A Shopify event for small businesses — A recap

Shopify is an e-commerce platform for retailers looking to set up an online store in minutes. With futuristic advances in e-commerce, Shopify’s success in these few years has been nothing short of exemplary.

Wide-eyed and eager, every retailer is jumping on the Shopify bandwagon and rightly so. Besides the obvious accounting, customer support, logistics, web optimization and marketing, features like calculated carrier shipping, advanced customer reports, abandoned cart recovery, fraud analysis and Shopify POS surely grab your attention.

So when Shopify with WeWork conducted an event on Saturday 21st April 2018, small and medium scale entrepreneurs assembled to interact with experts answering queries about digital experience.

The YFret team attended the event as a Shopify Partner. It was a window of opportunity for us to learn about issues and grievances faced by online retailers and how to resolve them.

Pain points faced by entrepreneurs

The evolution of digital marketing has moved beyond just affordable technology and rising competition. With consumers now who are better informed, online retailers face challenges which also have changed over time.

During our interactions with the many online retailers present at the event, a few challenges that came up prominently are as follows:

• Generating Traffic: With omnichannel fast gaining ground, retailers now can no longer rely on just one channel to drive their traffic. Targeting all devices and using all channels online retailers must gather their wits about the growing trends in digital marketing and utilize them for better reach and coverage to be visible where their users are paying attention.

Read more on this from our blog: Omni-channel marketing: 6 channels you may not have thought of

• Capturing quality leads: Every business needs to generate a healthy amount of leads to get the most out of their marketing and maintain their ongoing undertakings. The innumerable ways to generate traffic are readily available online; however, a consistent effort with right content will generate the most qualified lead. Blogs, content marketing, social media advertising and email marketing are few of the most effective channels.

Read more on spam for email marketing here: Is your email marketing sliding down the slippery slope called spam?

• Conversion: A major growing concern for online retailers is conversion. Anytime a visitor takes action, their journey from registering to viewing a product to abandoning items and to a purchase on your website is a conversion. Evolving businesses these days must optimally utilize technology and marketing efforts to convert leads to customers
• Retention: Attracting customers and retaining them would require effort but the former is more expensive. Interactive strategies to optimize their experience with the help of tailor-made, engaging content and an efficient customer support to get the most out of your business are some of the best ways to retain loyal customers.

What we suggest

• Personalization — Customized campaigns with relevant content tailor-made to each customer ensures customer satisfaction to a very large extent. Personalization based on intent (purchases), action (click/open), browsing behaviour and the individual (name) creates a sense of familiarity making the customer feel more important. The more a customer feels like the content sent to them are relevant, the more likely they are to make a transaction.
• Optimization — Through data-based decisions, repetitive and blast-to-all campaigns can be made more effective. Optimization can help in driving campaigns on any devices or software, to provide content for campaigns, drive more activity and better understand the customer.
• Automation — Create campaigns to automatically send to customers and subscribers. It helps in generating more revenue and allows more time for other marketing activities. Some of the tactics applied in automation are abandoned cart mail, purchase follow-ups and mapping browsing behaviour.

Knowing your audience well enough to answer their queries is a plus point but by listening to the questions we got a better understanding of the kind of issues faced by our audience. This is not only a valuable lesson but also a chance to investigate further and develop our own platform.

Benefits offered by Shopify and their partner ecosystem

Shopify enables the most important functionality to get started with an e-commerce platform with beautiful ready made templates.

Quick and easy to setup and use — Shopify offers an easy and quick way to launch an online store.

No tech worries — Now you don’t need any software expertise to launch a basic Shopify store as all software and hosting are provided by Shopify and its partners.

Secure and reliable — If you have an e-commerce store you will be dealing with sensitive customer information credit card details and impatient customer which means you need to be fast, secure and always online.

Mobile ready — Mobile-friendly websites are very important these days as more people are spending time on mobiles. All of the themes of Shopify are mobile friendly.

Shopify App — All the Shopify features can be accessed through its app anywhere and anytime which saves a lot of time for other activities.

Own payment gateway — Shopify has integrated with many payment gateways and also offers its own which is powered by Stripe.

Abandoned Cart Recovery — When a visitor to your store places a product in their shopping basket but leaves without paying it, a reminder mail is sent to these customers to complete their purchase.

For the day, the event seemed to go very well and was a huge success. The WeWork team worked to make the event a smooth one. For a few hours, the venue was turned into a hub of interactive, enthused online retailers pressed on the issue of ecommerce.

YFret was able to meet quite a few remarkable entrepreneurs invigorated to adopt the changing tide of the digital marketing world.

YFret is an AI based data driven, omni-channel marketing assistant. We enable you to integrate your POS data or external purchase history which is all brought to one place in three easy clicks. We provide deep insights analyzing product catalogue and track product and consumer behavior through their life cycle and track the performance of automatic and ad-hoc campaigns across channels to provide you insights for retargeting purposes.

This blog was written with contributions from Ankur Kumar. If you have questions please feel free to contact us or comment below.