Ultimate Ecommerce Checklist: To Start Successful Shopify Store

May 20, 2022

The average success rate of ecommerce businesses is only 10% which means 9 out of 10 ecommerce startups fail every year according to a report published by the Startup Genome. (But you are in 10 percent if you follow our ecommerce checklist)

Still, what encourages you to start a successful ecommerce store? The answer is the number of online buyers that was 4 trillion in 2020, and In the year 2021, retail e-commerce sales were approximately 4.9 trillion US dollars worldwide stated to Statista.

To earn your part from this market. We suggest you Shopify ecommerce platform to start your journey because approximately 29 percent of e-commerce businesses are using Shopify in USA.

Before you get started reading checklist points, we want to tell you that we are an e-commerce website design and development company (especially Shopify websites) and have been working since 2015 to help e-commerce entrepreneurs to get started on a successful e-commerce business journey.

The blog continues, enjoy the reading!

You need to follow this ultimate checklist to start a successful ecommerce store on Shopify. Here it is.

15 Ultimate Shopify e-commerce checklist points to start a successful store

#1 Ecommerce Checklist Start with Choose the Right Niche According to Your Interest and Market Trend

To run a business for a long time successfully. It’s important to choose the right niche of your interest or industry in which you are an expert and analyze the products that are trending in the market. Because when you are interested in that particular niche, then you are aware or updated with the latest trends and understand the market demand or people’s buying behavior.

For example – If you are a fashion expert then go with fashion accessories that are trending now, and if you have an interest in electronic gadgets then choose electronic industries.

We suggest you choose what you like to talk about, think about, and can influence about.

Here is the list of major things that you can sell on Shopify

Products (fashion, electronics, toys, crockery, homemade, dropshipping, etc.)
Services (appointments)
Memberships
Consultations
Digital products
Classes, lessons, and workshops
Rentals
Installations (and quotes)
Donations
Event tickets
Digital gift cards

#2 Research The Market and Competition

Market and competition research help you to find how your competitors are performing by evaluating competitors’ products, services, growth, and marketing. You can adapt their strategies to grow your business and enhance your marketing campaigns.

Keyword research, social media strategy, and paid campaigns:

For competitor analysis and market research, you need tools like Google, Social Media, Youtube, Quora, Similarweb, Ahref, Google Keyword Planner, etc. By using these tools you can analyze social media strategy, paid marketing campaigns, customer demand, and keyword research.

Analysis of products or services offered by competitors:

It is essential to be aware of the market demand and most trending products or services. To figure out this you can track what products or services others are promoting.

Perform a SWOT Analysis of Competitors:

SWOT analysis is the best technique to identify competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats while planning the business strategy.

#3 Contact Suppliers and Manufactures

Finding the suppliers and manufacturers is the pillar of your retail or drop shipping business success. You should contact the suppliers or manufacturers before you start selling online.

Are you going to sell local products that are available in your nearby market?

Then contact multiple local suppliers or manufacturers and compare the prices and quality of products. Having contact with multiple suppliers or manufacturers can resolve the problem of being out of stock.

If you are going to plan a dropshipping business with international products then first create a list of international dropshipping suppliers and contact them. Prepared a sheet of questions to be asked by suppliers before getting started.

#4 Decide an SEO Friendly Business Name

With our experience in marketing, we suggest you prefer the business name that is more relatable to your major product category and more according to the search queries performed by your target audience.

An SEO-friendly business name helps you to get rank higher in SERPs. Simultaneously, it increases website traffic and generates sales.

But, if you decide on a name that is easily available to register and within your budget then it’s okay. There is no need to bother more about the domain name. You choose according to your preferences.

Note: While deciding the name of your business. It’s important to check the availability of the domain and different social media accounts. You can check instantly on Namevine.

#5 Buy A Domain and Hosting

Buying a domain name and hosting is the first step to starting an online business. Now buy a domain name similar to the business name you decided previously and choose the hosting plan according to your requirements.

Domain – A domain is the address of your website. A domain name is easy to remember that is associated with physical IPs. Internet users can access your website with the domain name.

Hosting – Web hosting is space you purchase to host your website files on the internet. So, users from any part of the world can access them.

#6 Setup A Shopify Store

Shopify account setup is the next thing that you should keep in mind to start an ecommerce business online with Shopify. Setting up your Shopify store including the different steps as described below:

Create a Shopify account –

To create a Shopify account, go to Shopify.com and click on the button “14-day free trial” as shown below.

After clicking on the button, you will redirect to the signup form window. You have to fill all three fields shown in the image below. Now click on the “Create your store” button to complete the signup process.

Check out this guide for a complete Shopify store setup step by step.

Add Your Custom Domain –

After creating the Shopify store the next point on our checklist is “add custom domain” to Shopify. You have already purchased a domain and now need to connect it with your Shopify store.

If you don’t know how to add a custom domain to Shopify. There is no need to bother. Here is the complete guide to adding custom or third-party domain to Shopify checkout now. This is a complete step-by-step guide to adding a custom domain to Shopify.

Create Standard Pages –

The next thing to check is that you have created standard pages so buyers can learn more about your business or store. Some of the important pages are the Homepage, About us, Contact, Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policy, Legal Mention, and FAQs.

Homepage:

The homepage is the most important page on any website. It is the most often landing page where most of the users land. This page contains the links to all other pages of the store to users can navigate through it easily.

Dynamic pages::

Dynamic pages are collections and product pages. These are the pages that generate sales mostly on an e-commerce site. So having an engaging, customer-centric, optimized, and responsive page design is the priority of any Shopify store owner.

Static pages:

Terms & conditions, legal mentions, about us, and the contact us pages are static pages on the website more often. These pages are important for a website. These pages give more information about the company, products, and legal policies and increase the confidence of buyers.

Contact us form page:

Contact us form page helps you to build an email marketing list, generate leads, provide customer support, and reduce spam mails.

#7 Upload Content and Products

Upload content, product details, images, and videos to your store. Keep optimizing them to boost user experience and website search engine performance.

We suggest you use high-definition images and videos with an intuitive color combination. And keep images and video files size as minimum as possible so your website can load faster and provide an exceptional user experience.

Keep your website content specific about products or services and search engine friendly that provide value to both users and search engines. Shopify gives the feature of bulk product upload through the CSV files.

Do it yourself – You can do all these content and product upload tasks on your own. May it take some time, but if you want to save some money you can do it yourself.

Hire an expert– You can hire an expert to upload products and content to your Shopify website. Experts upload all the content, product images, and description without defacing your store design.

#8 Create and Add Logo

A logo is a graphic design made with a combination of images and text together. It tells about your brand and provides a unique identity online. We know humans have the behavior of noticing and recalling the visuals images than text. So, logos help your branding online.

Use tools to create a logo – You can create a logo with free and paid online tools. Shopify also offers a free logo maker Hatchful a tool to create a professional logo in seconds.

Hire a professional – You can also hire a professional logo designer to create a unique logo for your e-commerce business that tells your brand story effectively. Professional logo designers create a logo with multiple versions and high resolution.

#9 Optimize Your Online Store

Optimization of an online e-commerce store is an essential point of the checklist. Store optimization improves your loading speed, UX, and SEO.

Optimize loading speed – To optimize store performance start with checking your store loading speed with tools like Google speed test, GTmetrix, Pingdom, etc.

To optimize store performance, compress all images, JavaScript, JSON files, redirections, server requests, and other factors affecting website loading speed.

UX optimization – For UI/UX optimization you need a Shopify designer or expert who can perform a complete UX audit to enhance your website conversion rate. Designers perform different tests such as website functionality, forms, user experience, and responsiveness in this.

SEO optimization – SEO optimization is the process of optimizing website metadata, heading tags, keyword uses, content, alt tags, schema, redirections, URLs, etc. For this, you can hire an SEO expert to optimize your store or you can do it yourself by googling all the points.

We suggest you hire an SEO expert for all this to get a better result.

#10 Install, Setup, and Test Payment Gateways

To make your store ready for the payment transaction, install payment gateways available in your country or choose according to the locality of your business. Setup payment gateway APIs according to your business requirements, and don’t forget to test before pushing it to live.

To install and set up payment gateway APIs on your store. You will need the help of a technical expert to set up a payment gateway on Shopify. At EcomHeroes, we are offering payment gateway setup services only for Shopify stores.

#11 Add Sales Channels

Social Media Sales Channels –

Facebook and Instagram are the most popular social media channels globally. According to the latest stats published by Statista, Facebook has 3.58 million users, and Instagram will reach 1.2 billion users by 2023.

According to a report published by Hootsuite, 27% of internet users find new products from social media advertisements.

To get the advantages of such platforms, you need to add social media sales channels like Facebook and Instagram. These channels enhance your social media marketing campaigns, branding, and traffic.

CTA buttons –

Adding CTA (call-to-action) buttons on the website can improve the conversion rate. Call to action buttons are used for lead generation, lead nurturing, and closing sales. Shopify offers free apps that help you to add attractive CTA buttons and social media buttons to your store.

#12 Install Analytics Tools

It’s necessary to observe the performance of your website, marketing campaigns, sales, and other insights to grow your business. If you are not doing it, you are way behind the competitors.

Analytics tools are used to monitor the performance of social media campaigns, paid advertisements, email marketing, store sales, store bounce rate, exit rates, average order value(AOV), sessions, and customer behavior.

You can install multiple analytics tools like Google Analytics, Spuermetrics, Conversific, and Order metrics that fulfill different purposes. You can use data from these tools to improve your strategy to grow your business.

#13 Make Marketing Plans

Now you have checked right all the above checklist points. Now it’s time to attract buyers to start a successful Shopify store journey. To start sales, you need to reach the mobile phones of potential buyers.

To start your marketing, you can choose from different plans or can execute them all at a time.

SEO – Search engine optimization is probably the best way to get customers online organically. It will take time, but when it gets started to work, then you can’t even imagine the number of traffic, or we can say buyers on your website.

Paid Promotions – Paid promotions are used to get instant sales. As it sounds, you have to spend money to get the sales from this. Pay Per Click(PPC), Facebook advertisements, LinkedIn advertisements, and other social media platform advertisements are types of paid promotions.

Email Marketing – Email marketing is another effective way to start your marketing campaign. You can send promotional emails to customers on your mailing list. Send intuitive content about attractive offers, new products launch, coupons, and giveaways.

#14 Test Complete Store

Testing your complete store is a mandatory step before launching your e-commerce store. You should perform all the tests so that users use your website without an interruption to make a purchase, because “first impression is the last impression”.

You should perform all these tests on your website before it launches:

Functional testing
Product details testing
Shopping cart testing
Payment methods and gateways testing
After order testing
Forms testing
Store URLs, navigations, collection pages, and social media link testing
Marketing campaigns testing
UX/UI testing
SEO testing

When you perform all tests, it means you ensure the success of your store. Now your store is ready to launch.

#15 Launch – eCommerce Checklist Ends Here

The launch is the final checkpoint in our list. You have done all the hard work now it’s time to sit back and see the results.

All the best for your store launch now you have become an entrepreneur.

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