Everything you need to know to sell on Shopify easily

Why choose Shopify to sell online?

Shopify est l one of the most widely used e-commerce platforms of the moment. In fact, nearly 150 million people chose to shop on Shopify in 2023.

Its main markets are in the United States and the United Kingdom, but Shopify is available in 175 countries worldwide.

Here are the main advantages offered by Shopify:

No programming skills required

One of Shopify's greatest advantages is that it can be used requires no programming experience. So, if you're just starting out as an e-merchant, Shopify makes it easy to open a site with its intuitive, easy-to-configure interface.

And that's not all. Hosting, information security and updates are already guaranteed. Shopify takes care of all the technical details, from marketing to payment.

A customizable store

Shopify lets you open a store that matches your company's image. You benefit from a wide choice of ready-to-use themes and templates to create your own custom store. Note that some themes are not free.

A wide range of functions

Shopify offers a range of features such as :

• Stock management

• A catalog

• Product sheets

• Videos and images

• Discount codes

• Tracking sales and shipments

• SEO optimization

• Etc.

Un essai gratuit

You have at least a 3-day free trial to test the effectiveness of Shopify. The free trial will allow you to familiarize yourself with Shopify's tools.

During the free trial, you can :

• Add products

• Creating collections

• Setting up payments

Payments are not not allowed during the free trial To start selling, you need to subscribe to a paying offer.

Affordable rates

Shopify propose prices to suit all types of business . You can start free of charge, then subscribe at a higher rate as your business grows. "Shopify "basic allows you to benefit from a subscription to 24 euros per month s with the first month at 1 euro. You can also opt for the superior " Shopify" to "Advanced".

If you're the head of a large company, the “Shopify plus” from 2000 euros per month is an offer tailored to the needs of companies with millions in sales.

Responsive and available customer support

As a Shopify user, you can turn at any time to the highly responsive customer support . Whether you need information or assistance, our highly responsive team is ready to listen.

Apart from these many advantages, Shopify is one of the most powerful tools for creating a store.

For all these reasons, Shopify is the best e-commerce site ahead of WooCommerce, Etsy and WordPress.

Create your Shopify store

Thanks to its intuitive design, Shopify lets you launch, manage and grow your online business yourself. We'll walk you through the steps involved in setting up your Shopify store.

Register and set up your Shopify account

Go to the Shopify website. Click on the "Start" button "You'll find it in the top left-hand corner of the site.

You can open your Shopify account with an e-mail address or your Facebook account This address will be used for your company. If necessary, you can change the default address at a later date.

Once you've entered your personal information (last name, first name, country, city, zip code, address, telephone number) and your company details, simply click on the button. "Create my store".

Once you've created your store, you'll have time to try out the site for free. Take advantage of this free trial to work on your store.

Choosing a theme for your store

The next step is to choose and download a theme. To do this, you need to go to your store's admin interface and then enter the "Sales Channels" section, the section that lets you manage the various aspects of your store.

In "Sales Channels", click on "Themes". Shopify offers you a wide range of themes . To find the right theme, choose according to the type of product you're going to sell and your company's values.

The themes can be paid or free. Paid themes offer more features, but this doesn't mean that free themes are any less interesting.

Downloading a theme differs according to the type of theme:

• For free themes Click on "Explore Free Themes" and choose from dozens of free themes, then press "Add" to add your chosen theme(s).

• For paid themes Click on "Visit Theme Store", click on the theme you want in the store and then click on "Buy Theme".

Customize design and layout

As a final step, you customize your store to suit your tastes and needs. For example, you can create a free logo for your company on Shopify.

You can also modify the content displayed on your page: you can choose the order in which your products appear in your collection, and add links from your social networks.

Manage your products on Shopify

You can manage your products, collections and stock more easily via the Shop application or directly on the website.

Add and organize your products

To add a product to your Shopify catalog, simply go to in the "Product" section of the Admin interface You will then be asked to enter product information such as name, stock and status . This last piece of information is fundamental, as it indicates to customers the availability of the product in question.

You can group your products by collection. By creating a collection, you can optimize the management of your products.

Defining prices and variants

A product can have several variants. For example, if the product in question is a garment, the possible variants are size, color, type of fabric, finish, and so on.

To add a variant to your product :

• Go to the "Products" section

• Click on the product where you wish to add a variant

• Click on "Add a variant".

• Add the option values for the variant: for example, for the size variant, you would add the values "S" , "M" , "L" and "XL".

• Click on ✓

Once the variant has been added, you can define the respective prices for each variant. In this way, products will be classified by category . With Shopify, you can add up to 100 variations for each product, but each part can only have 3 options combined (example: one product per size, color, fabric or per fabric, weight, color).

Inventory and stock management

You must manage your product inventory. This will prevent you from selling a product that is already out of stock, or producing more of a product that is not very popular.

Inventory your products manually or by barcode. By analyzing the data from your Shopify store, you can find out which products are selling best and adjust your stock according to customer needs.

Optimizing your store for sales

Do you want to increase the sales of your online store? Here are some tips to help you do just that.

Using Shopify's SEO tools

Before customers can buy, they must first come across your products. So how do you get users to find your store? improve your natural referencing. Boost your visibility and move up the rankings in Google search engine results.

Shopify's SEO tools allow you to boost your store's online presence. For example, they can help you find the best keywords to include in your product sheets SEO tools for Shopify include : le Google Keybord Planner , Yoast SEO, Plug in SEO, etc.

Integrate applications to enhance functionality

To stand out from your competitors, you need to make the most of your Shopify store's features . For this, you can enlist the help of applications that can improve your sales performance.

In particular, they enable :

• Improve the customer experience on your store: an application to create videos to illustrate your interfaces, to send special notifications to all your visitors, to help customers find a product more quickly, etc.

• Better manage payments and shipments

• Develop effective advertising campaigns

Implement marketing strategies

Your store can boost sales with marketing strategies such as :

• Setting up a loyalty program

• Promotional offers with discounts

• Advertise by e-mail or SMS

Before implementing a marketing strategy, it's important to know your target customer, the competitive environment and always take your company's values into account.

Process payments and shipments

To better respond to customer requests, you must define payment methods and delivery options in advance. This makes it easier for you to process orders.

Configure payment options

Customers can pay for their purchases by all the payment options you have activated. You can choose credit card payments, online payment, payment by bank transfer Among the most popular payment services are :

• PayPal

• ShopPay

• Metapay

• Google Pay

• Amazon Pay

Before choosing the payment methods authorized for your store, check whether this payment method is available in your country or the country where your customers are located. For example, Stripe is not available in Africa.

Manage shipping and delivery options

During purchase, the customer must specify delivery method The delivery method depends on the particularities of your business. For a fully online business, you'll need to deactivate the in-store collection option Go to the administrator interface to configure the delivery options available for your products.

Details such as costs and delivery times must also be specified on each product for sale.

Providing quality customer service

Customer service quality is a decisive factor in the choice of customers. That's why you shouldn't neglect this aspect of your Shopify store.

To do this, you must be available at all times. You can add your telephone contacts and company e-mail address . A FAQ page allows you to provide useful information about your company. Finally, you must be attentive to customer feedback in order to improve your services.

Promote your Shopify store

You know how important promotion is to the success of your store. Here are some tactics to help you do just that.

Use social networks to attract customers

Your Shopify store must be linked to social networks to attract more customers.

Here are our tips for doing so:

• Create profiles or pages on social networks.

• Visit regular announcements on networks such as Facebook, Instagram and Tik tok.

• Publish content on your company pages

• Promote your brand via des postes

• Interact with your followers in the comments

• Create hashtags

You can also hire a community manager.

Launch advertising campaigns

Using online advertising platforms can help you promote your store.

You must create visually appealing ads to increase conversion rates.

You can play with humor, popular news, etc. Pay attention to the length of your ad: all information should be transmitted within a short timeframe. If it's a video ad, the average length is of 30s .

Collaborate with influencers and brand ambassadors

The final tip is to collaborate with popular influencers to advertise your brand.

First, you need to identify and list the most relevant influencers that correspond to your company's target customers.

Next, get in touch with the influencers of your choice. You need to establish a collaboration between your company and the influencer, based on the interests of both parties, which can take the form of product placement, content writing on the influencer's blog or a testimonial on your site.

Finally, you can set up a sponsorship system or a code promo to attract new customers and boost sales.

Analyze and improve your performance

It's important to take the time to analyze your store's performance, to make sure everything's working as it should. Not only does this enable you to identify loopholes but also to make the necessary improvements.

Here's how to analyze your performance on Shopify:

• Define KPIs . The choice of KPIs to track depends on your objectives. In particular, you can track conversion rates, bounce rates, the number of subscribers to your newsletter, etc.

• Analyze your data on Shopify's integrated dashboard or via tools such as Google Analytics or Facebook Insights.

Once you have better visibility of your performance, you can make the necessary adjustments to improve it.

Here are our tips for optimizing the performance of your Shopify store:

• Improving the user experience by optimizing your store's various parameters, such as navigation, loading speed, images, etc.

• Write clear, concise, SEO-optimized product sheets

Common mistakes to avoid on Shopify

Here are the most common Shopify errors:

Neglecting SEO optimization

SEO is what enables you to appear at the top of the search results when Internet users search in your field of activity. It's all the more interesting because it's a form of unpaid advertising, unlike ATS.

So don't neglect it, even if you have the budget to invest in paid advertising.

Ignoring customer feedback

Customer feedback is an opportunity to review what's wrong with your offering. So don't just take it as criticism.

You need take the time to dissect them and take them into account to improve our offer and satisfy our customers.

Not using available marketing tools

Email marketing, SEO, paid advertising, social networks are all marketing strategies that can help boost your sales on Shopify. If you don't use them, you'll miss out on great opportunities.

How does Hero help you sell on Shopify?

Hero is a fintech that can be a valuable tool for your Shopify store:

• Collect customer payments at cost (up to 5x cheaper than Stripe)

• To purchase stock . Hero can advance you the funds and then allow you to make deferred repayments after 60 to 90 days.

In a nutshell selling on Shopify is so easy to set up and manage, it's within everyone's reach. To really boost your sales, however, you need to employ a number of marketing strategies. You can also use Hero, which supports you both in purchasing and in accepting payments.