Winning Tactics to Optimize Shopify store in 2020

You may be relishing between the blankets, sitting in front of the fire chimney, sipping a hot latte with the family, having eggnogs, turkey, and fruitcake cookies, hence, enjoying the holiday season to the fullest.
But suddenly, your sweet little bubble pops, as one of your family members asks about your store.

Eventually, you might get stuck on the work you have to start on your store, as to make 2020 more fruitful. However, it is possible that being a responsible Shopify seller, you have refilled your inventory, and done enough from your end. But have you optimized your Shopify store yet?

If not, then you may miss out on generating higher revenue because online sales are expected to increase by nearly 19% meaning 4.2 trillion in 2020. (source: business2community.com)

And if yes, then you can use the following as the checklist. So, ignite your engines to the fullest as the shoppers are ready with the cozy sweaters pulled on.

What’s inside?

• Why is it important to Optimize Shopify store for 2020?
• Tips to Optimize Shopify Store in 2020
  – Customer engagement tips
  – Discount offers
  – Apps to sell and expand your business
• Bonus tips to Optimize Shopify store
• Conclusion

If you haven’t prepared your store yet, you must not be cleared with the “Why”,

Why is it important to Optimize Shopify store for 2020?

The way your Shopify store reflects the eyes and SERP is very important for SEO and customers. When customers are easily getting the products they are looking for, they tend to spend more time on the store. They will go for more and more products if they find this process smooth enough.

Let me show you a relatable case of Kirsten Howorth, founder of Pixielure, her business of selling glitzy clothes went good, but as anyone expects more, she does the same. With an idea to get her business turned into a brand, she approached us.

We went through her store, and here the role to optimize Shopify store came into play. The optimization worked wonders to her store, she got a hike of 60% sale into which selling on google shopping also plays an important role.

The changes worked perfectly for Pixielure, and for sure, they will go good for your store, therefore, have a look at them.

Tips to Optimize Shopify store in 2020

There are a few of the most important suggestions/tips to Optimize Shopify store. Follow them no matter whether there is jack frost nipping at your nose if you want to end-up with this festive season as a successful Shopify seller. Some of these tips are shared by the Shopify experts on Shopify’s Instagram profile.

1. Customer engagement tips

• Live chat feature- This feature widely helps in building a customer-business relationship. The customers can easily connect with you at any time of the day, therefore, they can ask you any product and order related doubts. This feature also makes your customers feel more in touch with your business.
• Offering discounts- Reach out to new customers by offering them discounts and coupon codes. You can also offer them early access to an exclusive sale that you are offering in your store.
• Build an Email list- Email list will help you to keep your customers warm time-to-time. You can inform them about all the new offers and products which you are offering in your store. In addition, that list will also help you throughout the year.

2. Discount offers

Earlier we have discussed why discount offers are important but don’t you wish to know which type of discounts are preferred by the shoppers? Gotcha! here’s the list-

• Percentage based discounts- Percentage-based discounts can be set depending upon the margin that you have. You can set them on the basis of the final price during the check-out or individually for the products. They may sometimes push shoppers to buy more to get a high percentage of the discount.
• Free gifts- This is a great way to greet your customers. You can either offer like “If you buy ‘X’ number of products from this collection, you will go home with this product”. Or you can set a fixed merch on the basis of checkout price.
• Discount codes- This a great and most widely used way to offer discounts to the customers. This also helps in generating higher-order value than you might normally get.

3. Apps for selling and expanding business

Like every year, online stores will experience a huge traffic jam, and managing them may leave sellers out of their patience level. However, these apps won’t help you to Optimize Shopify store but still, they are essential for the management of inventory, orders, canceled orders, and shipping related tasks which may consume all your day and time, which you can use for the marketing of your products and increasing conversion rate.

There are dedicated apps that empower sellers to sell on marketplaces and also helps them to manage inventory and orders as well.

Some of them are listed below-

• Apps to sell on marketplaces- Selling on marketplaces would be a piece of cake if you just go for selling through these apps. Sellers can sell on marketplaces by listing all their inventory in bulk within minutes. Their process of selling and managing inventory & orders will be automated through the app.
  There are different apps for different marketplaces and if you wish to have one for the marketplace of your choice, you can grab it by clicking here.
• Apps to bulk import your products to your Shopify store- If you are selling on the marketplace and you wish to import your products on your Shopify store, then this app will aid you in almost all the processes and will also make your selling process easier.

If you are interested, you can have it by clicking here.

Bonus tips to Optimize Shopify store

1. Maintain social media engagements

Being active on Social-media is the most cost-effective and fruitful online marketing strategy to increase brand awareness and reputation. This will increase your store visibility as well. For the year 2020, you can,

• Use eye-catchy and high-quality product pages with the taste of the new and engaging products.
• Share fresh content.
• Use polls on Instagram stories to keep your customers warm.
• Practice the use of new year related trending hashtags.

2. Use the power of Ads

Ads are one of the best digital marketing practices to reach a wider new audience. You can target your audience on the basis of gender, age, preferences, location, etc. to improve the visibility of your products and grab the quality audience. You can even run Shopping Ads as they are quick for shoppers to buy the desired products.

3. Be mobile-friendly

This “Mobile-first” generation won’t accept your business if your business is not mobile-compatible.

Nearly, 3.3 billion smartphone users in the world today. Nearly, 42.63% of the world’s population have a smartphone today.

Therefore, the compatibility of your online store for Mobile is crystal clear.

Still not convinced yet? Have a look below-

Testing the mobile version of your website is mandatory, but consider not to make any huge changes. The mobile version of your website or app should be the replica of the desktop version of your site.

Apps to convert Store into a mobile app are easily available on apps.shopify.com, you can painlessly get the mobile app version of your online store through these apps.

4. Enable better and quick shipping services

Shipping is one of the most important concerns that a merchant needs to take care of.

Being a shopper, one would never like to wait for days to get an order, and definitely, he would never go for a store that takes too long to ship the order. Therefore, always pay close attention to the shipping services or other related services, make ‘em quick, and more personalized.

5. Speed-up page loading

The main cause for the shoppers to bounce isn’t site crashes, but slow loading pages.

According to Shopify.com, a second acceleration in the loading time of your online store can boost your conversions by 66%.

Consider optimizing the speed of your Shopify store and improve the loading time.

6. Make checkout experience quick and easy

After selecting favorable products from a huge inventory, no one would like to spend more time in the checkout process. It’s your job as a merchant to make the checkout process smooth, quick and easy for the cheerful experience of the shopper.

PRO TIP: The best practice to do so is to let shoppers skip the cart and buy directly from the product page without leaving.

Shopify Dynamic buttons allow customers to quickly buy the products they are viewing. They can skip the cart and can complete their payment process through the checkout process displayed on the button.

7. Make your Shopify store SEO friendly

To Optimize Shopify store, It is very important for your store to rank on the SERP, as more eyes= more sales. This directly means that you have to make it SEO friendly. By performing the following steps you can have your store or its products to rank well on google.

• Use alt text- As we know, Google is still working on its algorithm to read the images, so better make the images understandable for it.
  Simple, use alt text on your images, as through the alt text, Google will be able to know about the image. Therefore, your products will rank.
• Maintain character limit- The Ideal character limit of the title is 55-60 and that of the meta-description is 155-160. Try maintaining the above-mentioned character limit for the headings and meta-description of your products and store pages.
• Use tags & Keywords- Tags specify a particular category to a product. They help Google to recognize the category of the product to which they belong. Also, the incorporation of the keyword is important for the product to rank. It ranks that particular product when a related keyword is being searched in the search bar.
• Enrich high-quality product content- Shoppers consider the content/ description of your products on a high note as this is what describes a product. You should enrich your product content with uniqueness and it should be clear and concise. You can-
  – Research for more related products first and then after taking the best points out, start framing one.
  – Keep it clear and concise, don’t fake your content.

8. Create gift guides

There are thousands (just like me) who get confused while selecting the perfect gift for someone. Just like me, they spend hours selecting the right gift, and the right gift guide is something that can quench the thrust of the desired gift. You can have a proper gift idea list for New Year, or you can make separately on the basis of category just like Etsy did.

9. Remarketing

Consider the situation of a shopper, who visited your website in the month of July and found a perfect gift for the New Year, so he marked it. After that, unfortunately, he forgot to buy it.

Being a Shopify seller, you must be having a list of all such products which are in the cart of shoppers for a very long time or products that were highly in demand, if not, then create one now as it’s the time to remarket them.

Remarketing of the products pinches the shoppers’ time-to-time with the products one they have looked for or added them to the cart.

This increases the possibility of the shopper to buy it as they showed interest in those products earlier.

Listen to our Spotify Podcast for emerging trends shaping the eCommerce in 2020!

On the Whole

Optimize Shopify store for 2020  to make it more personalized for Shoppers so that they can enjoy buying products. It gives your store an up-to-date look, therefore, your products also get in the same frame.

Some of the ideal tips to Optimize Shopify store is mentioned above which you can use to grab the most of the year 2020.

Are we missing anything? or you are looking for something else? Let us know in the comment section below