4 Tips for Running a Shopify Business

Over 44 million people purchase items from a Shopify store. With the decline of brick-and-mortar businesses, Shopify stores have become an increasingly popular way to earn a living. But running a Shopify business comes with its hardships.

From difficulty in finding customers to complexity in setting up your store, you can find growing your eCommerce business challenging. To maximize your efficiency and stand out from the competition, you need to optimize the essential aspects of your online store.

Here are some Shopify tips to make sure you’re focusing on the stuff that grows your business.

1. Create a User-Friendly Website

Your site is the first impression a potential customer gets of your online business. Therefore, crafting an eye-catching site is crucial to helping your store convert visits into sales. It’s estimated that 80% of customers will leave a site if it doesn’t cater to their needs. This means a user-friendly eCommerce store is paramount.

Since customers can be put off by finding a product in a sea of inventory, you should ensure your site has trouble-free navigation. You can create categories, sub-categories, and internal variations to showcase the products in your store.

You can also enable searchability. Unlike regular websites, eCommerce websites have a lot of pages. If you don’t enable the product search option on your website, your customers may have a hard time finding the products they want to buy.

Enabling searchability allows easy access to products, increasing conversions for your online store. You can also research color psychology and use theme colors that appeal to the customer.

In addition, you should also focus on your eCommerce call-to-action (CTA). It helps your customers navigate to the section where the conversion can take place. Other user-friendly website practices you can implement:

Keep your contact page updated
Make the header fixed and interesting
Make images eye-catchy
Show little text
Minimize pop-ups
Optimize Your Shopify Website for SEO

35% of total traffic for online stores comes from search engines. For your eCommerce business to rank higher on search engines, you need to optimize for SEO. Lacking an SEO strategy for your store can mean missing out on a lot of traffic and revenue.

But there’s more to optimizing your website for SEO than clickbait and keyword stuffing. This makes the process a little bit intimidating since you’re optimizing product listings instead of content.

Before you optimize for SEO, you can notify search engines of your existence by registering your store with Google, Bing, or more. Having a good On-Page SEO ensures your online store has well-organized sections with clear keyword-optimized signage.

You can also use features of Off-Page SEO like backlinks to ensure your store is mentioned and referred by other non-competitive sites.

Additionally, optimizing your technical SEO ensures your Shopify website is fast, safe, and functional to increase your search visibility.

2. Make Your Website Mobile-Focused

With 79 percent of Shopify traffic coming from smartphones, your eCommerce website should be mobile-focused. If your store isn’t optimized for smartphones, your site may glitch out and cause customers to leave.

To optimize for mobile, you can check the Shopify theme to see if it looks good on mobile devices. Since space is scarce on mobile phones, you can leave out the navigation bar and instead use the space for images, text, and content.

You can use that space to add text, images, or content, it’s a matter of optimizing your space on the mobile website. You should also consider redesigning your page for your mobile device by

Avoid using horizontal images
Using images sparingly to draw focus
Using minimal text
Test the thumb-friendliness
Ensure there are few to no popups
Optimize your Shopify site for different screen ratios like phone, tablet, etc.

You can also consider creating a mobile app. It can help draw and convert new customers that prefer using apps.

3. Work On Customer Retention

While your Shopify business needs to attract new customers, it’s much profitable to retain old customers. Since loyal customers trust the quality of your products, they’ll end up spending more on them. This can increase your return on your investments.

This is why you need to establish trust with your customers by creating value through your products. You can also update your accounts and come up with strategies that encourage your customers to align more with your online store than competitors.

What’s more, you can remind them of your business and offer advice and insight that adds value to them through personalized marketing campaigns.

Offering customer loyalty programs and discount offers is a great way to reward your loyal customers and bring them back to your online store. Additionally, lenient return policies can lead to fewer abandoned carts and increase sales.

Posting on social media can be a good way of spreading the word about your Shopify store. It not only promotes your online store but also connects you with target customers.

You can create social media accounts for your business on different platforms to increase traffic to your e-commerce business and build your brand. You can link your Shopify store to your social media profiles to help convert your targeted leads into loyal shoppers.

While posting on social media is great, it’s important to take note of the time you post on the platforms. Whether you’re promoting your products or writing a blog post, scheduling your posts can be a central part of having a successful social media marketing strategy. You can auto-schedule your social media posts, posting at times your target audience is active on social media platforms.

The content you post on social media should also be relevant. It should keep your customers engaged without making them feel overwhelmed.