Shopify provides easy-to-use, intuitive e-commerce solutions but it's easy to make mistakes along the way. Some of these are common mistakes and some are more critical than others. 

If you're a Shopify shop owner, it's important that you understand how to properly set up your store. The wrong setup, apps, and strategies could put your business in danger, causing the user experience to suffer and leading customers to abandon their carts. In this article, we'll outline 24 common Shopify shop errors and how to correct them.

1. Not customizing the checkout page

People may not give much thought to the checkout section of their online store — rightfully so! It doesn't seem like a particularly fun area of a website. But this is actually an essential part of any lively shopping experience. Your customers will be clicking through and interacting with this part of your Shopify site on countless occasions, even if many aren't shopping for a specific product but rather browsing. This means that it's crucial to ensure that your checkout process is as frictionless and easy as possible for them to use. That way, you ensure that customers have a good time, are happy to make a purchase, stay loyal to your brand, and keep coming back again and again.

2. Using low-resolution and low-quality images.

When using the internet to run any business, the images you use can be critical to your success. Good-quality, high-resolution images can help customers determine if a product will meet their expectations. When they see a low-quality image, they may lose trust in your products or business and make other purchase decisions.

Seriously, one of the worst things you could do for your eCommerce store is to use low-quality images for your products. For any shop owner, a great image can do wonders for sales. But, inadequate or low-resolution images tend to backfire.

Not every business is able to hire a professional photographer to take high-quality photos of products. In fact, small business owners tend not to have the budget for this kind of service. That’s why Shopify came up with the stock photography feature for its online store theme, Polaris. But even if you do have the budget for this kind of service, using stock photography can be a huge mistake if you use low-quality images. 

3. Using too many apps

We've seen it happen a million times. A new business owner opens their Shopify account and gets excited about the possibilities. They see all these free apps and think, "Yes! I can add all of these to my website. It's free!"

There's an app for everything. Want to add some social media feeds? Boom, there's an app for that. Need a pop-up to get email subscribers? There's an app for that too. Maybe you want a price comparison tool or live chat so customers can contact you without leaving your website. You guessed it: there's an app for that too.

But if you're not careful, your apps could be slowing down your Shopify website. Let's say you decide to add an app that sends discount codes to your customers when they're about to leave your website. That's great - but what if that app slows down your site by more than 1 second? You lose 20% of traffic!

Make sure to keep what’s only essential which can be done by comparing the benefits to the cost of a similar service or product.

4. Not taking the website design seriously.

Your online business may well be saved or destroyed by a few Shopify blunders. A lot of people make the mistake of not paying enough attention to how their store is designed. When developing an online business, it's important to take your time. Be careful not to hurry things, because they will notice if you've put in little effort. Having a website that appears to be simple and thoughtless will give your customers the impression that you don't care enough about your website to bring forth high-quality service and products.

There's also no reason why your website should be any less creative than your competition. It is imperative that your design be modern and responsive for all devices because the majority of consumers today use mobile devices instead of desktop computers.

If you're not a creative person, don't worry. There are plenty of options for you, such as hiring a designer or using Shopify's pre-made themes. These two solutions might be a good fit for your needs and your budget, depending on which one you choose. There are advantages and disadvantages to both hiring a designer and using pre-made themes depending on your needs.

5. Having popups that appear within 10s of loading the website

Honestly, no one and I mean no one enjoys popups. It’s annoying and it’s intrusive. Sure they can be useful methods to get customers to your newsletters and emails but you need to do it correctly.

While it may seem like a good idea to have a popup that appears right away, it's actually not. Having a popup that appears right after the webpage loads is an instant turn-off for customers. When they see it as soon as they come to your website, they immediately feel like they're being sold to or pushed into something. They don't even get a chance to look around at what you have to offer first before getting hit with an offer.

It's much better if you let the customer get adjusted to and comfortable in your store first before showing them anything. Give them time to look around and browse. Then after you can show them a popup.

6. Not checking your content for grammatical and spelling errors

Typos and grammatical mistakes can have a negative impact on your customers' perception of your brand.

A Shopify store with grammatical or spelling issues appears sloppy and unprofessional. Emailing your supervisor without verifying your spelling isn't acceptable, is it? It's also a bad idea to make mistakes like this since it lowers your customer's trust and conversion rate, and increases your bounce rate.

Customers think the same thing when they come across a typo in the middle of an article or product description. They will begin to question how much care you put into other aspects of the business: Is my order going to be shipped on time? Am I really getting a quality product? Will I get my order at all?

You can easily avoid this problem by proofreading everything before you publish it. Trust me, it won't take long. Take the time to verify that everything is absolutely perfect before it goes live on your site. It's true that "nobody's perfect," but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

7. Not utilizing Google Analytics

You can’t improve what you don’t measure!

Not using Google Analytics could be a grave mistake for any Shopify business. As a Shopify store owner, it’s crucial to analyze and track your visitors’ behavior in your store and Google can help you with this. With these tools, you can analyze important metrics such as traffic sources and bounce rates. Then, you can improve your store and easily analyze if your changes helped.

With Google Analytics, it’s possible to see where your customers are coming from (i.e., which countries or cities they are from), how many pages they visit, how much time they spend on each page, etc. You can also see whether they come from organic search results or paid ads (e.g., Google Ads).

Google Analytics is free of charge. To add this tool to your Shopify store, all you have to do is create an account on the platform and follow the instructions given by Google to add their code in the Admin panel of your store.

8. Not adding Facebook Pixel

Another important tool to use for your Shopify store is the Facebook Pixel. It tracks your visitors’ behavior and saves their actions. Using it, you can, for example, separate the audience who has only seen your content from the audience that has initiated a checkout already.

This way, you’ll be able to create special ads for the audiences that have already seen your content and the audience that hasn’t. Also, you’ll be able to find out how many people have actually visited your store after clicking on an ad.

After you have your Facebook Pixel set up and have started tracking, you can create an Audience and start with retargeting.

Retargeting is a powerful way to reach out to people who have previously visited your store. By using retargeting, you are reaching out to people who are already interested in what you do and your products. In other words, they are more likely to convert when they see your ad again.

We recommend creating an Audience based on the number of days that have passed since the first visit. This way, you will be able to reach out to people who visited your site but didn’t complete their purchase - a warm audience, if you will.

9. Picking the wrong store name

It’s important to take your time and choose a great name for your store. Something memorable, related to your niche, easy to understand, and unique. If not, it's easy to forget, and it will be hard for customers to find you when they search on Google.

Building a business is hard work, and you have to take it seriously if you want to succeed. It needs time, planning, and resources. You can’t just build a website and expect people to find it. You need to get in front of the people who are looking for what you sell.

The most common mistake I see is choosing the wrong name for your store. A lot of entrepreneurs pick names that are based on their own name (e.g., John’s Bikes) or something that doesn’t describe what they sell (e.g., Fast Store). Not only does this make it difficult for customers to know what you do at first glance, but your site won’t show up when people search on Google for “bikes” or “fast stores.”

10. Selling and having too much inventory

When you're selling anything online, your goal is to get customers to discover what they want and buy it. Many people appear to believe that "the more things I sell, the more likely customers will find something they like and buy." This is totally untrue.

The most successful stores tend to specialize in one thing. They might have a few complimentary items, but they are not trying to be "everything for everyone."

Niche stores also have an easier time building an audience because their customers are more likely to remember them. People who want "gifts for men" are far more likely to recall a store that specializes in gifts for guys than a mega-store with gifts for everyone (including women and children).

As mentioned above, concentrating on one product can make marketing much easier: you don't have to worry about managing lots of different ads or campaigns. You can focus on perfecting ONE campaign and spending money on perfecting it.

Specializing is also the only way to compete with Amazon. If you're trying to compete with them by selling everything under the sun, you're going to lose. But if you sell something unique that Amazon doesn't have, you can find success by specializing.

CONCLUSION

If you’ve ever built or ran your own Shopify store, you’d know that it can be difficult to make mistakes and then learn from them. The key is to not let the errors get in the way of your goals. If you are encountering a problem, look for a way to fix it. Remember: just because something happened, it doesn’t mean that you can’t change it.

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