10 Shopify Best Practices to Help Sell More in 2024
With 2023 in the rearview mirror, it’s now time to reflect on what worked for your business, what didn’t, and how you can best improve and optimize your Shopify store moving forward. Your Shopify storefront has so many elements that can be optimized: keywords, product pages, titles, descriptions, product images, videos, and more. You get the picture?
But the road to elevate your Shopify storefront and start selling more in 2024 isn’t as long as you think—and we’re going to run through 10 of the best practices to get you there.
So, let’s jump in!
1. Optimize product listings and pages
Optimizing your product listings and pages is a task that’s never quite complete—just when you think you’ve improved everything in your online store, a new trend might emerge requiring you to start all over again.
But this is a good thing! Ensure your listings and product pages are fresh and consistently up-to-date.
Here are a couple areas to pay extra attention to:
- Titles and descriptions: Include any new or buzzy keywords that might attract your audience.
- Product images: Keep your Shopify product photos updated, and shoot new ones if you release a new product feature or make a change to an existing item.
- Videos: Product videos are becoming increasingly popular, as well as more affordable and accessible for brands of all sizes.
Keen to learn more about effectively sizing your images for Shopify? Read through our blog on the best Shopify image sizes, or check out our Shopify image resizer tool >
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This can seem like a lot of work, but it doesn’t have to be! There are so many tools out there to automate the optimization process for you, so you can focus your time and energy on other things, like strategy and growth planning.
One amazing tool to help is soona’s Listing Insights. It’s a first-of-its-kind visual analytics engine designed to optimize the visuals selling your products on Shopify. Get feedback on your visuals’ technical performance, ecommerce platform optimizations, and your context mix.
2. Create an amazing customer experience
Your customer journey and user experience (UX) are some of the most important parts of your Shopify store. You can have the best product, with beautiful product imagery and spot-on titles and descriptions, but if the UX is clunky or inefficient, you’ll lose sales in the conversion stage.
Here are a few ways you can optimize your customer journey:
- Site navigation: Ensure your main navigation bar is clear and uncluttered. It has to be easy for users to get around your website and find what they’re looking for.
- Personalization: Optimize the customer journey by including messaging specific to the intended target audience.
- Faster checkout: Streamline the checkout process by making your order and payment forms as concise as possible—avoid the “I’ll finish this when I have the time” mentality (which almost always ends in abandoned carts).
- Multiple payment methods: Allow for people to pay in different ways (card, Klarna, debit, PayPal, etc.)
- Mobile optimization: Make sure mobile devices can seamlessly view and use your ecommerce site, and the mobile checkout process is just as efficient as the desktop version. Use Shopify themes that are optimized for mobile device viewing.
Overall, the customer journey can be improved if you think about removing anything that could pose a barrier to entry.
3. Consider keywords for search engine optimization (SEO)
To capture organic search traffic, you need to rank for the relevant keywords. If you optimize your ecommerce store well enough and gain decent traffic, the search engine might be inclined to boost your site to the top of the rankings for those particular keywords. In turn, you’ll get more traffic—potential customers—to your store and improve your sales.
So, if you sell homemade candles, you might try to incorporate keywords such as “homemade candles”, or “handmade candles” into your product titles and descriptions.
A couple of places you can incorporate keywords for visibility in search results are:
- On-page: including keywords in the customer-facing content of your store. This would be in your product titles and descriptions, or the main copy of your site.
- Off-page: including selected keywords in your metadata, or through backlinks.
Did you know? Search engines also consider how quickly your site loads. Faster-loading sites perform better in search. Find out more about your Shopify speed score >
4. Leverage integrations
Another way you can improve sales to your Shopify store in 2024 is by tapping into the platform’s wide library of integration options and Shopify apps, both its own and third-party.
You might link your Shopify storefront to your Amazon marketplace, or another online marketplace like eBay.
Depending on the search functionality and algorithm, you might find you get more traffic to your Amazon storefront, but not a whole lot coming through your Shopify channels. This could be due to several factors, such as SEO, target market, or customer behavior. Whatever the case, it’s best practice to link your storefronts, so you can capture the audience all in one place, and not miss out on potential sales.
5. Develop a strong online presence and brand
If you’ve optimized your Shopify storefront, made the necessary changes to improve the customer journey, and linked your marketplaces, but still find a slowdown in sales, it might be time to look into your ecommerce business as a brand and assess the effectiveness of your online presence. After all, if you’re selling online, your brand and online presence is paramount.
Here are a few ways you can augment and fully establish your brand:
- Get clear visually. Decide on a logo, color scheme, and aesthetic that works for your business.
- Target personas. Think about your audience and their pain points. What are you solving for them? By answering this question, you can better position yourself in the market
- Establish your messaging and voice. Understand your target market, and nail down how you speak to potential customers
6. Test different marketing channels
Once you’ve established your brand, position, and messaging, you can set up a marketing funnel to keep your customers engaged. Don’t worry! You don’t necessarily need a full multi-channel marketing strategy to be successful. To start, it can be as simple as sending a monthly newsletter.
The No. 1 thing to keep in mind is customer retention. So, rather than invest all your resources into getting new leads all the time (though this is still important), you can focus on capturing low-hanging fruit by cross-selling to your existing customer base.
Here are a few channels you can engage to start marketing to your customers:
- Paid marketing and retargeting: Use your ecommerce website visitor data in paid ad campaigns to retarget your audience on another platform, such as Google or LinkedIn.
- Email newsletters: Try out a regular newsletter with company updates, promotions, and more. This keeps your business top-of-mind without putting people off with a hard sales pitch. You can collect visitor opt-ins on your Shopify storefront.
- Abandoned cart automations: Improve customer retention with abandoned cart emails. Whether it’s a long checkout process, or the customer got distracted and meant to come back to complete their payment, sending a quick email reminding them of the items in their cart waiting to be purchased, can be enough to push them over the line into a conversion.
Resizing images for different uses? Crop your images to fit the unique specs of Shopify, social media platforms, marketplaces, and more with the free soona image resizer ✂️ >
7. Offer discounts and promotions
One tried-and-true sales tactic is to offer discounts or promotions throughout the year. Be careful not to go overboard—having too many sales might result in the perception of your product as less valuable than it actually is.
While this is certainly a sales tactic, marketing also has a role to play. You can use a newsletter, as we discussed earlier in this article, to promote an upcoming discount, or an opt-in to offer customers some kind of membership that gives them 10% off, for example.
There are endless ways you can promote your products and position them as a “steal”, without undervaluing your brand. Which in turn, is why it’s so important to establish a brand in the first place!
8. Monitor and analyze data
This might seem like an obvious one, but sometimes it takes some digging through your data to find gaps in your pipeline. Look at your sales for the previous year—are there certain months that did far better, or far worse, than others? And if so, what activities did you do during that month?
Perhaps you had a small dip in sales in December when you offered a buy-one-get-one deal. This could indicate more people than you anticipated took the deal, leaving you to fall short as the sale was too costly.
Or, maybe after looking at your leads by product, you find that one of your best-selling products has a small number of leads, whereas a product you didn’t think sold well had a lot of leads. This could indicate the low-selling product has a lot of potential if you put more marketing effort into pushing those leads into conversions.
The possibilities are endless, but the bottom line is your previous data is a goldmine and can hold the map for success in the new year. You just have to know where to look.
9. Ask for reviews
As a part of your customer journey, it’s best practice to ask for a review! The more reviews you have, the more likely your store is to rank for the keywords you’re targeting, and therefore bring more traffic to your site—reviews can contribute to your SEO score.
You can even offer an incentive program, where customers receive 10% off their next purchase if they leave a review. This does two things: First, you’ll get a (hopefully positive) review from your customer, and second, you increase the chances of another sale with that 10% discount incentive! You can continue to do this for every sale, and start racking up the reviews, keyword rankings, and revenue.
10. Stay updated with e-commerce trends
Last but not least, it’s also best practice to keep up with e-commerce trends. The e-commerce world changes rapidly, and the most successful ventures adapt equally as fast.
Follow similar brands and big players in your market on social media, do your own research, and stay tuned through industry newsletters, bulletins, events, and more.
Here are a few predicted trends in the e-commerce space for 2024:
- Sustainability
- Omnichannel
- Mobile commerce
- Social commerce
- Delivery
- AI personalization
There are so, so many more, but the key point here is to look into these regularly and ensure you’re keeping up. E-commerce is notoriously a fast-paced environment, but with the right amount of research, planning, and consistency, you can stay on top of it, with no problem!
It’s also a best practice to stick with soona
If this seems like a lot of steps, don’t get discouraged! You can take these steps in your own time and optimize your sales funnel and Shopify store as and when you need to. And with the right product photography partner, optimizing your Shopify site for sales is a heck of a lot easier.
soona knows exactly what it takes to meet Shopify’s requirements and impress online shoppers to capture the sale.
Grow your Shopify store with affordable product photography from soona >
10 Shopify Best Practices to Help Sell More in 2024
With 2023 in the rearview mirror, it’s now time to reflect on what worked for your business, what didn’t, and how you can best improve and optimize your Shopify store moving forward. Your Shopify storefront has so many elements that can be optimized: keywords, product pages, titles, descriptions, product images, videos, and more. You get the picture?
But the road to elevate your Shopify storefront and start selling more in 2024 isn’t as long as you think—and we’re going to run through 10 of the best practices to get you there.
So, let’s jump in!
1. Optimize product listings and pages
Optimizing your product listings and pages is a task that’s never quite complete—just when you think you’ve improved everything in your online store, a new trend might emerge requiring you to start all over again.
But this is a good thing! Ensure your listings and product pages are fresh and consistently up-to-date.
Here are a couple areas to pay extra attention to:
- Titles and descriptions: Include any new or buzzy keywords that might attract your audience.
- Product images: Keep your Shopify product photos updated, and shoot new ones if you release a new product feature or make a change to an existing item.
- Videos: Product videos are becoming increasingly popular, as well as more affordable and accessible for brands of all sizes.
Keen to learn more about effectively sizing your images for Shopify? Read through our blog on the best Shopify image sizes, or check out our Shopify image resizer tool >
{{shopify-ad="/external-components"}}
This can seem like a lot of work, but it doesn’t have to be! There are so many tools out there to automate the optimization process for you, so you can focus your time and energy on other things, like strategy and growth planning.
One amazing tool to help is soona’s Listing Insights. It’s a first-of-its-kind visual analytics engine designed to optimize the visuals selling your products on Shopify. Get feedback on your visuals’ technical performance, ecommerce platform optimizations, and your context mix.
2. Create an amazing customer experience
Your customer journey and user experience (UX) are some of the most important parts of your Shopify store. You can have the best product, with beautiful product imagery and spot-on titles and descriptions, but if the UX is clunky or inefficient, you’ll lose sales in the conversion stage.
Here are a few ways you can optimize your customer journey:
- Site navigation: Ensure your main navigation bar is clear and uncluttered. It has to be easy for users to get around your website and find what they’re looking for.
- Personalization: Optimize the customer journey by including messaging specific to the intended target audience.
- Faster checkout: Streamline the checkout process by making your order and payment forms as concise as possible—avoid the “I’ll finish this when I have the time” mentality (which almost always ends in abandoned carts).
- Multiple payment methods: Allow for people to pay in different ways (card, Klarna, debit, PayPal, etc.)
- Mobile optimization: Make sure mobile devices can seamlessly view and use your ecommerce site, and the mobile checkout process is just as efficient as the desktop version. Use Shopify themes that are optimized for mobile device viewing.
Overall, the customer journey can be improved if you think about removing anything that could pose a barrier to entry.
3. Consider keywords for search engine optimization (SEO)
To capture organic search traffic, you need to rank for the relevant keywords. If you optimize your ecommerce store well enough and gain decent traffic, the search engine might be inclined to boost your site to the top of the rankings for those particular keywords. In turn, you’ll get more traffic—potential customers—to your store and improve your sales.
So, if you sell homemade candles, you might try to incorporate keywords such as “homemade candles”, or “handmade candles” into your product titles and descriptions.
A couple of places you can incorporate keywords for visibility in search results are:
- On-page: including keywords in the customer-facing content of your store. This would be in your product titles and descriptions, or the main copy of your site.
- Off-page: including selected keywords in your metadata, or through backlinks.
Did you know? Search engines also consider how quickly your site loads. Faster-loading sites perform better in search. Find out more about your Shopify speed score >
4. Leverage integrations
Another way you can improve sales to your Shopify store in 2024 is by tapping into the platform’s wide library of integration options and Shopify apps, both its own and third-party.
You might link your Shopify storefront to your Amazon marketplace, or another online marketplace like eBay.
Depending on the search functionality and algorithm, you might find you get more traffic to your Amazon storefront, but not a whole lot coming through your Shopify channels. This could be due to several factors, such as SEO, target market, or customer behavior. Whatever the case, it’s best practice to link your storefronts, so you can capture the audience all in one place, and not miss out on potential sales.
5. Develop a strong online presence and brand
If you’ve optimized your Shopify storefront, made the necessary changes to improve the customer journey, and linked your marketplaces, but still find a slowdown in sales, it might be time to look into your ecommerce business as a brand and assess the effectiveness of your online presence. After all, if you’re selling online, your brand and online presence is paramount.
Here are a few ways you can augment and fully establish your brand:
- Get clear visually. Decide on a logo, color scheme, and aesthetic that works for your business.
- Target personas. Think about your audience and their pain points. What are you solving for them? By answering this question, you can better position yourself in the market
- Establish your messaging and voice. Understand your target market, and nail down how you speak to potential customers
6. Test different marketing channels
Once you’ve established your brand, position, and messaging, you can set up a marketing funnel to keep your customers engaged. Don’t worry! You don’t necessarily need a full multi-channel marketing strategy to be successful. To start, it can be as simple as sending a monthly newsletter.
The No. 1 thing to keep in mind is customer retention. So, rather than invest all your resources into getting new leads all the time (though this is still important), you can focus on capturing low-hanging fruit by cross-selling to your existing customer base.
Here are a few channels you can engage to start marketing to your customers:
- Paid marketing and retargeting: Use your ecommerce website visitor data in paid ad campaigns to retarget your audience on another platform, such as Google or LinkedIn.
- Email newsletters: Try out a regular newsletter with company updates, promotions, and more. This keeps your business top-of-mind without putting people off with a hard sales pitch. You can collect visitor opt-ins on your Shopify storefront.
- Abandoned cart automations: Improve customer retention with abandoned cart emails. Whether it’s a long checkout process, or the customer got distracted and meant to come back to complete their payment, sending a quick email reminding them of the items in their cart waiting to be purchased, can be enough to push them over the line into a conversion.
Resizing images for different uses? Crop your images to fit the unique specs of Shopify, social media platforms, marketplaces, and more with the free soona image resizer ✂️ >
7. Offer discounts and promotions
One tried-and-true sales tactic is to offer discounts or promotions throughout the year. Be careful not to go overboard—having too many sales might result in the perception of your product as less valuable than it actually is.
While this is certainly a sales tactic, marketing also has a role to play. You can use a newsletter, as we discussed earlier in this article, to promote an upcoming discount, or an opt-in to offer customers some kind of membership that gives them 10% off, for example.
There are endless ways you can promote your products and position them as a “steal”, without undervaluing your brand. Which in turn, is why it’s so important to establish a brand in the first place!
8. Monitor and analyze data
This might seem like an obvious one, but sometimes it takes some digging through your data to find gaps in your pipeline. Look at your sales for the previous year—are there certain months that did far better, or far worse, than others? And if so, what activities did you do during that month?
Perhaps you had a small dip in sales in December when you offered a buy-one-get-one deal. This could indicate more people than you anticipated took the deal, leaving you to fall short as the sale was too costly.
Or, maybe after looking at your leads by product, you find that one of your best-selling products has a small number of leads, whereas a product you didn’t think sold well had a lot of leads. This could indicate the low-selling product has a lot of potential if you put more marketing effort into pushing those leads into conversions.
The possibilities are endless, but the bottom line is your previous data is a goldmine and can hold the map for success in the new year. You just have to know where to look.
9. Ask for reviews
As a part of your customer journey, it’s best practice to ask for a review! The more reviews you have, the more likely your store is to rank for the keywords you’re targeting, and therefore bring more traffic to your site—reviews can contribute to your SEO score.
You can even offer an incentive program, where customers receive 10% off their next purchase if they leave a review. This does two things: First, you’ll get a (hopefully positive) review from your customer, and second, you increase the chances of another sale with that 10% discount incentive! You can continue to do this for every sale, and start racking up the reviews, keyword rankings, and revenue.
10. Stay updated with e-commerce trends
Last but not least, it’s also best practice to keep up with e-commerce trends. The e-commerce world changes rapidly, and the most successful ventures adapt equally as fast.
Follow similar brands and big players in your market on social media, do your own research, and stay tuned through industry newsletters, bulletins, events, and more.
Here are a few predicted trends in the e-commerce space for 2024:
- Sustainability
- Omnichannel
- Mobile commerce
- Social commerce
- Delivery
- AI personalization
There are so, so many more, but the key point here is to look into these regularly and ensure you’re keeping up. E-commerce is notoriously a fast-paced environment, but with the right amount of research, planning, and consistency, you can stay on top of it, with no problem!
It’s also a best practice to stick with soona
If this seems like a lot of steps, don’t get discouraged! You can take these steps in your own time and optimize your sales funnel and Shopify store as and when you need to. And with the right product photography partner, optimizing your Shopify site for sales is a heck of a lot easier.
soona knows exactly what it takes to meet Shopify’s requirements and impress online shoppers to capture the sale.
Grow your Shopify store with affordable product photography from soona >
