Shopify is an eCommerce platform for those who wish to establish an online store for their products. Shopify provides an arena of high-tech technologies to its users to be able to run their online store efficiently however, merely opening a store on Shopify won’t make your store up and running on its own.
There are challenges that every Shopify merchant faces and this article gives solutions to these challenges. The biggest challenge of all is to attract the right audience among many others.
Here are the top 5 challenges faced by Shopify merchants along with the solutions:
1. Attracting the right audience
The biggest challenge on Shopify is to be able to attract the right audience so that the merchant not only attracts a crowd but the crowd that’s interested in the product. It’s extremely important to attract the right audience to make the sales that the merchant is aiming for.
Creating an online store on Shopify alone won’t do the trick. To make it successful, the real requirement is to choose a platform that caters to the audience that you’re aiming for. For instance, someone who is targeting Genz would need to promote their product on a platform like Instagram. Moreover, the content should be appealing to the targeted customers.
For instance, if one is running a beauty brand, posting videos and content related to beauty tricks, makeup hacks, and related fields may attract the right kind of audience.
2. Making profitable sales
This challenge may be an extension of the one discussed above. Attracting the right audience alone may not be enough if they are not being converted into customers. In the competitive world that we live in, customers generally have several brand options for the same product. To be able to convince the customer that you are the right brand for them may be a great challenge.
The key is to build trust with the audience. Share your brand’s story with them, and tell them how your brand cares for their well-being a lot more than the others. Take them through the process that you use to create your product.
Allow customers to review your product and share the same reviews with the audience to ensure that they know about your genuineness. Build a relationship that’s deeper than a simple brand-customer relationship. Let your customers know that in a world where most brands are trying to exploit them, your brand wishes to do the opposite.
3. Dealing with the fear of multi-channel integration
Merchants are often afraid of using more than one platform to sell their products because it may lead to chaos. The real challenge first is to overcome this fear because using multiple channels automatically increases the chances of sales and there’s no reason why a merchant shouldn’t opt for it.
To overcome the chaos that it might lead to, a good multi-channel integration system needs to be put in place. The order tally should be accounted for in one place irrespective of where the order has come from. Having a centralized inventory for orders from multiple channels will ensure a much simpler and more efficient way of keeping records and streamlining delivery and returns.
4. Getting your products on to Shopify
Having a real-time update on the availability of the products is a big challenge for all merchants and managing the real-time inventory on multiple platforms is an even bigger challenge. The merchants need to use a good application that can help them maintain the availability of products in real-time to avoid confusion and chaos.
The biggest challenge in this field is for brands with a great number of products. For brands with a limited number of products may not face the difficulty at such gravity as will the brands that sell a wide range of products.
5. Shipping speed is a big challenge
Shipping speed for a lot of merchants is a great challenge because the big e-commerce platforms like Amazon have brought to their customers the provision of one-day delivery that’s making it hard for all the other platforms to compete.
Shopify has now started working towards increasing their shipping speed but that’ll also require the merchants to make huge investments by placing their products at every warehouse. Increasing the shipping speed may be a difficult thing to do, but it largely affects the customer base as late shipping will only make the customers attracted to a much faster merchant.
