Archive

Starting an online store begins with filling a need and building credibility, but the factors that go into making your ecommerce store a smashing success don’t stop there. While the barriers for setting up an online store are low, the majority of people starting an ecommerce business fail largely due to mistakes that seem obvious in hindsight — such as overestimating profits or trying to be too many things to customers from the onset. But there are many more mishaps new store owners experience.

To enhance your shot at success, look to avoid these 10 common mistakes when starting your ecommerce store.

1. Not having a plan of attack.

You don’t need to have a formal business plan — but you still need a plan. Most entrepreneurs regard the business plan as homework they don’t want to do. While it is true that the big-format 20-page business plan is growing obsolete, you do need to know who and where your core customers are, what you are selling and what...

The user-generated feed of dog photos has become a hashtag and, in a way, an online movement. The couple behind ‘Dogs of Instagram’ started it as a pet project and now have four million followers and a very successful ecommerce business.

The founders used a formula they don’t teach in business school:

1. Start an Instagram account about something you love

2. Lovingly build a community around that shared passion and watch the numbers grow

3. Translate that community into a growing media & a retail business beloved by customers

Oh, and along the way, find the love of your life. This is the story of Dogs of Instagram, an immensely popular Instagram account, and Lucy & Co, the business that grew out of it.

When husband-and-wife duo Ahmed El Shourbagy and Ashley Paguyo El Shourbagy met in July 2011, Ahmed had been posting photos to his new Instagram account, @dogsofinstagram, for a week and a half. Ahmed had an interest in social media and an itch to do...

Your ad copy is not necessarily the first thing people see, but it will determine whether or not the user will read more, and eventually follow your call to action.

Writing great copy is not easy, but it also doesn’t have to be like pulling teeth either.  Writing engaging copy for Facebook ads is a skill that not everyone has, but one that everyone can obtain with a little research, and practice.

Pro Tip: Remember that people scroll through Facebook quickly, so lead with your most important message.

Facebook offers a variety of different ad formats, with different specifications for each. Stick to the important information and pay attention to the character count limit for each format. 

Get the good stuff in before the text is truncated and if you have a specific action you want; be sure to make that part of the ad. For example, Visit our store, Call for a free quote, Check out our website, etc.

Start by considering your tone of voice, which should be a reflection...

Learn how how Chrome Industries uses ecommerce data to A/B test items on their online store and build a better more profitable customer experience. Website optimization is key for any online retailer to take their store to the next level.

Store owners of all sizes should always understand the numbers by taking a deep dive into their visitor behavioral data. By gaining insight on your customer behavior, you can uncover details that you would not have noticed before allowing you to increase your profit and potentially even create new revenue streams.

Most Shopify stores think that the only way to increase revenue is to increase traffic. That is never the case. The truth is that most online stores do not need to drive more traffic. Every online store first needs to optimize their website to capitalize  on the traffic that they have.

Implementing website optimization strategies such as: Product page A/B testing, exit-popups, newsletter fly ins, improving user experience design,...

When MVMT Watches was founded in 2013, the team knew right away that optimization would be key to the company’s success. If a Shopify store has the ability to evolve and innovate faster than their competitors, it ensures that every decision they make (and invests) has a positive impact on revenue.

Customer retention and customer life time value are major focuses for MVMT because of the nature of watches: customers are only in the market for a watch once every few years. So, how does MVMT increase the average order value of each customer purchase? By cross-selling.

MVMT decided they wanted to increase the average order value of each customer by adding in interchangeable straps to every product pages of their existing core offering of watches. What were the results? Adding this new cross-sell item increased conversions by 5.5% for mobile shoppers and 2.2% for desktop shoppers. How did they implement it?

Choosing Where To Promote A New Cross-Sell Product

MVMT first needed to do...

When LSTN headphones started their West Hollywood, Calif.-based audio company in 2012, they thought retail was the surefire route to customers. Their first deal was with Whole Foods, even though most of its stores had never sold headphones. They hustled, went on the Today Show and Good Morning America, and landed Best Buy and Nordstrom, plus others. They soon discovered, brick-and-mortar retail was much more demanding than they’d expected.

“We figured, naively, that it was the only true way to scale.” Co-Founder, Bridget Hilton

There were trade shows to attend. Costs for in-store marketing, including expensive displays. Advertising fees that ate into their already small margins. Flights to retailers for what seemed like endless meetings. Payments for sales teams, reps and showrooms. Retailers requested pricey new packaging changes and updates. And despite all that, the big boys in their category could always do bigger, louder, stronger marketing.

In retail, they...

Chubbies makes men’s shorts. Not jet-powered hoverboards. Not spider drones that can film every moment and beam it to the interweb. Shorts. A product that hasn’t changed since the early 19th century and their sales are north of a seven figures year over year. Here are four quick steps to launch your new Shopify venture without selling your home.

1. They started small. Really small.

Chubbies started by taking 50 shorts out to Lake Tahoe and trying to sell them to people. Within moments, people were lining up to buy them. They sold the 50 and then traded the shorts they were wearing, telling them that this was an idea worth pursuing.

2. The co-founders live the values of the brand.

The co-founders each had a quirky collection of shorts they owned, or had inherited from people. The weirder the better. And this passion flowed into their values and ultimately made the brand more relatable. They were the face of the brand, not some hired models.

3. They put content...

Integrating your ecommerce marketing campaigns across your social media channels always reaps solid rewards. When you think of integrated campaigns, leveraging all of your channels like Facebook, Email, and Instagram can really give your marketing campaigns a 1-2 punch.

While it does take a large amount of strategy, creative energy, and planning the rewards on the other side can be incredible. Lets take a look at an example of how to correctly sync a marketing campaign across multiple channels from men’s grooming company – Beardbrand.

According to founder Eric Bandholz, “Beardbrand is a premium men’s grooming company. What that means is that we put the product ethos and the quality of products as well as customer service at a higher priority than we do price.”

Since they are competing in a very crowded category, Beardbrand needs to go above and beyond to… well, create a brand. One of the main ways they do this is through content-based...

Imagine this scenario.

You have been working for weeks contacting bloggers and influencers in your niche to hopefully gain exposure and generate more sales.

In today’s massive world of influencers on youtube, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat etc., it is extremely hard to keep track of who exactly is driving the most ROI for your business. Yes, you can give everyone their own discount code, and manually track sales and data but that is just a unscalable short term solution. You need a long term scalable way to efficiently track your ROI.

You need to be able to track each campaign to see which one was most effective, as well as which one was least effective. Guess what? There is a free tracking tool out there that you (hopefully) already have installed in your store that can track all of this for you.

Google Analytics. Yup…it’s not just for tracking traffic 

Besides tracking website visitors, Google Analytics is an AMAZING tool to use to track data on exactly which...

Email is the bread and butter of digital marketing. While it’s important to have a number of communication channels through which to engage your community, no Shopify store ( or any ecommerce store) can afford to neglect email marketing.

But the importance and prevalence of email marketing is part of what makes it so difficult. When everyone is trying to woo customers with email, it becomes that much harder to make yours effective. And the first hurdle (after building your email list) is getting people to open your emails.

Here are eight ways Shopify store owners can optimize their emails to maximize open rate. Armed with these strategies, you can expand the reach of your message and ultimately bolster brand awareness and gain more customers.

1. Step Up Your Subject Lines

This first strategy is probably the most obvious. There are tons of articles out there with tips on how to write better subject lines. After all, one study found that 33 percent of people decided whether...