5 KEY THINGS TO CONSIDER BEFORE YOU BUILD YOUR SHOPIFY STORE

Shopify has come to take a place as one of the leading platforms that generate and manage e-commerce stores. It is currently being used by over 1,700,000 million merchants across 175 countries.

Although Shopify is equipped with numerous features to help you manage your e-commerce store, you’d face huge challenges that would frustrate your time as a merchant if you fail to pay attention to some of these key factors when building your Shopify store. 

You should consider these 5 key things to keep things organized.

1 Set up your Shopify domain

In the early stages of setting up your Shopify store you get a free myshopify.com domain, e.g. “https:// new-commerce-brand .myshopify.com.”

When you look at it from a user perspective, this doesn’t look great. It prevents your business from building a strong brand. Your brand is more likely to be remembered when you have a unique domain (explained further in this article is how you can build trust and authority).

If you have a time constraint, you can work with a Digital Marketing agency who can assist with your domain set-up. Or you look to purchase domains from various online platforms like Google Domains.

It’s very likely that when you follow the steps to update your domain, you may come to see an error where tells you that your domain is not connected. This is no mishap, or wrong input as it can take up to 24 hours for the domain name to get updated.

2 Have good quality media assets

To prepare and finalize any form of media is a lengthy process which requires a lot of collaboration, planning and reviewing. Having a library of good quality media assets pre-arranged before your Shopify build will not just bring your store together, it would save you valuable time later down the road.

The visual assets you need are:

Product images

Branded images

Selection of stock images

ESP, JPG and PNG logos

Style sheet

Branded graphic motifs

Icons

Video files

This may sound like a lot but you are better off having a wider library of assets to select from when building out your Shopify site than not.

Another strong tip for any branded images that you may come to have, (namely photography with your logos on top), is creating a version without your logo so you can use it across your Shopify store or other marketing projects. A point you should consider is using simple design tools like Canva, or for more dynamic content you can use apps such as Video Background.

3 Map out the mobile version of your site

Despite things going extremely digital, some business owners still haven’t had the thought of having the mobile version of their websites. Humble advice? Stay far from that thought.

Why is this critical? According to our blog How Site Speed Impacts the Customer Journey we found that 79% of customers who are dissatisfied with a site’s load speed would most likely not return. This can be a significant chunk of revenue that you are not capitalizing on.

One of the advantages of Shopify is that it allows you tweak your settings to make your website have a better look on mobile. But it would be a good idea to run several site speed tests via platforms such as Google Page Speed whilst checking if your website has any broken links. Eastside Co’s Easy Redirects app is a strong tool to track and repair broken links.

Site speed is one of the factors that you need to pay attention to, there are other things such as image or CTA placement, pop-up minimisation or optimizing your site on different browsers. These also have a great and direct impact on the performance of the mobile version of your Shopify site. This would be a good opportunity to share your mobile web design to a UI/UX designer for further customization.

4 Consider a chatbot or link to direct messaging on social media

Technological advancement has enabled businesses more than ever before to reach out to its target audience in smart ways. According to smallbizgenius 1.4 billion people are using chatbots to answer simple questions or gather feedback on their websites.

By having a series of answers pre-written for your chatbot, your customers can get instant answers. This helps save time and operational costs for you as a business. However, if you prefer to answer separately via social media, you can integrate Shopify with Facebook Messenger. Effective communication is always a great feature, but for optimization, it’s best you allow a better customer experience via your Shopify store.

5 Understand the fundamentals of SEO

So much information about SEO strategies are flying around, but it’s better to have full knowledge of SEO, starting with the basics. Shopify does offer a range of tools for you to improve the SEO of your Shopify store, and once you know how to utilize these tools you are one step closer to building an effective Shopify Store :

Produce a sitemap

Editing and optimizing your images promotes site speed (you should consider platforms such as Pixlr or Canva)

Include relevant keywords to your corresponding pages

Unique titles should be your go to helping hand, while you add meta tags to every page

Building out your Shopify store’s links and promoting these links will improve the visibility of your site. One way to make Google or other search engines to make your site more accessible is by continuously working in your SEO strategy from the start.

These are our 5 key things that you should think about before building your Shopify store.

If you’re looking to get started on Shopify, drop us a line – we have solutions lined up to help design and develop your store quickly, with marketing and business strategies available to support your brand on its journey.