Shopify's 11 Most Underused Features
Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce systems used by companies who want to create an online shop and conduct their retail operations through the internet. Over 1.7 million different businesses all over the world use this platform to handle their transactions.
It is imperative that all available tactics and Shopify features be completely leveraged in order to improve Shopify sales. Even though Shopify has delivered some extremely useful features, a majority of shops fail to take advantage of these functions. From abandoned carts to Facebook-Shopify connection, to Shopify experts, to POS, to discount codes, all these problems may be addressed utilizing Shopify capabilities to enhance sales.
In this post, we’ll go further into Shopify’s box of tricks. Using the cutting-edge strategies presented in this piece, you may increase sales, attract new customers, and enhance the overall efficiency of your business.
What is Shopify?
Founded in Canada in 2010, Shopify is a leading e-commerce platform with its headquarters based in the city of Ottawa. Shopify is an e-commerce platform that allows you to create your own online store. Shopify was built by Tobias Lutke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake in 2004.
Shopify is one of the greatest platforms to use if you are considering creating an online business since it provides a comprehensive e-commerce site builder that is accompanied by hundreds of designs. Shopify offers a 14-day free trial, allowing you to determine whether or not you are comfortable with the platform.
It supports 50 languages and 70 payment channels, making it simple to sell products to customers all around the world. Aside from these services, Shopify also provides content management tools, SEO optimization tools, and tools for recovering abandoned carts.
Shopify Features to Utilize
Shopify's features help customers develop elegant eCommerce sites and track business performance. It has advanced analytics features to help users make informed business decisions that improve sales and website efficiency.
Here are the top 11 Shopify features consumers should take advantage of:
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Bring Back Customers with Abandoned Cart Recovery
When it comes to eCommerce, the average cart abandonment rate is at a high 68.81%. That's a significant amount of transactions you might be overlooking.
This happens when a consumer picks and adds an item to their carts but then abandons the transaction without making a purchase. Despite the high incidence of abandonment, adopting strategies to lower it can help you out.
First, you'll need to look into the causes for the high number of abandoned check-outs if you want to lower the amount of abandoned check-outs.
Some customers become sidetracked and fail to finish their transactions. Meanwhile, other customers may just be adding items to their cart in order to calculate the overall cost, including shipping and taxes. Some people may even abandon their cart on purpose in the hopes of receiving a discount via an abandoned cart email.
Regardless, customers typically only add products that they’re genuinely interested in. This gives you a window of opportunity to use various methods to persuade or remind the consumer to complete the transaction.
To see your store’s abandoned carts, go to your Shopify dashboard, go to Orders > Abandoned Checkouts to see for yourself. You see a list of all the customers that added things to their cart but didn't check out.
If you’re on the Basic Shopify plan, you’ll be able to manually send an email to each client to remind them about the products in their cart.
On the other hand, you can set up a triggered email that automatically nudges every consumer who leaves an abandoned cart if you have the Advanced plan or if you've downloaded a cart-abandonment app.
If you’re able to do this right, you’ll be able to get a lot of those customers back to finish their transactions.
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Create Customer Profiles to Better Target Them
By requiring your customers to create an account before purchasing from you, you can track and monitor their information and purchase history.
While this may appear to be intrusive, it is a typical occurrence in eCommerce and is entirely legal, given you have your terms and conditions and privacy notices in place. Having customer accounts allows you to know who purchased what.
Comparable to abandoned cart checkouts, tracking purchase histories through customer accounts can help you figure out who bought what things, so that when similar items become available, you can email them directly.
To enable this, go to Settings > Checkout. Then, under the customer accounts area, specify whether it is 'optional' or 'required.' When purchasing, customers will now be asked to sign in or create an account.
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Entice New and Old Customers to Purchase with Discount Codes
It's common knowledge that offering discounts and deals to customers helps increase income; the question is, how can this be done with Shopify?
As you do your business, you’ll need to keep things moving and not every month will have as many sales as the previous ones. In order to increase Shopify sales and customer loyalty, discount strategies like the "Buy One, Get One" strategy have shown to be quite effective.
The easiest way to achieve this is by utilizing Shopify's discount features. With it, you’ll be able to produce discount codes for a specific dollar value, or offer percentage discounts, or free shipping.
You can also opt to apply a blanket discount to the entire purchase or numerous collections or apply a discount on a particular product or collection. You can also apply conditions so that only certain consumers can be eligible for a discount. Some conditions may be those who make frequent purchases (otherwise known as loyal customers), new customers, or those who meet a minimum purchase requirement.
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Allow customers to Pay for Anything, Anywhere, With Shopify POS
Shopify's own payment system, Shopify Payments and Shopify POS, has to be one of the company's most significant and best investments. These two features link the brick-and-mortar and online POS, allowing shops the option to enhance their Shopify sales by taking payments anywhere.
Using Shopify POS, you can take advantage of the brick and click trend that large retailers like Nordstrom and Amazon Go are embracing in order to boost their online sales.
Shopify POS provides a unified Dashboard to track in-store and online sales. The app is compatible with Apple devices (iPhone & iPad) and allows users to customize Orders, view Customer Purchase History, and add Discount Offers. A loyalty program can also provide customers with rewards.
Shopify POS lets businesses create tailored marketing campaigns for in-store customers. Shopify provides POS Lite and Pro. Pro includes In-store Analytics, Omnichannel Selling, and more.
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Improve Your Website Ranking with Shopify’s SEO Tools
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial to the success of any online business because it promotes website rankings. People who end up in your online store are most likely using a search engine and are most actively looking for products like yours and therefore are more likely to purchase. You can use search engine optimization (SEO) to increase the search engine ranking for your shop and help customers discover your products.
Effective SEO techniques help businesses boost their online visibility and boost sales. Shopify clients have access to a variety of search engine optimization (SEO) tools, which they can leverage to help them reach their specific targets.
The organization of the content on your website is critical to SEO performance. Just making your website easier to navigate will enhance your rankings. Simply avoid creating unnecessary categories and subcategories.
A simplified site structure makes it easier for search engines to crawl your site and rank your products. You can organize it with these simple structures:
Homepage » Category Pages » Product Pages
Homepage » Category Pages » Sub-Category Page » Product Pages
You should also have an About page and a Contact page. Customers and search engines rely on these sites to determine your credibility and trustworthiness.
Apart from your website’s structure, you should also optimize your title tags. You can do this by first writing some titles and descriptions for your items and categories. You can borrow marketing copy from supplier websites, but it's 100 percent better for your customers and SEO ranking if you generate unique material.
Find the right keywords and work to integrate them into your writing in a natural way. If they sound unnatural or are difficult to incorporate into the flow, you should reconsider your keywords.
While image alt text can also be optimized for SEO, it should still fit organically.
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Speed Up Customers’ Purchasing Decisions with Live Chat integrations
The lack of human touch in online transactions is one of the primary obstacles to higher sales yet we can't expect ourselves or our staff to man the store for 24 hours.
To overcome this, you'll need to give the highest level of customer experience (CX). You can increase Shopify sales by earning your customers’ confidence by utilizing live chat apps. In this way, customers' decision-making processes are eased and the sale of a certain product or service is encouraged.
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Shopify Analytics
Shopify has several analytics tools that enable users to analyze their online store’s performance. Shopify Analytics delivers significant insights relating to Customer Activities, Marketing, Sales, and others to enable businesses in streamlining their operations and making more informed strategic decisions for boosting sales.
Shopify’s sophisticated Dashboard offers crucial analytics like Product Analytics, Live view, Demography of Visitors, Total Purchase, and more. It can be readily connected with Google Analytics to augment Shopify Analytics’ capabilities. Additionally, a variety of reports, such as Marketing, Inventory, Acquisition, Order, Sales, and Profit, as well as a large number of Custom Reports.
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Facebook Integration
Because the majority of customers use their Facebook accounts on their phones, it's likely that you already have a Facebook business page or are selling your products on it.
If you've got a relatively active or large social following, you can duplicate your entire shop tab on your Facebook profile. Customers will be able to buy directly from you without having to be routed to your website, resulting in a more effective, smoother sales process.
The Facebook store instantly syncs payments and inventory with your Shopify account via an API, allowing you to manage everything from an one location.
To begin, duplicate your shop on your Facebook profile. Go to Settings > Sales Channels > Add Sales Channel > Facebook to begin. Customers will soon be acting on their impulses and buying more and more things directly from you with a'shop' link on your Facebook page, eliminating the need to redirect to your website.
Because the Facebook store instantly syncs with your Shopify account, using an API allows you to handle payments and inventory in one location.
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Shopify Dropshipping Eliminates The Need for An Inventory
Dropshipping is a completely new method to run an online company, and the best thing is that you don't need a ton of inventory to get started.
Dropshipping is a business concept in which eCommerce companies purchase things from a third party and have them shipped straight to their customers. This concept eliminates the requirement to have an operational warehouse open in order to store listed items. Companies must pay wholesale prices to suppliers while maintaining control over the prices customers see on their websites.
Shopify has a number of apps that enable businesses to interact with thousands of wholesale suppliers worldwide. Oberlo is one such tool, which allows companies to seamlessly import items from AliExpress and offer them on their Shopify online store.
When a consumer buys anything from your store, you should place an order with a third-party supplier, who will subsequently send the product to the buyer.
All they'll know is that the products are from your shop even if you won't have to deal with inventory, packaging, or logistics.
To set this up in Shopify, use one of the numerous dropshipping apps available in the Shopify app store to collaborate with a supplier and manage everything from one location.
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Auto-Calculate Shipping Prices for Each Customer
Even if you lure a new consumer with marketing that leads them to your website, or your correctly priced products attract them to put it in their shopping cart, you might still lose the transaction if your shipping and handling fees are too high.
You can increase Shopify sales by utilizing real-time carrier shipping, which allows you to compute the precise shipping cost based on the location of each buyer and the size or weight of the goods. To do so, you'll first need to enable the 'Advanced Shopify' plan on your Shopify store. Second, choose the shipping company, such as UPS, FedEx, etc., to determine the handling and shipping fees.
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Using Shopify Experts
Collaborating with and receiving advice from a true expert is a quick and effective method for resolving eCommerce obstacles, whether they are business or personal in nature. Shopify embraces this idea by supporting a small number of partners with competence in development, design, marketing, and photography.
Shopify experts help business owners in using all of Shopify's features to their greatest potential. For businesses who are new to Shopify and just want to get started, Shopify offers a 30-day Free Trial during which you can evaluate the platform and its features.
To return to Shopify Experts, the platform does genuinely advertise a number of specialist partners in programming, design, marketing, and photography to help your online business reach its full potential. This is a great choice if you don't have the time or expertise to maximize your Shopify store.
Final words
In eCommerce and any business, there are a lot of roles you will need to play and it can become difficult to do all of them. This is the perfect time to outsource some of these tasks to professionals who can get the job done. Shopify Experts can bring professionalism and a level of maturity to a new company.
Who is Webinopoly and what can we do for you?
- Webinopoly houses a team of Shopify experts in web design and development who can customize a design for you to match your vision and brand;
- Webinopoly's developers are experts in providing the most efficient solutions to your customer’s problems
- We specialize in e-commerce marketing and advanced eCommerce Analytics for eCommerce and Conversion Rate Optimization service
Connect with us
If you’re ready to start, you may call us at 713-805-5888, email us at [email protected], or leave us a message here.
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