Shopify The Ultimate Guide to Shopify

We understand that starting an ecommerce store from scratch can be a very stressful experience. The amount of choice you have initially in choosing the platform that’s right for you is exasperating enough. Perhaps you have a job already and you’re want to become a ‘sidepreneur’, but you don’t know where to turn for help.







One platform trumps all others when it comes to support and resources and that is Canadian giant Shopify. It has an abundance of features to help you get the most of your account including 24/7 support via chat and email, forums and the ecommerce university which has a tonne of handy blogs and guides.

We scoured through forums, Shopify’s blog posts and other materials and collated our favourite material, to bring you the ultimate guide to using Shopify, by the people who know it best, it’s employees. In the first of a two part guide, here’s what Shopify workers said about product page conversion, marketing, selling your story, working as a ‘sidepreneur’ and utilising your free $100 Adwords credit.

Build product pages that convert

“Include enticing buzzwords and phrases like “built to last”, that gets the reader excited about the product.
Add stock information to your page. Once your stock drops below a certain level you may actually see sales pick up, as it adds a sense of urgency to improve conversions by up to 332%.
Beyond just including the standard social share buttons, attach a hashtag unique to each product. This will help promote your product across different platforms that support hashtags such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Studies have shown that shipping and handling fees are the number one factor in cart abandonment, so displaying shipping information on your product description can be particularly beneficial.
Customer generated reviews increase conversion rates, as visitors are 63% more likely to purchase from a store that has reviews.
Use breadcrumbs, as this is an easy way for visitors to navigate back through their product catalogue, and would help with bounce rates” – Tucker Schrieber, Growth Team at Shopify

Outbound is dead, long live Inbound

“Inbound marketing is marketing that’s focused on getting found by customers. It’s the antithesis of the annoying telemarketer, such as blogging and infographics.
By creating and publishing thought provoking content on a regular basis, you’ll quickly get your name out there as a thought leader.
Give yourself a reasonable goal like publishing one valuable blog post per week. Inbound marketing costs run an impressive 61% less per lead than traditional marketing.
Studies show that 41% of B2B companies have acquired a customer through Facebook, 42% through Twitter, and 57% through their company blog” – Mark Hayes, Director of Communications

“Canva is a great tool for creating beautiful marketing images. What sets Canva apart is it’s drag and drop visual editor, which means you can simply select the elements you want
Death To The Stock Photo is a free subscription service that emails you a handful of beautiful photographs every month for use in your marketing content.” – Mark MacDonald, Content Marketing Manager at Shopify

Sell your story

“Everything you need to know about Article, a curated online store for men, you’ll learn in the first two sentences of their about page: “Your grandfather didn’t have to consider quality. Unfortunately, in today’s disposable culture, you don’t have that luxury.
With a simple bit of “gotcha” copy, Wrightwood turns buyer expectations about furniture stores on their head. ‘The big chains don’t charge high prices because they want lots of money. Or at least that’s not the only reason. Nope. They do it because they are inefficient’.
Au Lit Fine Linens three minute video lays out what the hundred words on the page is too polite to tell you. You spend 3,000 hours a year sleeping and you owe it to yourself to do it in pure cotton.
Joe & Justin at Natural Fource sum up what their company and their supplements are all about, by effectively saying “Hey, we’re just like you. We hate putting garbage in our bodies. If you do too, help yourself.”
Writing an about page is a tall order — you need to confidently tell your story while humanizing your company, all while encouraging product sales by helping visitors join your tribe”. Aaron Wrixon, guest poster

Work 9 to 5 and become a ‘Sidepreneur’

“Too many people, when they start out, have a bunch of ideas for products they would like to sell. Just launch one product from the line initially.
Because your time is limited, you need to start scheduling your side business activities, you can do this by simply using Google Calendar.
Save time by creating a series of “canned” responses in Gmail, to questions you frequently get in your inbox, to make it easier and quicker to respond to common questions you might get about shipping, your product and pricing.
It’s fun to come up with a name for your business and design a logo. Ultimately, these things are not as important as the amount of time most people pour into these aspects of their business.
Instead of processing, fulfilling and shipping each order yourself, look into hiring a company to do it for you. Look at the things you are doing or have to do to get your business up and running. Can you hire someone to get it done faster or even better?.
Tools like Buffer and Hootsuite allow you to schedule your Tweets and Facebook page posts ahead of time” – Corey Ferreira, Content Marketer at Shopify

Don’t waste your Adwords credit

“Creating AdWords Campaigns involves a planning step (products and goal), a research step (keyword planner tool and analytics), and an execution step (campaigns and ad creation)
Ask yourself, which of my products have the highest ROI? Put this into Google Trends to see which has the most opportunity.
The key ways to return results is to use separate Ad Groups for each product and Modified Broad Match on your keywords. Ad groups allows for tighter control and Modified Broad Match is a tool you can use to refine the searches your keywords match.
Focus your clicks by using location targeting, also when you’re writing ads for your product, you only have 3 lines and your display URL to use. That means you need to find every advantage you can when you’re building your ads.
Lastly, download the free Google Shopping Shopify App to sync your store with Google Merchant Center. Product Listing Ads appear above searches and provide an advantage over standard text ads” – Tommy Walker, Marketing at Shopify
Want to read part 2? Head over to the Veeqo blog and subscribe to keep up to date on its release.
Author Bio: Richard Protheroe is a Content Marketing Executive at Veeqo. Veeqo allows you to connect your Shopify and Amazon accounts to manage your stock in one centralised place.