The Truly Ultimate Guide To 10X Your Shopify Store Good news: You don’t have to know everything to grow an online store. Or be gifted with incredible intelligence. Or have a type-A personality. Or get lucky... In fact, you can set yourself on the road to massive eCommerce growth with a few simple ideas I’ll reveal to you below. How would your life change Not a pipedream. That’s if you woke up knowing: true eCommerce success. Your online store was making dozens, And that’s what this guide is all about. hundreds, or even thousands of sales You can grow your eCommerce busi- while you slept. ness, make money while you sleep, automate many manual processes, You automatically had psychological and save tons of time. triggers built into your store to maxi- mize conversions and average order And you don’t have to spend years value. studying eCommerce best practices or weeks trying to find the latest hot Your store is so sexy, your competi- products to get there. tion is irrelevant. All that’s required of you is a willing- ness to think about eCommerce in a different way than you’re probably used to. In this guide, you’ll learn: 01 eCommerce website design What are 10,000 visitors worth if you’re converting at 0.5%? Diddly. Let’s fix that. 02 eCommerce SEO Use Google to drive thousand of high-converting visitors. 03 Social media Get more likes than that one from Grandma. Discover how to make social media work for you. 04 Content marketing SEO and social media are almost impossible without con- tent. Learn how to create the best. 05 Customer service Keep customers coming back and get more free referrals. What’s not to like? 06 Location-based marketing Have a physical location? This section is perfect for you. 07 eCommerce marketing & growth strategies Learn everything else that didn’t fit in any of the previous categories. 08 18 Shopify apps and counting Wondering what the cool cats are using to grow their stores? Check these out. Section 1: 01 eCommerce Website Design Section 1: eCommerce Website Design No amount of eCommerce hacks, tips, or tricks will help you if your site sucks (not that your site sucks, but you know…). Even if your site is awesome, I’m willing to bet it could do with a few more tweaks. After all, in the words of Vince Lombardi (NFL player and coach): “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.” So, how do you optimize your Shopify store for maximum conversions? Obviously, one little tweak won’t change the world, but this section will cover the following: 1 eCommerce Site Navigation 2 Making Your Site Mobile-Friendly 3 Improving Your eCommerce Search Function 4 Making Your Site The Speed of Light 5 Better Product Descriptions & Options Let’s pimp your site. Section 1: eCommerce Website Design eCommerce Site Navigation 1 eCommerce Site Navigation Your site’s navigation (the links at the top of the page) are like the signs in the aisles at an unfamiliar grocery store. You’re sort of familiar with how things should look and they help you get to the goodies you want in that particular store. So, what does site navigation have to do with increasing your online sales? Only the fact that KISSmetrics lists bad navigation as the number one reason people leave a website! Bad site navigation causes friction and confusion, two of eCommerce owners’ biggest enemies. To combat this, your navigation should express your brand while also providing familiarity to your shoppers in order to build trust and make buying simple and easy. But this guide isn’t about vague notions of what you should do. It’s real, actionable stuff that you can use right here, right now. To improve your website navigation, do this: Work from the top down. Start high-level, with general and meaningful labels. Things like “Phone Cases”, “Shoes”, or even “Clothing”. Don’t get too fancy. Calling your shoe category “Foot Houses” or something weird to go with your brand probably isn’t that great of an idea, tvhough it could arouse curiosity and might be worth testing. (Oh, the contradictions! Conversion optimization is a scientific art, not an exact science.) Be logical and intuitive. If you have something that could go in two categories, put it in both categories. For example, Build.com puts the subcategory “Bathroom Lighting” under both “Bath- room” and “Lighting” parent categories. Go with what’s common. While it can be tempting to create some fancy navigation, for eCommerce sites it’s Section 1: eCommerce Website Design eCommerce Site Navigation often better to go with what people know. Again, the whole familiarity builds trust and cuts friction thing. Make top level navigation clickable. A 2013 Baymard Institute survey found that shoppers expected the top level of a dropdown or flyout menu and any headings in that menu to be active links. On the Macy’s website, for example, the top-level navigation labels are links to category landing pages. There you have it - our quick eCommerce site navigation tips. If you feel your site navigation needs an improvement, why wait? Go fix it right now. Section 1: eCommerce Website Design Making Your Site Mobile-Friendly 2 Making Your Site Mobile-Friendly We live in a world where more people own a mobile phone than own a toothbrush. Gross? Yea, but it says something: Mobile is important. Probably too important, but I’m not here to judge. The reason mobile matters isn’t because of how many people have them, but because of how many people use them to do their shopping. In 2015, roughly one-third of all sales came from mobile. But ignoring mobile doesn’t just cut your sales by a third. Sure, most people buy on their computers… but, they start their search on their phone. Roughly 45% of all shopping involves a mobile device, and 57% for millennials. If your store isn’t mobile friendly, you’re losing those people, too. So, how do you optimize your site for mobile? If you’re reading this, you’re probably using Shopify. You’re in luck - most Shopify stores are mobile-friendly. However, not all of them are, and if you made changes you may have un-optimized it. So, it’s a good idea to check. To check if your site is mobile-friendly, put it into Google’s mobile-friendly test. Section 1: eCommerce Website Design Making Your Site Mobile-Friendly If it’s not mobile-friendly, the tool will show you how to correct the issues. Keep in mind, however, that even if your site comes back positive, that doesn’t mean it’s user-friendly on mobile! It just means it has the proper code and load speed. You may still need to tweak your site. Visit your site on your phone. Answer these questions: • Does it look good? • Is it easy to navigate? • Is it difficult to click on anything (i.e. are buttons or links too small)? • Does it load quickly (within 3 seconds)? Note: If you’re unsure how to optimize your site for mobile or improve mobile usability, you can hire us to do it for you! 3 Improving Your eCommerce Search Function The search bar on your site is likely one of the highest-converting tools at your disposal. Chances are, if someone’s searching for something, they’re about ready to buy. Check this out: Footsmart saw an 82% improvement in conversion rates (!!) by simply optimizing their site’s search function. They made it stand out by changing the color to green, providing better filtering options, and displaying better results. Section 1: eCommerce Website Design Improving Your eCommerce Search Function How can you do the same? Here are some tips from KISSmetric’s post on search optimization: 1. Make your search bar stand out (by contrasting colors or making it bigger). 2. Provide better filtering options. 3. Offer semantic based search (meaning your search engine can understand “shoe” and “sneaker” should bring up similar results) using a tool like Instant Search Plus or Nextopia. 4. Implement intelligent autocomplete (similar to Google’s search suggestion function). Instant Search Plus and Nextopia can do this as well. 5. Use breadcrumbs to help people go back and forth (i.e. “All Products -> Women’s -> Shirts -> Red). See how Kohl’s does this in the image below. Site search all tuned up? Good, let’s keep going. Section 1: eCommerce Website Design Making Your Site The Speed of Light 4 Making Your Site The Speed of Light A major part in making your site mobile friendly (and in SEO, which we’ll discuss later) is making sure your site runs fast. In fact, according to surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less. And if the site isn’t loaded within 3 seconds, they’ll just leave! One study even found that a single second delay lead to a 7 % drop in conversions. So if you make $100 a day, in one year you’d lose $2,555 per one second of lag. Yikes! But you needn’t worry. There are plenty of simple things you can do to improve your site speed (...and some not so simple things). First of all, test your site’s load speed with PageSpeed Insights and Web Page Test. (I recommend both to get an accurate picture, as sometimes they’re not totally accurate.) Section 1: eCommerce Website Design Making Your Site The Speed of Light As you can see, they both show mobile and desktop version speeds.