Show Notes
Building a successful ecommerce business is tough, but the difference between a great store and one that doesn’t perform really isn’t that different.
In this episode we’re going to share with you six mistakes most Shopify store owners make and how you can avoid them.
You’re going to learn
- What apps give you an unfair advantage
- Analytics, which ones matter most
- And the number one factor on whether or not someone will buy from you.
Check out our Ecomm Accelerator Process free training, a proven system to help frustrated store owners become the impactful store owner and generate consistent sales in their store. Watch the training now for free: https://www.optimizedstoreowner.com/ecomm-training
Connect with us
Transcript
Christian [00:00:00] Running an efficient and optimized Shopify store can be very, very challenging with different themes, apps, plug ins, different strategies out there. And, what we want to do in this episode is break down six of the biggest mistakes that we've seen personally with our agency and mistakes that people may not even think it's a mistake. Things like maybe speed analytics, a little bit of a teaser right there. But check out this episode. You're not going to want to miss this. You definitely want to implement something today from this episode. Check it out.
Narrator [00:00:35] This is The Marketing Natives providing actionable ways to grow, improve and succeed in your business and now your hosts, Christian and Aaron.
Aaron [00:00:50] One thing that is really interesting to me is the amount of people who are on Shopify and creating not only themes, but apps and like everything that goes along with it. So as we've grown our YouTube channel, shout out to you guys, go check us out on YouTube for anything for Shopify and Facebook. But, that was not supposed to be a selfish plug. But enjoy it. My point is that we've had a lot of people hit us up for all these different apps and software that you didn't even think that you needed for your store. It's just to the point where it's overwhelming. These people are like, all right, we want you to partner with us. No, we want you to partner with us and one of them has 2,005 star reviews and the other one has 3,000 five star reviews. And so, it can be really overwhelming and it can, I don't know, it just can be a lot. So I think that, you know, for me just from the outside, even looking in and looking out, looking in to look out, just seeing all the opportunities and looking at all the different things, it's kind of hard to know what to choose. So I feel good about this episode to help people and navigate them through their store so that they don't make the same mistakes, they don't get overwhelmed and they don't go down the path that will potentially cost them dollars.
Christian [00:02:04] Yeah, I think it's going to be very interesting. Plus, it's something that we've done with all of our ecomm clients where we've broken down all their websites and seen what they're doing wrong and what they're doing right. So we have firsthand data on some of the biggest mistakes that we see store owners on Shopify make and things that hopefully will steer you clear of and then be things that you've never even heard of.
Christian [00:02:40] Yeah, I think this is going to be very, very beneficial for everyone who has a Shopify store. I think that's going to be, at least, one of these things that you can improve on. I know for sure.
Christian [00:02:52] Just to be clear, everything that we do here for Shopify and for e-commerce are all part of our ECOMM accelerator process, where we make sure that frustrated store owners can become more impactful store owners by implementing, like today we're implementing alternatives and tactics and strategies on the actual website to increase sales. But the ECOMM accelerator process goes through a lot of different things, a lot of different aspects of your business, including marketing, advertising, et cetera. So in order to benefit fully from the whole program, we're going to be giving you a link at the end of the episode for you to check out. It's a free training that we have. So that's just a little bit of a tease of what will be giving you at the end of this episode. But without further ado, let's start with one of the biggest mistakes that not only Shopify store owners make, but regular website owners and business owners where they have this mentality of, you know, once it's built, we can just forget about it, right? It's like a setting it and forget it, build a website, build a Shopify store, and then you absolutely have no plan to grow. You have no strategy. You think that you can do the bare minimum and people will come in and buy your product. We see this every single time that we work with someone. It's just not the way they should be thinking when it comes to building any sort of website, or for this matter, of a Shopify store. Even if you have the greatest idea in the world, nobody is going to know about it because you don't have a plan to let people know about this great idea. Right? So having an idea, having the right audiences and doing that research are all important. But besides doing all that and having a great product, you need to have a plan, a strategy to grow that website, to grow the visitors to that website. So then you have a better opportunity to sell more.
Aaron [00:05:05] Right.
Aaron [00:05:06] I think this gets broken up to still just number one. But just to clarify here, because we do both sides, we grow e-commerce brands in our agencies. So we see both sides from the marketing and the branding and I think to clearly differentiate the two of them, marketing attracts the person for the first time. But the brands, what keeps them sticking around? So you may have an amazing website. Christian may design an amazing website for you, for the brand side, but no one's going to see it and stick around if they don't have the marketing side. So you've got to figure out a way, a source to drive traffic there. And so, absolutely, we've built some amazing sites and people were like, hey, so nobody's coming here, and we try to be as upfront as possible and just be as candid with possible as you know, even on here where we say you've got to have a strategy and we've even implemented where, "Hey, what's your plan for marketing during the website process? That's because we don't want you to build an amazing website with us and then not see results. We want you to start implementing a strategy to drive sales because that's the whole point you're building a site for. So almost to a point where it's even more important, like I'd rather you have traffic. You can fix a design problem. If you have traffic, you can't really optimize a website and then be like, hey, I put a new logo or I put a new color scheme or theme on here, and it's going to make me more business because if you don't have the traffic, it doesn't matter. So just want to clarify the marketing and branding side of that. So it's kind of like one side of it.
Christian [00:06:34] Yeah and I think with that too, maybe Shopify store owners may not think too much that they need to do SEO, but I think it is a very important component to to drive in traffic and e-commerce SEO and Shopify SEO are a little bit different than your typical website SEO that you normally do. So take that into consideration as well. If someone's telling you that you need to do SEO for your Shopify store, they're not lying to you. That's a great way to increase traffic to your store.
Christian [00:07:07] So keep that in mind when you're developing this plan to grow, SEO is an important aspect besides marketing and advertising as well.
Christian [00:07:18] I guess another big thing that we see is that stores that are just absolutely bloated with 20 to 30 different apps and plugins.
Aaron [00:07:29] Oh, yeah.
Christian [00:07:29] Store owners just, "Oh yeah, I need that feature, I need that feature", and they just add apps to their Shopify store when what this is doing in the back end is just bloating your website with code and things. I've seen the stores that have four to five of the exact same app all installed, sometimes even using them simultaneously, where they're using a pop up right to, I don't know, to their homepage, and then they had this other app that they downloaded to have a pop up on the add to cart page, and then it just absolutely does not make sense to have multiple apps doing the exact same thing.
Christian [00:08:23] So do not do that.
Christian [00:08:25] Do not add every app that you see, be very, very strategic about the apps. It's kind of like, your Shopify Store is your house. Right? You wouldn't just let anyone who knocks at your door, you welcome come in, and say "hang out at my house".
Christian [00:08:44] You need to be very selective on the type of app that you're using. Do really thorough research on the company behind the app as well. I think that's another thing that we see. It's like sometimes these apps are created by I don't know, I'm not knocking anyone on the other side of the world, but on the other side of the world, there's a one person company.
Christian [00:09:05] They don't have a support team. They don't have any sort of documentation.
Christian [00:09:10] And then, you add this app and all of a sudden your store gets hacked. I don't know, like, obviously, Shopify does a pretty good job of vetting apps, but things like this happen all the time because store owners are just so adamant about adding everything and anything to their stores.
Aaron [00:09:25] Yeah, definitely be discretionary with that. And while you do that, it's kind of a piggyback from number two id to number three is the speed. So this is pretty easy, but it's overlooked because people have a little vanity for themselves. So they're like my website can be slower because it's mine versus if they go to somebody else's website and it loads slow so they're like, oh, I'm off of this thing and I get so frustrated. Well, guess what? People are going to get frustrated if your website is slow. Honestly, you've got to load it in three seconds max and what I've even seen recently for e-commerce people, they suggest 1.7 sec. so, less than 2 seconds to really get some optimization in sales. I can't remember what the number is, but anything above like three seconds, like for four seconds for every second it loads that slower, it's like potentially 10 percent of business that you could lose at that point. So, take that with a grain of salt. Even if I'm off by five percent, imagine five percent of your sales every single time or every single day or every single month being gone, just because you don't have a website that's fast. So speed is something not to neglect. You do need a fast site. You do not want to frustrate people. You could even lose customers who've been there for a while if they just get frustrated with your site.
Christian [00:10:43] Yeah. That goes back to having apps. Having apps do blow your website and that's probably one of the biggest things even Shopify tells you in order to increase speed is to be easy on the amount of apps that you have on your store and beyond the apps, obviously the content that you have in there. So make sure that your images are optimized.
Christian [00:11:06] Make sure that maybe even videos. If you're using any videos on your home page and things like that: product pages, that those videos are also optimized, that they're not taking a lot of space on your website for people to load.
Christian [00:11:22] And yeah, I think a lot of people may not realize that even running speed tests could also be maybe confusing because there's hundreds and hundreds of customers going to your website. I mean, hopefully, and they all have they're all in different locations or using different devices, different networks, different speeds and different things. So you definitely want to make everything possible right in your wheelhouse where you can provide for all these different devices and website speeds and providers the best way and the fastest way to load your website. So when you look at things like speed tests and even Shopify is built in, it could be a little bit misleading because it's almost always a very poor score.
Aaron [00:12:14] Yeah.
Christian [00:12:16] But I wouldn't get too carried away with those scores. You just make sure that you're hitting all those check marks on best practices when it comes to speed. And with that, I think our next point, our biggest mistake is absolutely ignoring analytics; very important indicators from the website. Even Shopify gives you a lot of data actually, right off the bat. And then, if you have the Facebook pixel, that will also give you a lot of good data. And then beyond that, I mean, maybe we're advocating to add an app, but things like Hotjar, for example, you're able to tell exactly where people are going on your website, what pages, what buttons are clicking, where they're actually looking into or whether they're reading. So knowing what metrics to follow on your website and knowing what numbers to look into is very, very important. I think one thing is understanding them. And then, the other one is actually tracking them and making sure you have some sort of a simple spreadsheet. Right? To keep track of the changes that you're making and how are the changes affecting your website.
Aaron [00:13:36] And I think, you know, as a bare minimum, looking at comparing your new data with your old data to see are things getting better or are they getting worse?
Aaron [00:13:46] Are you adding apps and it's slowing it down so people stop going from page two to page three so you can see how many sections that somebody has. You can see the total orders that you have. You can see total visits to your site. Those are all things that are telling you something. Some of them are actual indicators and some of them are like pre-indicators, meaning like if you get less traffic over time, if you get less traffic, you're going to get less sales. It's just a simple fact. So using that data to help you make decisions is going to put you in a position to be successful long term.
Aaron [00:14:27] Hey all! Growing and scaling a profitable online business can be difficult, especially if your strategy has been to watch YouTube videos and ask your friends questions. But when you have a proven strategy in place growing gets much easier. We created a free training that covers the exact framework we use for every one of our online store owners. This five part strategy will be your secret weapon to increasing your ROAS; Return On Ad Spend, average order value and repeat customers and these are the tactics you can implement today. If you want to take the guesswork out of growing your online store, stop spending hours on YouTube, then click below to get access to our free training to start scaling your store today.
Aaron [00:15:05] One thing that I think to pay most attention to for your analytics is like the amount of time that one person spends on your website. So if they only spend 30 seconds, well, they probably didn't interest them. They either didn't like your product or they didn't like what you said about the product and so they left. So what can you do there? A lot of times it's just trial and error testing to figure that out. But you do need to be paying attention to that data so that when you start to do things like Facebook ads or Instagram ads and you send people there, it's not that people aren't going to bounce off because this is a huge thing to be focusing on is your website. So I think that kind of segues very nicely to the next one we have here, which is writing poor product descriptions. Now, most people that I've seen product wise, if it's a single product, they do OK, but if it's multiple products, it's just more of the same, like, hey, this is a blue cup or this is a black dress. They don't go into detail about who it's for. They don't have any adjectives to describe the product. So it's just bland. It's just very generic. Go look at something like Nike. Go look at something like an Alo Yoga or any type of brand like that and what you're going to see is like these shoes are built for athletes or these shoes are built for somebody who wants to stability on their life or whatever that is like Nike does a good job of using adjectives to describe who this is for. So good product descriptions can absolutely make or break your site, because if they get all the way to the point where they're going to choose between you and somebody else, and then, they read that product description, that's really not for me. I'm not really that interested in it. Then they may go somewhere else.
Christian [00:16:47] Yeah, I think that even beyond the product description, like just paying attention to your product page or your product pages should be the most important part of your Shopify store, because that's where the actual decision making happens and that's how you should be looking into every product page is almost a landing page for that particular product, and that's where the customer makes that decision whether they're going to add it to the cart or not add it to the cart. So even be ongoing the product description, which by the way, we have a YouTube video on writing good product descriptions and what are some of the things that you need to cover in there. So definitely go to YouTube.com and then search for Bit Branding channel. And then, there you will see it's probably one of the most recent videos on how to write good product descriptions. But I think beyond the product description, treating that page as a landing page, adding things like if you're selling garments, shirts and pants and things like that, adding a sizing chart, letting people know exactly how this product fits, adding product reviews for that particular product that obviously, depending on what you're selling, it may be harder or even easier to add some of these things. But these are things that you need to be paying attention to on your product pages, because if your product page only has five images, price, add to cart and maybe related products at the bottom, then you're doing it wrong.
Aaron [00:18:14] Yeah.
Christian [00:18:15] You need to do more than just that. If you get anything from this go look at your product pages it probably looked like that, you definitely need to do more than that. I think the last point that we have here, the biggest mistake is that store owners are not experimenting enough. So all the things that we talked about here today are all experiments that you can do. Right? They're all things that you can start implementing today and that's what we highly encourage you to do, is to start experimenting with a lot of different things. Start experimenting with images, with videos, with running ads, with website speed, with the analytics, with getting rid of apps, just trying new things.
Christian [00:19:04] And even in this time where, for example, TikTok is killing it right now, and TikTok is positioning itself to be an awesome partner with Shopify. Are you even aware of that? Right? Are you aware that TikTok could be the biggest next e-commerce platform out there? That's something they need to be paying attention to and start experimenting with. Even if you just take today a couple of minutes to even read an article about it. Start getting familiar with new things that are coming out and don't be afraid to start experimenting.
Aaron [00:19:44] Awesome. So I was going to say Christian mentioned this too, I think that if anything, you just go out and experiment, but take one of these things, one of these line items, go and try to make it better. So it's just constant. The difference between a good successful store owner and one who's just average that they constantly are trying to improve. And, once you do that and you can try to beat the time or the period that you had before, then you're going to be more successful and then you're going to continue to build on that. And really, these are the pieces that you need for your Shopify store. But it's only one component. It's really the first component, but it's only one component of the five areas that you have to have in your business to scale profitably. One of these key areas, the website, if you get this correctly, it could do really well for you if you get traffic, but you need the traffic. You also need other components to consistently grow and scale at a profitable rate and that's why we created the free training for the ECOMM accelerator process. It walks you through, like I said, the five areas that are absolutely needed to help you find not only consistent sales but predictable sales and scalable sales and take you to that next level. So this training is 15 minutes long and it will walk you through exactly what you need to have in place. And then, we also have an option. If you're to get at the end of the training, you're thinking, this is amazing, I'm going to go implement this. But you want a more personalized approach. We have an option for a 45 minute strategy session. We'll walk you through exactly what your store looks like and what strategy you should be implementing from the five part pillars and how you can grow or scale your business. So that's an option. That's kind of an add on bonus there is the Strategy Session, and I think that's really where you get a lot of value. So make sure you go check out that training. It's 15 minutes. You can watch or listen in your car just make sure that you're going and consuming that content, taking notes not while driving, and use those services or use that training to help you grow your business, because that's what you're listening to this for. We don't want you guys to waste time, go and implement these things.
Aaron [00:21:54] All right. So if you've been listening for a while, we appreciate you guys. And just want to ask if you found value, no matter if you've been listening for one, three months or even three years at this point, we'd love an honest review. This helps us not only figure out how we can make the podcast better, but gives you some good exposure too, because you leave a review out there and we'll give you a shout out here on the podcast. So go and leave an honest rating and review. If this is your first time or your first episode, please make sure that you subscribe. We put out an episode every single Monday and we've been doing it now for three plus years. And so, you know that we're going to be trying to add as much value as possible consistently for you. And also just a reference back. If you're one of those people who's more of a visual learner, you can go over to our YouTube channel @BitBranding, just search on YouTube, find it and subscribe. We also put out multiple pieces of content there every single week. And as you know, YouTube's more of a visual platform. So it'll walk you through a lot of these things that we're talking about. So make sure that you guys are going to implement things, taking action, and we will talk to you guys next time.
Christian [00:23:06] Peace!
Narrator [00:23:09] The Marketing Natives podcast is a production of Bit Branding.
