This series of article is for you; the budding entrepreneur who might be trying to choose an ecommerce platform or the serial entrepreneur considering dipping your toes into the pond of ecommerce. We set out to explain how we as Shopify Experts & the Shopify platform can help you!

In our previous blog post we delved into the benefits of Shopify themes & the Appstore. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Lets look at Shopify’s powerful analytics & reporting features and sales channels.

What’s your goal?

Why does the average entrepreneur start an ecommerce store? If you ask one, you may be presented with a variety of different responses – let’s look at some of those here:

• I want to make a difference, create jobs and encourage sustainability
• My lifestyle needs to change, I’m tired of working for the man
• I need to secure a future for my kids and pass something down to them
• I just want to create, my passion is what I want to sell

All of the above reasons are super valid and they may present the motivation behind creating a business. But the goal is different, we all have the same goal once the decision is taken to start an ecommerce biz. MAKE SALES.

Firstly, let me say that anyone can start an ecommerce store and make a few sales. But to MAKE SALES means you’re selling enough to be profitable and your business is growing. There’s a lot you can do to make sales, but there are 2 vital ingredients that you must have before anything else, without these you are destined to fail:

1. Good product(s)
2. A market for your product(s)

Good product(s)

This is key, without a good product you are not going to be desirable to consumers. There are many facets of what makes a good product and we will dedicate a future blog post for this. You should ask some questions: Do people need / want your product? There’s no point in selling the best VHS player you could possibly make in 2019. Is your product good quality? You may make initial sales with a bad quality product, but your customers will not come back to you and you’ll very quickly gather bad reviews and a bad reputation. Is your product different enough from the competition to make an impact?

A market for your product(s)

You can have the best product in the world, let’s imagine the most beautifully made boat money can buy. But it’s a small boat for one person, it’s not particularly fast so can’t be used for sports, it needs to be maintained regularly and is extraordinarily expensive. Who will buy it? This is the question you need to ask yourselves and some proper market research should be carried out. Is your market too saturated? Is there a demand for the product? We will dive into this in more detail in a future blog post.

Need some help on deciding whether you’re on the right track with product or market or both? We can help you pull together a report get in touch with us here.

Back to Shopify, let’s look at a couple more features in more detail which can help you to MAKE SALES.

Reports & Analytics

Shopify has integrated a very powerful suite of analytical & reporting tools which we can use when running our ecommerce store. How does this help me?

It’s all about understanding how your store is performing and areas where you have issues. For example, which is my top selling product in July compared to December. Great ok it’s X in July and Y in December, I’ll invest in more stock for X come July and more for Y in December. This is just one example for you, but the amount of things we can learn is HUGE. Check this article from Shopify for a good background.

We’ve all heard of Google Analytics right? It’s powerful, there’s so much you can do it with it. But have you ever looked inside? Confusing right? The Shopify ethos mentioned in part one of this blog series comes into play again: “breaking down barriers for people to run their own businesses.” It’s super simple, clean & intuitive. You can get some really good data and insight from within these tools without paying an agency inordinate amounts of money to analyse for you.

However, sometimes you’ll need some help – you’ve tried it yourself and can’t understand why you’re getting loads of traffic but people are leaving your site after 10 seconds of landing on the homepage or why your sales are not growing each month. That’s where we can step in, we’ll build you an initial report on your issues & put together a conversion optimisation package to help you iron out your kinks and MAKE SALES. If this sounds like something you need then get in touch with us here.

Sales Channels

If you’re reading this you’re already thinking about one sales channel – your online store! But why would you limit your product to be sold through only one sales channel? Read more on this useful blog on popular sales channels.

Shopify can help you integrate a number of different sales channels with the click of a button, did you know that your Instagram account can be a sales channel, your facebook page or why not use the brilliant Shopify POS for physical sales in your store or at pop-up events? Shopify makes this easy for you reporting top level data on all of your sales channels on the homepage or in more detail in the powerful reports you can pull mentioned earlier. And best of all – your inventory and stock is all kept in perfect sync across all your channels!

Some of the best sales channels such as Amazon, Ebay, or Etsy do not integrate as easily with Shopify. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be. There are apps which will help you centralise your stock in Shopify & provide you with the analytics and reporting across all. If you need some help with this or advice about which direction to go then then get in touch with us here.

Our in house team , can advise you, run and optimise your marketing strategies across the different sales channels, whether its PPC campaigns on Instagram, Facebook, Etsy, Google Shopping and many more. Get in touch!