Free
Get a custom Shopify store in 5min

Shopify Best Practices: Optimize Your Shopify Store for Sales

Author Picture
by
Martin -
Author Picture
Co-founder at Dropshipping.com
Martin is an agency owner and SaaS projects maker. His work is featured in the leading ecommerce brands, magazines and podcasts. Talks about Marketing, Business Development, and Growth Hacking!
Learn more about our editorial process
Co-founder at Dropshipping.com
11 minutes


When it comes to eCommerce, Shopify is one of the most popular options, and optimizing your store is necessary to make your business a success.

For dropshippers working with narrow profit margins, fine-tuning every aspect of their Shopify store can be the difference between doing really well and just getting by.

A dropshipper’s business is all about pieces falling into place. It is very important that your online store functions well and effectively without any disruption since you can sell without inventory.

Store upgrade is the best way to offer a better user experience that might lead to more sales and, finally, more profit.

But to do that and use it to its fullest potential, you need to understand all its features and how to integrate it with other tools to make it more successful. So, how can you make sure your store is set up for success?

Create Your Online Store in just 5 Minutes – For Free

Pick your niche, our AI builds your store, add 10 winning products and we teach you how start selling today. Start picking your niche

Choose a niche

Must-Have Tools and Integrations

First things first: setting your store up with the right tools. Inventory management applications like Oberlo or Spocket come in very handy. 

These applications will enable you to sync the products directly from the supplier to your store and will keep inventory updated in real-time, hence automating the order processing. 

That not only saves your time but also reduces the chances of over-selling. Imagine having to do manual adjustments with each sale or every incoming shipment, that would just be a logistic nightmare, bound to go wrong. 

By using these tools, you ensure that both you and your customers will never have to deal with a bad experience.

Automation tools like Shopify Flow can handle repetitive tasks for you, giving you more time to think more about strategy. No more tedious processes of manually sending order confirmation emails or updating inventory at stock-keeping unit levels. 

This automated workflow can operate everything from sending welcome emails to new customers, updating inventory levels across multiple sales channels, and triggering re-engagement campaigns for inactive customers.

Speaking of marketing, tools like Mailchimp and Klaviyo can help you create email campaigns and can also keep track of their performance. 

For social media, tools like Hootsuite or Buffer offer the ability to schedule posts on multiple networks. That will mean sending out regular posts without being glued to your laptop 24/7. 

Often checking your store’s performance is essential so that you can have an idea of what’s going on. Tools like Google Analytics can give you detailed insights into your website traffic, the behavior of your customers, and conversion rates. 

Shopify itself can also give you valuable information about sales, customer demographic data, and how each product is performing.  

This is very helpful in terms of making informed decisions. For instance, if you notice a very high bounce rate on any particular product page, that would include the optimization of the page’s content or its layout. 

Keeping an eye on this metric can help you pick up trends and areas that may need to change or improve.

Another department that you should never compromise on is customer support. 

Tools like Zendesk can make it much easier for you to handle customer inquiries through email, while live chat apps like Tidio and LiveChat allow your customer to send you a message directly from your website. 

All of this can help give your customers a better experience while at the same time making things easier for you.

Getting back to your customers quickly will help you gain their trust and loyalty. Especially if they are on your website, ready to make a purchase but have some questions before making a final decision.

Picture1

Build your Shopify store in minutes, not weeks

Start dropshipping with a free AI Shopify store, automated supplier, winning products and free courses. If you don’t make at least 1 sale, we will pay you $50 for your time.

Build your free store

Designing for Conversion

A well-designed store is the best way for you to be successful at dropshipping. The best place to start is by choosing a good, functional theme. 

Shopify offers many themes that are targeted at different industries. You’ll want one that looks good and works well.

The design should be clean and intuitive; making it easy for your visitors to find what they’re looking for. Make the homepage as inviting as possible since it’s your shop front. 

This should include high-quality visuals such as professional images and videos of your products in action. Customers are attracted to content that is more visual so invest in quality imagery.

Highlight your best-selling products and ongoing promotions to catch visitor’s attention right off the bat. 

If your store specializes in a specific product then highlight that with a simple but powerful tagline letting your customers know what your store is about. 

For example, if you’re into eco-friendly merchandise; through visuals and text, you can show how the concern for sustainability drives you forward.

The product page is where your customer will decide whether to buy a product or not so you’ll want to make sure it grabs their attention.

When you write your product descriptions focus on the benefits of why customers would want to use your product and don’t just mention the features of the item. You can keep your customers interested by using the language that they use. 

The more detail, the better. Having high-resolution images that include a zoom feature, detailed descriptions, and customer reviews can all help your buyers make informed decisions about a product. 

Meanwhile, you can use tools like ReConvert Upsell & Cross-Sell, which can help you to apply some very effective post-purchase upsell strategies so you can include related products on the bottom to upsell a sale. 

A simple, easy checkout process is one of the big things that can make or break a sale. If there are too many steps and it gets complicated to complete a transaction there’s a bigger chance of them abandoning their cart and not coming back.

Don’t have too many steps involved and be sure that you allow alternative ways of paying for a purchase. The less friction, the easier it will be for the customer to complete his or her purchase.

Giving your customers correct information on shipping, during checkout, like the cost and what your normal shipping time is, is also more likely to convince your customers to go through with the sale. 

More and more consumers today are doing online shopping on their mobile devices, so you’ll want to make sure that your store is mobile-friendly from adding the items to their cart to viewing their cart, all the way through to checkout.

So make sure that you choose a responsive theme and test your store’s functionality on various devices. Fast loading and ease of navigation will ensure that your customer’s mobile shopping experience is smooth. 

Smoothing Operations

Efficient operations are vital for your dropshipping business and managing your suppliers effectively and automating order processing can save time, reduce errors, and ensure a smooth flow from when the order is placed to delivery.

Another important aspect of streamlining your operations is efficiently managing your inventory so that you’ll prevent products from running out of stock or overselling. 

Tools such as TradeGecko and Stocky will be helpful in tracking your levels and creating purchase orders.

Going through your inventory data regularly will help you make the right purchasing decisions. For example, you can look at the trend of sales to give you correct information on what sells and doesn’t.

That will help you understand which products are in high demand so that you can make sure to keep adequate stocks of all those products to meet the demand.

Cross-platform selling is another great way of opening up newer avenues for increasing your reach and providing more diversified streams of income. This not only increases visibility but also your sales. 

It lets you list and sell your products on different marketplaces, like  Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and of course, your Shopify store. Integrating your Shopify store with other platforms might sound complicated, but it’s a lot easier than you think with the right tools. 

These tools can help you keep track of inventory and orders. It can manage your listings for you from a single dashboard, and make sure that all your information and products are consistent in all channels. 

This will let you systemize your stock levels, facilitate order fulfillment, and keep track of your sales from one place.

You can learn more about the concept of cross-platform selling by checking out oneshop pricing.

Market Your Shopify Store

Marketing is the best way to drive traffic and sales. That includes paid advertising, which is an especially powerful way to attract targeted website traffic. 

Attractive visuals and appealing ad copy that highlights the benefits of your product will attract the right potential buyers. 

Facebook and Instagram are very effective in reaching a specifically targeted audience, so you will be able to create highly specific ad campaigns with their help.

Google Ads are another way to get high-intent buyers who are searching for your products.

Other great ways to nurture leads and encourage repeat purchases are through email marketing. You can run segmented email campaigns including personalized product recommendations and special offers. 

Email marketing is a direct channel to your customers and it’s the place where you’ll get to build relationships over time and stay connected with your customers.

Social media has been the pivot of brand awareness and sales. You can build interesting content on various platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok that can draw the attention of many potential customers.

Influencer collaboration, running social media contests, and posting user-generated content are other ways to increase reach. 

Other than this, every social media platform has multiple options available for advertisement. For instance, Instagram Shopping will let your customers shop directly from your posts and stories with ease.

SEO is the backbone of organic traffic. You should research and identify the most popular keywords from your target market, words your customers will search. Then, include those words in the title of the product, the description, and even the meta tags.

High-quality content with backlinks from other known sites will also help to promote the ranking.

Content marketing is one of the best ways to get the attention of and engage your target customers. 

Another great thing to do is to have a blog on your Shopify store and post articles about your niche, including product reviews and how-to tutorials.

Posting informative content regularly, such as buying guides, comparing it to different products, and even the latest news in your industry can attract customers and help to promote your brand and products.

You can also use any of your social media content to reach a much larger audience. Content marketing gives you the privilege of selling to your audience more than just products. With the ability to understand their pain points and interests, you can build trust and loyalty with your audience.

Influencer marketing can be a very strong way to boost your business. Partner up with influencers in your niche who can help promote your products. They can do that through sponsored posts and reviews to their followers, who you may not be able to reach on your own.

The recommendations from influencers can have a huge impact on their followers’ decisions to buy certain products. 

Conclusion: Continuous Improvement

E-commerce changes all to time so making sure that you constantly make improvements is very important. 

Regularly testing different areas of your store, from product pages to marketing strategies, will help you identify areas that need improvement. 

Tools that can help run A/B tests will allow you to check for comparison of variations and help you to make decisions on that information.

Data analysis and customer feedback are essential to help you keep your store optimized. This helps you figure out a good user experience and ways to improve conversion by regularly going over your store’s performance and making informed changes.

It is a never-ending process that takes time, creativity, and willingness to change if needed. 

By following these best practices, you can build a strong brand and a store that can help you be successful with your business. 

About the Author

Profile picture of Martin
Martin Stoimenov
Martin is an agency owner and SaaS projects maker. His work is featured in the leading ecommerce brands, magazines and podcasts. Talks about Marketing, Business Development, and Growth Hacking!
Hey dropshipper 👋
What do you need right now in your Dropshipping journey?