10 Super Useful Insights From a Shopify Expert — 100% Free (1/2)
If you plan to launch your e-commerce, this article is for you. Maybe you already have a store, but something is not working as you would like. Or you are finally ready to take your business into the digital world, after many years of selling offline. It’s never too late for any of you to learn more and sell more online.
After more than 1 year working as a Shopify Expert, it’s time to recap some of the most important lessons I got. I will keep my focus on our favourite e-commerce platform and speak some of the good and bad decisions you may do while running your e-commerce. Hopefully, these pieces of advice will save you some money, time and headaches 👍
To make it easier to read, I’m splitting this article into 2 parts :) Follow me to check the next part. Coming very soon.
Take a look at the most interesting titles for you bellow and click to check them directly. Then leave your opinion and question as a comment, please :)
- Multi-language / currency stores may be a headache, but is that a problem?
- Custom design is totally worth it. Not sure if always though…
- Automate and work smart or go manual and work hard on the wrong things
- When we should use an app and stop crying for a few pennies
- Think. Stop thinking and do it. Think again when you have data
*You will see the next 5 topics in the second part of the article 😉
I. Multi-language / currency stores may be a headache, but is that a problem?
Nowadays many people want to start selling whatever they can all over the world online. Clients come to us with this epiphany of creating a store which will sell in US, Korea, Spain, Angola, and pretty much everywhere. The downside is that lots of people do not know what kind of work is required to achieve that dream. In Shopify, it may be a big problem to create a 100% perfect global store because it is not possible to localize a store to each country in the world in an easy way. Even if you use an app like Langify, the product titles will be in the main language at the checkout. For currency purposes, you can use one of my favourite apps to make the conversions based on the visitor’s locations. But as it happens with the language, at the checkout the customer will see the prices in the main currency of the store.
Why is that? 😕 Shopify’s checkout will always remain a mystery for you unless you upgrade to Shopify Plus. That’s the only way to get access to the checkout code. Without that plan, no app will be able to change language neither currency in that phase of the buying cycle. That’s bad for your client. He/She will definitely get confused by the sudden change at the checkout. Of course, there are some ways to prevent these misunderstandings. For example, the currency app recommended above displays an explanatory note in the cart. This message makes it clear, why the customer sees a different currency at the checkout. Not perfect, but still pretty good — it reduces some of the friction. Why is Shopify so mean to insist on having such a structure? From my point of view, the reason is very simple: the intention is to make you start by focusing on one country at a time. Local stores perform way better than international ones. If you don’t do your best to first dominate your region or country, it will be much harder to conquer other markets.
Don’t worry. I have an advice too for those who want to ignore my last comment and are ready to launch an international store. I definitely recommend you to try Jumpseller. This is a platform developed especially for merchants like you. All the functionalities we discussed are available from the beginning in their stores. No extra plugins or apps needed 👌
II. Custom design is totally worth it. Not sure if always though…
“I want to start my e-commerce. I want it next week, please. And by the way, make the design.”
Ups, not so simple my friend. I understand what you mean: you want a nice looking website, professional, trustworthy. But don’t think you must have a custom design to achieve it. Shopify Themes Store has many amazing templates for you. They’re very editable and easy to set up. Not only that but they also:
- are 100% responsive
- follow all the standard SEO best practices you don’t want to worry about
- you have guaranteed support (no need to keep hiring developers for small fixes)
Shopify makes a deep analysis of those themes before accepting them into their store. There’s a good reason why there aren’t thousands of them available there.
Besides the reasons above, it’s waaaay cheaper and faster to customize a theme. From my experience, it’s 6x cheaper on average than getting a custom design. If you only need to test your concept, that’s the way to go. If you have a short budget and/or a tight deadline — that’s the way to go.
Definitely, there’s a place and time for custom solutions. Don’t misunderstand me. We at Ents love to design and develop custom solutions. But we love even more to give cost-effective solutions for everybody.
So, what do I need to start thinking about speaking with a designer? 🎨
- Money free to spend (you shouldn’t spend on design, money you saved for inventory and marketing)
- Time. As my father in law says: “A quick solution is a bad solution”. I rest my case.
- Data. A custom design can become a big push forward for your store. When you’re doing it from scratch, you can have everything you ever wanted to be there, right? Nope. What? 😿 You can’t fill your e-commerce with gadgets, pop-ups, and slideshows which you dream awake about. You shouldn’t, because they may seem attractive, but they can also hurt you at the end of the day. When you’re creating your new layout, you should base it on what you expect your customers to need. It’s great to think about it — do my customers really need this? This question will help you to avoid useless elements in your store. Your customers will be happy and thankful for it. Nobody wants crazy colours and plugins screaming for their attention. Now, better than asking this to yourself, why not ask your audience? Hi dear customer, do you need my facebook profile always thrown at you while you visit my store? I guess not. Good data will save you time and money. If most of your customers buy on mobile, it’s useless to insert a huge panoramic pic of your office on the homepage, for example.
Conclusion: Custom designs are awesome, but do it only if you’re prepared to handle it.
III. Automate and work smart or go manual and work hard on the wrong things
This rule applies to almost anything in your life. There are so many ways of working hard for poor results and don’t realise it. Check your daily and weekly routine and you’ll definitely find some painful points. Usually, stuff that needs to get done and nobody wants to do it, e.g.:
- send invoices
- fulfil orders
- to answer customer queries
- update your social media status
The last one is empty on purpose, so you can write down your own personal pain point, on which you spend more than 4h weekly. Figuring them out is a great opportunity for you to realise new ways of making your business go to the next level. The first thing you need to know before going on reading this point is your time value. Once you know your magic number, you will start thinking twice before repeating any task. The good news is that for almost each one of these problems there is already a solution.
For example:
- Wasting time on order fulfillment — use a local drop shipping service. If your business is not big enough for their minimum numbers, rent a small space and hire a team of students to do it. It’s simple and flexible work, they’ll love it and you’ll save money by saving your time
- Wasting too much time pairing payment — change for an accounting system which connects to Shopify or hire a Shopify Expert to develop it for you
- Wasting too much time with invoicing — use Sufio
This is only the tip of the iceberg. With the free time you’ll have you can focus on getting more sales, thus increasing the value of your time. If you are still not sure about how to achieve what you need, do not despair. Contact Shopify Support for advice or drop me an email or comment (we offer 1-hour consultation for free).
IV. When we should use an app and stop crying for a few pennies
This topic is very much related to the previous one. If you need to read this one, don’t skip the n.3. Let’s use a concrete example to make this discussion simpler.
You have 10 suppliers and each one has their favourite way of keeping you updated about their stock availability. XML feeds, google spreadsheets, email, you name it. You spend 2 hours per day updating your inventory, but you still need to makes some refunds every month. It’s impossible for you to keep it updated in real time. You find an app that might help you, named Stock Sync. For your specific situation, the cost would be 15$ per month. You start panicking: “Another app 😠 Why Shopify makes my life so hard and expensive? 😿”
Take a deep breath, it’s not so bad. That’s actually a very good deal. Think about it. You’ll spend 180$ per year on one hand. But you’ll save more than 20 days of brainless and boring tasks (actually days of 24h, not working days of 8h). Unless you can hire someone to do it for you and pay them 37 cents or less per hour, please just install the app.
*Please don’t hire anybody on those terms. Pretty sure that’s illegal and/or immoral 😅
V. Think. Stop thinking and do it. Think again when you have data
Here you are. Having some sales, but nothing amazing as you have expected. Or possibly you are able to live from what started as a side business, but you want to raise your income. What to do next? There are so many voices out there and it’s so hard to know what will work for you. SEO, discounts, social media, marketplaces, PPC… 😐🔫
Think. What do you want to achieve? Get a SMART goal and work towards it. How? Make the wisest decision you can with the information you have. Stop panicking and start doing something :) test it. It’s simple.
If you don’t have enough traffic to make a relevant A/B testing, simply test your ideas and see if it goes well or not. Then double check your SMART goal and write down what you’ve achieved so far with that method. If you’re in a good direction, keep improving it, if not kill the idea with no mercy and move on. Not saying to always go all-in on each new great thing that will solve all your problems (which usually are scams). Get good documentation on each method you want to test and then try it to see if it fits your business. My point is: don’t spend 1 month making crazy projections on how changing the shipping fees will affect the conversions. It’s much better to actually play with it for a week and see how it works out. Even if you need to test it during a month at the end you’ll have real data and not some ghosty kind of ideas and illusions.
That’s it, for now. 😆 Thanks a lot for reading until here. I hope this adds some value to your business and motivates you to keep working and focusing on your dream. You may now look forward to the second part of this article.
If you have any question about Shopify or if you need any kind of advice for your online business, feel free to ask. There are maaaany ways of reaching me and my colleagues. Here are the most popular ones:
- Book a 15 min call
- Email us at treebeard@ents.co (I know…cool email address)
- Comment this article
- Check our website(s)
If you really want to get my attention, clap a lot 👏 😇
