title tags.
- Here are the Shopify SEO developer guidelines on how to edit page titles, meta descriptions and fix duplicate content issues. It’s not that hard to make these small changes yourself – but make sure you backup the site before you make any drastic changes.
2. Join free knowledge groups & go to meetups
Join online forums, share wikis, go to offline networking events – use the Shopify community around you.
- There are loads of online forums for Shopify users that are completely open. You can say what you want, ask any question, air any issue.
- Many people ask for advice by dropping their store URL into a forum and asking for feedback– a lot of the stuff that comes back is very useful (especially from the Shopify Experts), but be wary of people trying to sell their services to you. It’s also important to be mindful of boundaries – what you say will be out there in that forum forever.
3. Need something? Ask for it
Feel like you’re lacking an important feature? Want some changes made to your dashboard? If there is something specific you want Shopify to implement that other people will care about too – ask for it. Start a thread on a forum and get other store owners to pledge with you.
- Shopify has taken loads of community initiatives like these on board before – your voices will be heard.
- You’ll get the best results if you cover the business reasons behind the change that you need. If you just sound like you have an axe to grind with your request – people will ignore it.
4. Trial the new CRM for some free online marketing
Shopify has recently invested in a messenger based CRM called Kit. Kit is a virtual sales package who will do your marketing for you; he can get on with simple online marketing tasks like running a Facebook ad campaign.
- Kit is potentially a huge time-saver for busy store-owners who haven’t got the time to implement their marketing strategies themselves. (You still need to hold the reigns when it comes to investment and marketing – don’t put your business strategy in the hands of a bot)!
- If you go for Kit Pro you can connect even more apps to Kit to help you link him up with invoices, SEO and retargeting. Shopify will probably integrate Kit with more and more apps as the user base grows.
- There’s a free trial of Kit on right now – you might as well give it go.
5. Use your one-hour free design support wisely
Shopify offers anyone on a Basic plan or higher one hour of free design support. Use this resource wisely and read up on the design before diving in.
- Read up on Shopify templates beforehand so that you aren’t asking questions that are already covered elsewhere. Come armed with a list of your most burning questions.
- Spend time reading Shopify developer chats to get an idea of what’s actually possible in terms of design and customization.
6. Design your own theme for Shopify
Got a good developer to hand? Want to create something completely custom? You can actually submit a new theme to the Shopify family if you like.
- There are stringent requirements for submitted themes and all themes need to be internationalized before going to the marketplace.
- Creating custom themes can be a lucrative side business and a great online marketing tool as well.
- Working with a Shopify developer can give you full control over your e-commerce environment.
7. Add a discount to cart abandonment emails
Cart abandonment emails help you convert leads back into customers; they are a core element of any e-commerce email marketing strategy.
You probably knew that Shopify has a cart abandonment email template, but did you know you can automatically include a discount too?
Just go into the email template and paste this snippet of code into the email:
{% if url contains ‘?’ %}
{{ url | append: ‘&discount=ABC’ }}
{% else %}
{{ url | append: ‘?discount=ABC’ }}
{% endif %}
This snippet must be placed in two separate places in the template to replace {{ url }} and {{ shop.url }}. You will also need to replace the ‘ABC’ with your pre-set discount that will now be included in all your cart abandonment email templates.
Here’s a detailed tutorial on how to do it yourself.
Play around with the name of your discount – you could go for something cute like WEMISSYOU or DONTGO.
8. Use the basic store builder for free for 14 days
Got a new e-commerce idea you just can’t wait to get started with?
- Shopify’s online store builder has a free trial period of 14 days – go from no store to fully operational online store super fast.
- Use all the Shopify resources to help you get things up and running as fast as possible – get a logo design, autogenerate terms and conditions and use free e-commerce themes to cut down on setting up costs.
9. You need to work hard
It’s important to remember that no platform can do your SEO, conversion rate optimization or promotional work for you. Sure, a platform might be able to help by putting in some good features or offering solutions – but a lot of it boils down to you putting in the hard work and the hustle. Only you have the strategic overview of what is needed next.
- Running an online business is hard. Use spreadsheets and time management tools to help you stay on top of things and be more productive.
- Realize that sometimes you might need expert help to help steer things in the right direction.
- Learn as much as you can, be curious, and put everything you learn into practice.
- Don’t believe in any of those “I will get you to #1 in Google” promises – there are no magic bullets, only hard work.
Hopefully, these ideas have helped you get a little bit more out of your Shopify store or e-commerce venture. What’s your favorite Shopify hack you’ve seen?
See also: 5 Main Components Of A High Converting Facebook Sales Funnel
