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Building and managing a website is no easy task. It can be time-consuming, costly, and filled with development hiccups.
Enter Shopify - the superhero to make your website development and management a whole lot easier. Shopify is both a website builder and a CMS (content management system), making it a seamless platform for creation.
In just a few clicks you can build your store with over 100 beautiful designs—without touching a line of code. If you're looking to add inventory, payment processing, and shipping options, they have those, too.
As a proud Shopify partner, SLTC is committed to educating and supporting businesses in utilizing the platform to achieve growth, hosting workshops and roundtable events at the Shopify NYC store on social commerce tactics, establishing a successful brand, and more.
Let’s take a deeper look into Shopify and why investing in your eCommerce business is critical to company growth.
The eCommerce Evolution
Here’s what we know: eCommerce can be run from anywhere, at any time, and it’s easily scalable. Not to mention, 95% of purchases will happen online by 2040. This fact, coupled with eCommerce being a 24-hour operation, means that having a quality, user-friendly website is an absolute necessity.
If customers have a hard time navigating your site, or if they find the information they're looking for difficult to locate, you run the risk of losing sales - and not just online sales.
According to a recent study,more than a third of customers look up online price comparisons when in a brick-and-mortar store. Ensuring that your website is easy to navigate allows someone in-store to be able to make their comparison quickly, which can lead to an increase in in-store sales.
Easy to Build, Easy to Maintain
If you haven’t gathered this yet, the words “Shopify” and “easy” are pretty much synonymous.
Shopify offers the complete package for designing and building a website in a fraction of the time it would take you to code something custom. It allows you to change your theme and add content freely while eliminating common issues like bugs and unexpected development costs.
The power behind Shopify’s themes is their flexibility. They are mobile responsive (more than 50% of consumers use a smartphone for shopping) and fully customizable based on the content you’d like to highlight.
Videos? Shopify can support them. Multiple landing pages for ads? Easy. Need a dynamic product filtering system? That can be arranged.
When seeking out a theme, it’s important to identify and look for key capabilities from a UX/UI perspective you’d like to include. For example, if cart abandonment is a concern, seek out a theme that offers optimized checkout. Optimized checkout themes feature pivotal components like total cost trackers and one-click add-to-cart buttons that help to mitigate cart abandonment.
From an inventory and analytics perspective, flexibility still reigns supreme. Shopify allows you to create listings and track inventory individually, meaning you can make manual adjustments at any time.
On the flip side, Shopify also allows you to make bulk inventory updates to maximize your efficiency and minimize your time. You can even manage variations of a single product under that product directly, vs. needing to manage each variation individually.
Not only does Shopify track inventory that will be delivered to consumers, but it also allows you to log and track inventory between your warehouses and suppliers making end-to-end tracking accessible at your fingertips.
Measuring Up
Equally as important as functionality is performance. Having the data to answer questions like, “How many products did we sell this month?” “What’s our AOV (Average Order Value)?,” “How is our traffic measuring up to our sales?” is vital to tracking business progress.
A differentiator for Shopify is its unique and well-detailed analytics dashboard. By having sales, traffic, inventory, campaign, and shopper data living in one place, you’re able to use Shopify to make better business decisions that directly correlate to growth.
The 411 on SEO
Being one of the top SEO agencies for startups and small businesses means that we know the power of SEO and we take the software that we use to optimize it very seriously.
90.63% of web pages get 0 organic search traffic from Google. SEO is a necessity in making your website more visible. It directly contributes to more traffic, boosting page loads (which decreases bounce rate), and provides ways to give your website and its content credibility and authority. When a website is performing well in search, it leads to an overall increase in awareness and conversion.
In fact, according to a recent study, SEO-driven traffic converts at up to 14.6%, versus just 1.7% for outbound advertising, like social media ads.
Shopify is SLTC’s choice software for assisting with SEO. In our case study with Green Grape, a Brooklyn-based artisan shop, you’ll see that we used Shopify to build an SEO-optimized website with a catalog of over 150 products, Build-A-Basket functionality, subscriptions, and a blog. This project resulted in 10K new unique visitors in just 3 months.
SEO is often avoided by business owners for fear that it’s too costly or would take too much time to ramp up. While a long-term strategy is important, Shopify’s built-in SEO features allow you to edit the title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs for blog posts, webpages, products, and collections all in one place.
It also helps you keep tabs on your website's performance, and stay ahead of the curve with powerful tools that find hard-to-find keywords, identify competitive opportunities, spot new business trends, and more.
We’re ready if you’re ready.
At SLTC, we believe strongly in the value of strategy, efficiency, and partnership. We’ve chosen Shopify as one of our leading partners because they allow us to provide those values to our clients.
If you are looking to take your eCommerce game to the next level, contact us here to book a discovery call.