Shopify has become the top industry leader in the ecommerce game. With over one million online stores using this platform, it’s easily the most well-known and well-used platform worldwide!
Given the climate of the world over the past year, with a pandemic looming in everyone’s life, more business transferred to online stores than in any other year in recent history. With the market becoming more and more saturated with online retailers, it’s very important to find the right platform to market your product or service. And Shopify offers the quickest and easiest way to get your brand noticed and to start building the brand of your dreams!
Here are five ways that Shopify can help you get your dream business off the ground or to help your already growing business become more relevant to compete with the big competitors!
1. Print-on-Demand Business Model
Shopify makes it extremely easy to stand out from the crowd, which is key for a successful print-on-demand (POD) business. When you get noticed very quickly, it can help you brand yourself and your business.
Shopify also offers a number of popular apps to facilitate the development of a POD store, such as Printful, Lulu Xpress, Gooten, and Printify.
What most people don’t realize about POD is that it’s actually a pretty cost-effective way to build up your brand aesthetic. You simply choose a product, upload your design, and customize how it looks. When your customer places their order, it’s handed off to the POD service, and they handle the rest.
With this business model, you don’t hold any products in stock. POD follows the drop-shipping business model, where you don’t have to deal with the headache of handling and fulfilling orders, purchasing in quantity, or managing inventory. You just find your audience, let the POD business produce and fulfill the orders, and, once fulfilled, you take a cut of the profit without ever having to handle or print any of the stock.
Note: POD is by far the easiest online store model to get into. It’s also the one with the least amount of risk as far as start-up costs are concerned. And it doesn’t have a lot of recurring costs over time.
2. Email Marketing
Shopify integrates with a plethora of email marketing platforms, such as Drip, Klaviyo, Omnisend, and plenty more. The variety of options within Shopify (whether you’re interested in new or old-school methods, such as emails) is never ending.
Facebook, Twitter, and (especially) Instagram are only useful if you’re trying to target certain demographics. Google traffic gives too much weight to SEO, and if you don’t have the technical know-how to improve your SEO, it can be daunting.
But email remains an effective and reliable way to get your message across to a large number of people at any given time. One good way of building a database is by capturing details through targeted opt-in forms, which can be added very easily to your Shopify store.
Whether you’re adding a signup in the footer for a simple newsletter or a pop-up offering a discount incentive, once the user enters their email address, you can use it later to target the customer for sales and to build your audience.
Of course, the content you then send out has to be pithy and colorful enough to grab the attention of whoever decides to hand over their email address to you!
3. Easily Editable Mobile Experience
According to Statista, mobile devices in the United States in 2019 accounted for around 44% of all online sales traffic. And in 2020, the percentage of adults accessing the internet from their mobile devices exceeded 80%.
How do you capitalize on this? With an easy-to-use app like Shopify, you can make your store as easily accessible, colorful, and user-friendly as possible. Shopify also offers you the right template tools and theme variations to make a switch from another platform painless or very easy and fast to build your store from scratch.
4. Creating Attention-Grabbing Content
Although a Shopify store may be easy to get off the ground, like any other business, it requires that you adjust to market changes and test different ideas and strategies over time—at least until you find that winning formula and the Benjamins start flowing in!
Making changes to your website on Shopify could not be easier. They offer hundreds of different themes to choose from so you can find the one that best matches your brand. And these themes can all be edited with ease even if you don’t have vast developer-type knowledge.
In today’s online market, the most effective way to encourage people to purchase your product is to frame your brand with engaging content.
But knowing what kind of content to produce in an ever-evolving ecommerce market can be tricky. That’s why you should be focused on these four key areas to bolster a product’s return on investment (ROI):
- Video
- Image content
- Reviews and recommendations
- Product description
According to a 2017 article in Forbes, nearly two-thirds of all online buyers are more likely to purchase your product if they’ve watched a well-crafted information video first. Image content is more effective at shaping customer perceptions about a given brand than product descriptions and reviews.
5. Marketing Products on Facebook
You’ve read the statistics before. Currently, there are more than 2.5 billion monthly active Facebook users worldwide—including over 228 million US adults, according to Sprout Social. You’re looking at a potentially limitless market, and you don’t know where to start!
Understand that if you decide to share your merchandising content the traditional way, organic reach (the number of people to whom you can deliver your content without the use of paid ads) on Facebook is limited. That’s why it’s important to keep your posts short and sweet as well as to post content from other interesting sources where you think there might be a quid pro quo in order.
If you have a good idea of your ideal demographic, then there are custom options you can use to target your audience more precisely. Facebook and Shopify work amazingly well together, which allows you to easily track visitors’ behavior on your site when they come from specific ads.
Conclusion
There are many routes you can take to get an online business off the ground. The path you choose—the one that best suits you and your brand idea—depends on a lot of factors that only you can decide. Whatever route you decide on, here are the top five ways Shopify can help you start the business of your dreams or grow your current brand into a global powerhouse! Shopify offers:
- Zero to low financial risk for starting and building a print-on-demand brand
- Hundreds of themes to choose from to match your brand
- Multiple sales channels
- Easily automated to make money why you sleep!
- Multiple business models (including wholesale and drop-shipping).
Resources
Bowman, M. (2017). Video marketing: The future of content marketing
Chen, J. (2021). 20 Facebook stats to guide your 2021 Facebook strategy. Sprout Social.
Coppola, D. (2020). U.S. mobile retail commerce sales share 2017–2021. Statista.
Statista Research Department. (2021). United States: mobile internet user penetration 2015–2025. Statista.
