As a beginner or seasoned pro, Shopify is a great way to sell online. As experienced users, we have found a variety of shortcuts and tips that might make a little difference to how your store performs. We try out new apps every week and test new ways of delivering content and marketing all the time. As a result we are ready to share with you anything we have learned to help you move forward. Below are a few of the things we have found most useful when starting up a new business on Shopify.
Search the back end of Shopify
Search the whole of your Shopify store. Press S on your keyboard when you are logged into Shopify and you can search for everything from orders to products, to blogs to help documentation.
Live View
Watch what is happening live on your website in terms of what you visitors are up to. Forget tuning into Eastenders every evening. You can while away your time by clicking on “Live View”. Here you will see a live map of the world showing where your visitors are located.
Once you have finished spinning the globe with your mouse you can watch as visitors turn into customers. The Customer behaviour panel shows when customers have an active cart are checking out and when they have purchased. As you know already when they have made a purchase you hear a loud ping from your phone and everyone is happy. Our endorphins fix is satisfied as you wait for the next ping which hopefully follows close behind.
Policy Documents
Instead of heading to a lawyer for Terms and Conditions and spending hard-earned cash that a start up can ill afford to part with, you can generate a standard set of policies using the Shopify Legal Documents. Privacy Policies, returns and other docs are part of your efforts to build trust with your audience. If your site doesn’t have them then your customers might look elsewhere. You also can’t use Google Shopping and other essential plug-ins without these pages clearly identifiable on your eCommerce website.
Head to Settings on the bottom left-hand side of your dashboard and select Legal. This will give you several options to choose from. Refund Policy. This is basic and you may want to change the duration from 14 days to 30 but that is up to you.
Privacy Policy. This has the basics of a privacy policy laid out. You need to read it through and make changes where applicable. For instance, there is an age restriction which may not need to be applied. The name of you business and address are automatically imported from your profile.
Terms of Service AKA Terms and Conditions
These are available for you to use and the name and address and contact details are all pulled automatically from your profile. Again please check everything and change where appropriate.
You can then add all of these policies to your footer. Just select the footer navigation menu and add each one as a link. These appear under the Legal Option.
Post Products for Free on Major Feeds
A little known trick is that you can post your product feed to other platforms for free. Yes, they want you to spend money but in order to do so they need your products uploaded first. This includes Shopify Shopping, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. Add the apps to your store and then upload the feeds. You will no doubt be asked for billing info but there is no reason you have to pay anything at all. You will also get promotional deals from the likes of Pinterest that give you £75 worth of free advertising to get you started. You never know it might actually work.
Google Shopping is a very good advertising platform for your products, what few people know is that they offer it a s a free service as well when there is no advertising or little competition. The cynic in us doesn’t really believe your products will ever appear but the analytics suggest otherwise.
Save Images for Web
Website speed is a key part of the SEO toolkit. The fastest way to slow down your website is to have big images and videos. This trick will only cover images but we can also show you what to do with videos if you like. Optimising your images means reducing the file size. The larger the file size the longer it takes to load, the longer it takes to load the more unhappy the customer. Unhappy customers who bounce away from your website lead to negative rankings.
It is is easy to make an image smaller by using a free tool like paint. Just right click on the image in question and open with Paint. You can then resize according to your needs. For a product in Shopify we recommend either 600 x 800 pixels or square. This does some of the job and is a quick fix. If you really want to minimise pictures then use Photoshop. A lot of start ups assume it is a big fixed cost. This is no longer the case, you can pay for just Photoshop monthly and it will only cost: £9 a month. In our opinion, a worthwhile spend if you need it for other image work as well.
When you open an image in photoshop you can save it for web. This drastically reduces the file size. Removing all of the proprietary data that often makes an image heavy. You can also reduce the file size while seeing a preview to ensure you don’t damage the quality of the image while you shrink it. Just click File – Save for Web and adjust the size of the image accordingly. You can also adjust the output to .png or jpg.
As with all of our posts, this information is a result of our work with our own websites. We are always testing new ideas and apps to see how well they work. If we think it might be useful then we will share it with you to help you on your Shopify journey.
