Tag: shopify store

7 Essential Things to Keep in Mind Before Building a Shopify Store

Over 1.75 million merchants across 175 countries trust Shopify to power their e-commerce stores. It is one of the leading platforms that allow merchants to efficiently build and run an online storefront. Shopify says they will do all the heavy lifting, while you focus on entertaining your customers and gain more profits. However, it is more complicated than that.

While Shopify offers tons of features to create a feature-rich and high performing online store, failing to pay attention to some key elements while building a Shopify store can create severe problems in the future. If you are just starting out with a Shopify store, this post is for you. These crucial tips will help you set up a robust Shopify store and keep it organized.

#1 Focus on developing a mobile version of the site

Shopify is a great e-commerce design tool. However, even in 2022, many businesses don’t care to give a thought to create a mobile version of the site. Having an excellent mobile version of the site is important because 8 out of 10 people will quit using your site if it is not properly displayed on their device. That is a loss of 80% traffic.

Thankfully, Shopify offers several features that allow you to optimize your site for mobile devices and make it responsive on any device. Some handy tips while creating mobile-optimized design are keep the header fixed, show as little text as possible, use minimal images, make CTA buttons bigger and optimize the site for different screen sizes.

#2 Buy your own domain name

When you first set up your Shopify store, it will give you a free myshopify.com domain. It is a sub-domain and it looks like “your-store-name.myshopify.com”. From the visitor perspective, this doesn’t look professional, which can prevent you from creating a strong brand image. Moreover, all your SEO efforts will be directed towards Shopify main domain.

Whenever you plan to launch your Shopify online store, make sure you first buy your own unique domain name. Don’t wait for your store to grow before you buy a domain. Buying a domain name cost a couple of dollars, but it gives you more than that. You can build your brand identity and make SEO work for your store.

#3 Use high-quality media

Although Shopify offers plenty of features right out-of-the-box, some things aren’t under its control. The most important thing that makes your store complete are the visual assets of your store. You built a perfect website, but if it doesn’t include high-quality product images, stock images, video files, GIFs and icons, you are getting nowhere.

This may sound a lot, but poor media files can easily put off your prospective shoppers. Therefore, use high-quality media files in your store, and include different images of your product along with detailed specification, so your buyers can get an idea should your products cater to their needs.

#4 Install essential plugins

Shopify offers more than 6000 plugin and apps to help extend the functionality and add more custom features to your site. Installing the right plugins can drive more leads and maximize revenue. Here is a list of some of the best Shopify plugins:

Voyager Upsell & Cross-sell – Recommend and sell more products

One Click Social Login – Let your shoppers sign-in automatically using popular social networks

Plug in SEO – Discover simple ways to optimize SEO and improve ranking

ReferralCandy – Reach new prospects with a powerful referral program

Jugde.me – Build social proof with product reviews and ratings

While installing plugins and apps, make sure you add only those you need as adding each plugin will increase your website loading speed and may affect site performance.

#5 Prepare a solid marketing plan

You have invested a lot of time and money in building a great Shopify store, but you don’t know how to attract target audience to your store and convince them to buy from you. A solid marketing plan that defines your efficient marketing strategies based on your target audience is what you need.

It does take time to understand your market niche and build a marketing plan. However, if you do it right, your marketing techniques will help you get your products in front of the right buyers. As a part of the market research, learn about what marketing techniques your competitors use to understand what works and what requires improvement.

#6 Familiarize yourself with basic SEO

When you build a store with Shopify, it optimizes every page with default SEO settings. Shopify offers adequate tools to improve SEO, but it is up to you how you use them. Once you familiarize yourself with basic SEO settings, you are a step closer to making your website appear in organic search results.

Spare some time to optimize keywords, submitting a sitemap, adding title tags, alt tags and meta descriptions, link building and content creation. Optimizing these on-page and off-page elements will most certainly help in improving visibility of your store on leading search engines, such as Google and Yahoo. SEO is huge, so keep working on it to make your website rank higher and make it more accessible.

#7 Create proper About Us and Contact Us page

You have identified your target customers, but do your customers know you well? Many customers want to know about merchants they are giving out their money. In fact, Contact us and About us pages are some most visited pages of a Shopify store. So, don’t make a mistake of assuming that your customers will buy anything from you without knowing about your brand.

Create appropriate About us and Contact us page by including the details of your company, your journey so far, what makes your brand unique, customer support contact number and email, and address of your physical location if you have. Also, include a contact form where your buyers can leave a quick message. This builds customer loyalty and adds professionalism to your business.

Conclusion

The aforementioned tips will most certainly help you in running a successful Shopify store. If you wish to start a Shopify store, but don’t have adequate resources, get in touch with us today. We offer 360 degree Shopify solutions to help you set up a custom e-commerce store and boost your online sales.

Top Tips to Choose the Right Shopify Theme and Make Your Store Stand Out

E-commerce industry is blooming at a faster pace, and more customers are shopping online than ever. Hence, if you don’t have an e-commerce store, then there has never been a better time to start one than now. Shopify emerged as one of the best platforms to build a robust e-commerce store. One reason why many online store owners love Shopify is the flexibility it offers with plenty of Shopify themes.

A Shopify theme is a template that defines how your store will look and feel to the users. Themes come with different layout and styling options that can be customized according to your needs. It is crucial to have a good store design that reflects your brand identity and keep your shoppers engaged for longer. Furthermore, a theme can have a significant impact on the performance of your e-commerce store in terms of customer experience, trustworthiness and conversion rates. Therefore, it is imperative to choose a theme that would suit your store without a wrinkle.

In this post, we will guide you on how to pick the perfect theme for your Shopify store.

#1 Prepare a list of key features and functions you want

Before you start finding a perfect theme for your Shopify store, list down all the primary features and functions you would want in your store. Whether you want video player, forms, blog, landing pages, cart drawer, large catalog size, email pop-up or new product highlight section, having a list of required features in hand will help you find the right theme more easily.

If you see a theme that has one feature you want, but have five other features missing, then move on. Look for a theme that offers more features, and get remaining missing features added with the help of a Shopify developer.

#2 Research your competitors

If you are not sure what do you want in your theme, it doesn’t harm to get inspiration from your competitors to get an idea about what you can add to your store. Learn about what theme they are using, what elements they have included in their storefront, what color combinations look best and what elements are distracting.

Learning about features and elements will help you choose a suitable theme for your store. Moreover, you can identify missing critical features in your competitor’s website and implement those to get a competitive edge.

#3 See whether it is mobile-friendly and light-weight

Another important thing to consider while picking a Shopify theme is to check the mobile view of the theme. That is because the number of mobile users is growing every day, so there are high chances that most of the website traffic will come from mobile. If you fail to deliver a great mobile experience, you may lose a potential sale. Therefore, ensure the theme you choose make your website easy to access from the mobile device.

Website speed is also crucial to its success. It can directly impact bounce rate, conversions and search rankings. Many Shopify themes come with fancy features, which may look attractive, but they slow down the speed of your website. So, look for themes that are lightweight, meaning they are not loaded with unnecessary elements, and focus more on performance.

#4 Inbuilt SEO features

SEO-friendliness is another important factor to consider while choosing the right Shopify theme. A beautifully designed site is of no use if it doesn’t rank in search engines. When your Shopify store has an SEO-optimized theme, it means it follows the best SEO practices to help you increase search engine rankings. SEO-friendly themes welcome more organic traffic to your website and boost conversions. Shopify offers a number of themes that are SEO-friendly right out-of-the-box.

When looking for the right Shopify theme that helps your store get discovered organically on Google and other leading search engines, make sure it is compatible with all devices, have clear navigation, support rich snippets and loads quickly.

#5 A great theme design and aesthetics

Attracting and retaining customers is a key to building a successful Shopify store. You can attract prospective customers to your site using SEO best practices, but retaining them is all about delivering a great experience. If your website is not attractive or interesting, then visitors may not stay on your store for long and may quit using your site.

A good theme contains many elements, such as matching color palettes, appealing user interface, proper background, readable font style and font color and so on. As your customers can’t really feel your products, they depend on visuals to experience them. So, if you succeed in grabbing their attention, they are more likely to buy from you.

#6 Shortlist based on your budget

Shopify themes are available at varying price points, ranging from zero to $250. Before you decide to buy a theme, determine what features you need and how much you are willing to spend on them. As with everything else in life, you get what you pay for, and it goes same with Shopify themes. Hence, differentiate between must-have and nice-to-have features.

Free themes are good, but if you are looking for a theme that offers a greater level of customization and features, then go for the premium ones. Since premium themes are designed to expand your store functionalities, there are good chances that you will find most of the features in your theme.

Choosing the Right Shopify Theme

With so many factors to consider, it can be overwhelming to choose the right theme for your Shopify store. You want all the necessary features and convey your brand message, and at the same time you want to ensure it fits in your budget and can be customized the way you want. At Island Wizards, we help you go through this theme selection process and offer theme customization service that will not only suit your store, but also make your shoppers fall in love with your brand.