How to Set Up Shopify ASAP with Best Practices

How to Set Up Shopify ASAP
by: David Anzalone07/23/2020

Quick Summary The clients we work with look to our expertise to use Shopify's most robust features to build exceptional eCommerce experiences that tell brand stories and supercharge sales. Shopify's bread and butter are the small, entrepreneurial businesses that want to set up and sell fast on template themes. If that sounds like you or your clients, here's some advice on what you can (and should) have to maximize your conversion potential while launching your site quickly and with little to no custom design or development.


The clients we work with look to our expertise to use Shopify's most robust features to build exceptional eCommerce experiences that tell brand stories and supercharge sales. Shopify's bread and butter are the small, entrepreneurial businesses that want to set up and sell fast on template themes. If that sounds like you or your clients, here's some advice on what you can (and should) have to maximize your conversion potential while launching your site quickly and with little to no custom design or development.

Strong Hero Offering

A hero product best represents a brand’s mission, values, and functional benefits. It’s the offering a brand is most known for and usually the first purchase by new customers. Hero offerings can be a single product (Manscaped), an assortment pack (Magic Spoon), or a trial kit (Harrys). What these offerings have in common is that they are the strongest argument for brand adoption. Positive product experiences are important. They lead to more returning customers. High acquisition is key for new brands, but retention is key for enduring brands.

Killer Customer Experience

New and potential customers might have questions about their orders, your products, and even your brand. Nothing kills a brand’s buzz like a bad customer experience. Make sure you have a plan in place to handle that. Create an FAQ page to address the most common questions you’ll probably get. If you can dedicate time to answer every question yourself, great, but chances are you won’t. Customers know brands aren’t on 24/7, but when you’re new online you need go above and beyond to roundhouse kick these people with a great customer experience.

Well-Produced & Useful Content

This is arguably the most important consideration for a website regardless of how big or small your brand is. The video, imagery, and copy on your site are critical to convincing potential customers to convert for the first time. Sounds obvious, right? You'd be surprised at how often we talk to brands that have a great business model and product offering but invest little on actual content. Take nearly any eComm web page, even the Apple.com homepage, and you'll notice that it's mostly content. It's easy to understand why well-produced content is essential. Your website is often a consumer's only interaction with your brand and product before purchase. You want to not only create a positive first impression but also communicate to consumers that your brand is legitimate and worth their time. If you invested $100K into a brand new website but shot all your product and lifestyle photos with a RAZR phone, no one would want to buy your products. People will probably think your site is a scam, no matter how many trust and anti-virus badges you slap onto the footer. If you're thinking about a paid acquisition, (which any new brand should), don't blow it with bad photos.

That said, if your content is gorgeous, but not useful, you might've wasted production dollars. What do I mean by "useful"? It's when the content shows and convinces a brand's intended users that its product or service will satisfy their needs and is ultimately "for them." Think about your target market and their needs and create content around those needs. What qualities within your specific vertical do people care about the most? How is your brand different, and does that difference matter to your target market? You should also invest time in UX copywriting, which is product and brand copy that is "useful" to your audience.

So, take a look at your content and evaluate it. If your content is well-produced and useful, great, make sure to arrange it on your pages in a way that gets the message across as best as possible. All that entails is messing around with content types in a theme's customizer, which is neither complicated nor overly time-consuming. If your visual content isn't great or doesn't reflect user needs as best as possible, make sure your copy is. Spend an afternoon researching your audience, then a few days on writing product and brand copy.

Conclusion

It doesn’t have to cost a leg and an arm to bring your brand to life on Shopify. The most important thing is to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and make sure the customer experience is what you would want it to be.

  1. Make sure your hero product embodies the core of your brand and makes it clear to your customers why your brand exists. Whether your product is a want or a need, it should be a solution to a problem your customers have.
  2. Go above and beyond in your customer service. As a new brand, it will take time for people to become familiar with it and comfortable enough to make purchases without skepticism. Staying one step ahead with a thorough FAQ will alleviate some doubt. Most importantly, make sure your customer service reps are easily reachable via phone, email, chat, and/or social media.
  3. “A picture is worth a thousand words.” The copy and images on your site are most likely the only form of interaction customers will have with your brand, so it is important to make sure that what they see shows that your brand and products are worth buying.

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