How to enhance your Shopify seller experience and ensure optimum sales

Featured article by William Gough, Independent Technology Author

It is estimated that by 2021 over 2.14 billion people will buy goods and services online, up by 480 million since 2016, with sales expecting to total 4.2 trillion by the end of this year. In 2014 there were an estimate of 12-24 million online stores. These numbers should highlight the importance for any ecommerce business to have a highly optimized website to stand out amongst the competition. For this reason, many companies and individuals have began using Shopify. Shopify, which was launched in 2006, is a leading commerce platform that allows people to set up an online store and sell their products. The company also provides point-of-sale systems. Products available on this platform include digital products, physical products, memberships, services and consultations and ticketed experiences. Shopify offers many optimization options and services, from tracking traffic to sale analytics to help your business thrive. This article aims to provide you with some of the top Shopify tactics to help use the tools available to the best of their abilities.

Reduce the number of clicks

Using a flat website architecture is great for SEO (search engine optimization). Using this architecture lets users reach any page on your site with 4 or less clicks. It is advised to establish a website hierarchy from day one. To do this, link your main categories to your homepage. Then link new pages to each category. Remember to link every new category to the homepage. Your URL structure should also follow your categories, for example https://website.com/category/page. Simplicity is extremely important if you planning on expanding your website with thousands of pages. It makes moving around the website much more efficient and less tedious. Studies have shown that there is a direct link to how easy it is to traverse an online store and sales.

Make the site mobile friendly

Currently 3.5 billion people have smartphones. Approximately 766 billion searches made by smartphones are processed by Google each year. Optimizing your website to be friendly to mobile devices will help you to be on the top of search results. Therefore, having a mobile-friendly site will increase your profits. Only a few simple steps are required to do this.

Reduce the amount of content for your chosen mobile-responsive template. Compress the images as much as possible to reduce the load time. Increase the font size to be readable, adjust the placement of buttons and make them bigger. Space out your links and avoid using Flash since it is an old plug-in and is susceptible to viruses and hackers.

Improve website load speeds

If it takes more than 3 seconds for a page to be loaded, approximately 40% of people will leave. This is why it is essential to improve the speed of your website before doing anything else. To improve the speed, you can activate browser caching, use content distribution networks to store copies of your website at multiple data points. You can also decrease the amount of unnecessary characters in your code, compress images and use redirects sparingly. By studying the analytics of your site, you can see which pages people spend the least amount of time on and test the loading speed of the page yourself, then make appropriate changes. Thousands of sales can be lost by people leaving your website due to slow loading times.

Offering print on demand products can be a great way to enhance the seller experience and increase sales on your Shopify store.

Conclusion

Using Shopify can be a great advantage to your online business. Remember to start organizing your website early by using categories from the beginning. This will improve the simplicity of your website and make it convenient for your customers to browse. This will also increase the amount of time people will stay on your website, making the likelihood of a consumer to purchase something higher. Making your online store mobile-friendly from the offset will make it easier for the millions of smartphone users to access different areas of your website in a much less painstaking way. With an ever-increasing number of smartphones being more powerful than laptops and computers, more people will be using them over time. This will give you a decided advantage early. Finally, by simply compressing images and reducing the number of redirects, you can avoid losing thousands of sales. With internet speeds increasing yearly, your website needs to have loading speeds that match. Removing a second or two of delay can boost your conversion rate by 7 percent. A higher conversion rate means happy customers.

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