In the ever expanding world of eCommerce, Shopify is a true industry leader when it comes to both customisation and scalability. Shopify Plus, the most advanced tier of the platform, offers a plethora of additional features that can enhance customer experience and boost business performance, but are you using it to its full potential? Under utilising Shopify Plus is a bit like owning a Ferrari but driving it like a Fiat 500 (no offence to Fiat 500 owners, it’s a great car).
At Kubix we specialise in helping eCommerce businesses like yours unlock the full potential of Shopify Plus. In this blog, we will walk you through five actionable strategies to elevate your Shopify Plus experience to the next level.
1. Improve Site Speed
The old adage of the Tortoise and the Hare still applies to various elements of life today, however, Aesop (the creator of this lovely metaphor) clearly didn’t have the eCommerce customers’ expectations in mind when he wrote it. To put it bluntly, slow and steady may still win some races but here, speed is king. A slow-loading site is, ironically, one of the fastest ways to lose potential customers and conversions.
How to Increase Your Site Speed:
- Lazy Load Images: Implement lazy loading to your store so images load as users scroll. This improves page loading times without compromising on user experience.
- Regularly Audit Apps: Layers of on site apps can slow your site down. Conduct audits frequently and remove any you no longer use. Also, consider whether you really need that free page speed optimiser app, many just don’t work.
- Image Compression: Shopify Plus automatically compresses images with site speed in mind. Because why should you do all the heavy lifting?
You can check your site speed with the native Shopify Loading Speed report , or use a tool like PageSpeed Insights developed by Google which can report on user experience of a page on both mobile and desktop.
2. Optimise the Checkout Process
A complicated checkout experience is a prime suspect for cart abandonment. A customer has perused your store, found something they like, added it to their cart, remarked on how fast the site was (see Point 1) and now finds themselves at checkout. The hard work is done but can you seal the deal? Here are some tips to turn clunky and confusing to seamless and simple.
How to Streamline Your Checkout Process:
- Checkout Blocks: Checkout Blocks, a Shopify Plus exclusive app, allows you to show or hide “blocks” based on cart contents, customers or shipping rules. These customisation options span from custom discounts and dynamic content to address blocking and hiding shipping methods. The best thing about it? No code required. Not only can you have a seamless checkout experience you can have a seamless checkout experience tailor made to your brand.
- Shop Pay: Allowing customers to checkout with one click, Shop Pay securely saves customer payment and shipping information, across all Shopify stores for faster purchases and smoother checkouts. This one isn’t a Shopify Plus exclusive, this is just a reminder to all Shopify users big and small to turn it on in your Payment settings.
- Load-tested Checkout: Due to its reliability, it’s easy to forget the amount of work Shopify puts in behind the scenes to keep its entire ecosystem running and secure. The Shopify Plus checkout has been load-tested to ensure over 10,000 checkouts per minute with unlimited bandwidth, transactions and SKUs, flawlessly.
Much like the ideal Shopify checkout experience we’ll keep this checkout tips summary quick and frictionless, Shopify Plus = reduced cart abandonment = increased conversions. Simple.
3. Leverage Shopify Plus Features
Shopify Plus as a more enhanced version of Shopify, comes with an extensive selection of additional features to really up your eCommerce game. Going back to the Ferrari/Fiat 500 analogy (again, apologies to any Fiat 500 owners out there), neglecting these additional Shopify Plus features essentially hamstrings your eCommerce business. Here are some of the heavy-hitters.
Shopify Plus Features You Should Be Using:
- Omnichannel: The term Shopify uses to describe the Plus feature of syncing your online and retail systems from an all-in-one platform that’s fully customisable. Have you got a large social media following? Utilise those channels. Does your business have a brick and mortar store? Take advantage of POS. All your products, all your customers and all your sales channels, all managed from the same Shopify admin you know and love.
- Launchpad: Exclusively for Plus, Launchpad is a scheduling tool that lives inside your Shopify admin allowing you to schedule product visibility, themes, discounts, and more with a defined start and end time. Choose the specific products you want to feature in a sale, adjust inventory as necessary and publish a dedicated theme for a promotional period.
- Shopify Flow: I know, you’re thinking “Shopify Flow? I’m not on Shopify Plus and I use Shopify Flow.” True, but Shopify Plus opens up a whole new world of possibilities with Shopify Flow. These include, inventory reordering alerts, advanced customer segmentation and automated discounts based on customer behaviour.
4. Implement SEO Best Practices
Your store is lightning quick, your checkout is pristine, you have Shopify Flows so comprehensively intricate they could be sold as pieces of art, but that won’t do much good if nobody can find you. Enter the white whale of eCommerce, Search Engine Optimisation. Also known as SEO, the majority of people in the eCommerce space are probably blue in the face from all the tips and tricks they’ve heard throughout the years, so let me do something different… Here’s 3 more SEO tips and tricks to improve your search engine rankings on your Shopify Plus store!
Boost Your Store’s Visibility with These SEO Tips:
- Improve URL Structures: Shopify URLs are auto generated from the title of the product, collection, blog or page and as a result can get messy at times. Cleaning up your URLs to include relevant keywords can really help SEO ranking. Don’t forget to hit that generate redirect button though!
- Image Alt Tags: Adding alt tags to images is as simple as it is effective. Image alt tags improve accessibility and provide search engines with more context about your images, which can help in ranking.
- Blogs: Shopify makes it easy to maintain a blog, so you should! Regularly publishing high quality blogs (such as this one) with content that targets relevant keywords in relation to your business helps drive organic traffic.
At the end of the day, SEO is a long game, a long term strategy to implement in order to build up over time. It’s easy to fall down an SEO rabbit hole and get bogged down by all the “top tricks”, but really, SEO is quite simple. Get your basics down, do it often, and do it well.
5. Utilise Analytics for Decision Making
Data, and its interpretation is the lifeblood of any successful eCommerce business. Luckily, Shopify Plus offers a great selection of analytics to help you make informed decisions. The better you know your customer base, the more capable you are of catering to their needs.
Key Metrics and Reports to Utilise:
- Customisable Reports: Shopify Plus allows you to create custom reports specific to your business. Can’t think of any custom reports you would want to analyse? No problem, Shopify Plus also offers a wide variety of report templates to track specific metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) relevant to your business.
- Customer Behaviour: With Plus, you can leverage advanced analytics to gain deep insights into how your customers interact with your store. Data such as browsing habits, product preferences and customer lifetime value enable you to make data-driven decisions that target customers’ specific needs and behaviours.
- Sales Reports: Shopify Plus provides detailed sales reports that can be broken down by product, location or channel. The channel report specifically can be incredibly useful if you are Omnichannelling (see above). Shopify Plus reporting is your one stop shop for detailed sales reports to track both trends and revenue over time.
Spending some time working with Shopify Plus reporting will allow you to gain actionable insights to fine-tune your store for better performance and increased revenue.
Ready to Optimise Your Shopify Plus Store?
By implementing these five strategies, improving site speed, optimising checkout, leveraging Shopify Plus features, refining your SEO, and using data analytics, you can take your Shopify Plus store to new heights.
If you need a hand getting started, get in touch with Kubix for a consultation (or to tell us why your Fiat 500 is better than a Ferrari) and learn how we can help optimise your store for success.
About Kubix
“We build and scale brands all over the world, from first-class Shopify websites, to seamless marketing strategies, our team understands e-commerce and exactly how to exceed your goals.”
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