Shopify is a SaaS-based e-commerce platform that allows you to build an online store and sell your products easily on the digital marketplaces. Shopify has a monthly based subscription plan. By creating your online store with Shopify, you skip the hassle of buying a hosting server, domain, and other services.
Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms because provides you its own hosting server in its plan. Shopify is the latest trending technology. Let’s have a look at the Google Trends in the given sample which is given below. Because It is one of the leading eCommerce platforms over all the world.
List of Top E-commerce Platforms in 2021
First, let’s learn a little more about SaaS so we can better understand the core of what Shopify is.
Why is Shopify SaaS-based?
Many of our clients ask why we choose Shopify as our favorite e-commerce platform. So before getting started with this let’s know more about SaaS-based e-commerce platforms.
SaaS or Software-as-a-Service is essentially a technological platform or delivery software on a subscription-based plan. It’s often called a cloud-based system. A cloud-based system often accesses through the web browser of your computer, laptop, mobile, and this user gets a license to access the service via the internet.
- Software as a service is a software licensing and delivery prototype in which software is access to the user and accessed via the internet.
Popular example Saas eCommerce platform Shopify, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce, Wix, and Squarespace. These are the latest eCommerce platforms, but of these, Shopify is leading on the top of the eCommerce trend.
Components of Successful Shopify Stores
Now that you know a good bit about Shopify, let’s dive into those precious tips that can lead you to being successful.
- “Perfect” is the enemy of “good”, and Shopify is more than good enough
A client of ours made the mistake with our own online wine store of wanting to customize everything. They started with Shopify, then to get more custom we moved to BigCommerce. Then moved back when we learned that all the custom stuff made no difference at all. - Focus on one channel first
Shopify plugs into every social channel, amazon, and anywhere else they can plug themselves into. This is an absolute trap to be aware of. This is too much to deal with at first for most people. Time and work-life balance matter, so I strongly advocate for people to focus on just the website or Instagram first. Learn what works, start building the audience until you see traction. - Write down your workflows and processes and see where the bottlenecks are
Shopify will handle a lot for you. Building on point #2, let’s say you have people buying through Instagram and revenue is growing, but slowly. Write down the workflow from someone making a purchase and include every stage, however small, and include the final experience you want the customer to have when they recieve your product. Which parts of the process could you outsource to someone on somewhere like Fiver, or to someone you could employ part time for instance? Which bits of the workflow could you use a tool to automate – like managing instagram posts and post scheduling? - Working IN is not the same as working ON your business – fulfillment leads to scale
It’s hard to avoid, but being a single point of failure in your business is not good. Yes, buying or renting your own warehouse or shipping things from your living room feels like it is saving you money at the beginning. But by you working IN your business, you’re a bottleneck! As the business grows, you have less time to pick and pack. Yes, fulfillment services cost money, but when your business is at the right point of growth, fulfillment will give you SO MUCH time back and will take away a lot of stress. Shopify integrates with so many! Be sure to have calls with people and validate pricing against your forecasted revenues and standard margins. - Look at the ROI of some Shopify marketplace apps to reduce “busy work”
I’ve been, and seen many time since, people giving themselves all the “busy work” when running their own store on Shopify. Shopify has a great marketplace of apps that can help do so much – like messaging apps that integrate with courier services and give your customers automatic delivery progress updates. That means no more emails you need to reply to because people are asking “where’s my stuff?”. Yes, that app might cost $25 or $99 a month, but just add up your time to see if it is worth it. - Map out long B2B sales cycles and see where improvements can be made
Drawing out the path of sales in steps can help you see where there are issues you can improve or automate. I’ve done this with multiple people and it’s always the same- as soon as it is on paper (or a spreadsheet or Notion or whatever) it’s obvious what needs to change to grow the business. - Use Shopify’s blog feature instead of having an external one – it’s good enough
I’ve seen people have a blog on a different platform like WP because it had “more features” than the Shopify blog. For most people, having the blog on the same platform is just easier to manage and regular content really helps to drive SEO and traffic looking for your product. - Set goals and be accountable to someone
There’s lots to do and lots of things to distract you. Shopify will give you a lot of insights, but it’s good to have an outside perspective to be accountable to. Find a community, a coach, or a mastermind group. Share your goals and keep yourself accountable to stay focused. Plus, you’ll get good feedback on your plan.
Looking to Grow your Shopify Store?
Small businesses and other e-commerce store owners come to Frasca Digital for help managing their Shopify efforts. Contact us today to see how we can help boost sales for your online store!
