Shopify is becoming bigger and bigger and it is nowadays one of the first choices when it comes to creating an e-commerce store. However, even the world’s most popular e-store platform is not without issues. The purpose of today’s article is to discuss the 5 most common Issue that Shopify site owners will face and how to solve them.
Why Shopify is the best for eCommerce?
Shopify is the equivalent of Amazon. How? You can find everything that you need on Amazon. Similarly, Shopify is a one-stop solution for all your e-Commerce needs. It edges competitors like WooCommerce across several factors, including:
1- Ease of Use
One of the thing that make Shopify on the top of eCommerce plateforms is the ease of use, the merchant store dashboard is clean and well organized that almost anyone can create a basic online store in just few hours.
2- Technical Support
Shopify provides a 24/7 support through different chanels, Forum, email, phone, chat and an interactive knowledge base that covers almost any topic
3- Hosting
After setting up your store, you do not need to worry about searching for a hosting provider. The reason is that Shopify provides hosting services. It saves you considerable time, effort and money.
4- Content Delivery Network (CDN)
When it comes to e-Commerce stores, speed is everything. If your website’s loading time is more than 3 seconds, you will be losing customers to your competitors. Over time, they might develop strong brand loyalty with a competitor. What does it mean for your business? Considerable losses.
It is where Shopify’s CDN feature comes in handy. CDN refers to servers grouped together but dispersed across different geographical areas. They work together to ensure that users quickly access the website and its content. Hence, if someone from Australia wishes to access your US-based Shopify store, they do not need to wait to connect to a US server. Instead, they will be routed to the nearest server, reducing loading times considerably.
5- Marketing Tools
It is very rare for e-Commerce platforms to offer useful marketing tools for free. Again, Shopify is the frontrunner to provide leading digital marketing tools for free. These tools help you lower your operating costs significantly. The tools allow you to do many things, including redirecting pages, creating SEO-friendly URLs, and adding meta descriptions. On top of it all, you can integrate your store with social media channels like Pinterest and Facebook.
6- Scalability
If you wish to scale your e-commerce store by adding new products or functionality, it is no cause for concern. All you need to do is upgrade your plan, while Shopify’s developers will handle all the technical aspects. When it comes to other platforms, the store owner is responsible for all the elements, including technical. Ask any web development company in Dubai or any part of the world, and they will recommend Shopify for this very purpose.
Now, coming back to our topic.
Shopify Issues & Their Solutions
Even the best platforms are not without their issues. Let us review common problems that you might face when using Shopify and their solutions:
1. Poor Site Performance
When we talk about site performance, we are referring to speed. If your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load, your business will soon go bust. If you are not convinced, know that the loading speed is crucial in Google’s search algorithm. If your website takes a while to load, Google will automatically push you down the rankings.
How to improve the performance? There are several options.
- Disable pop-ups or keep them to a minimum. You might have experienced that new tabs/windows open automatically after opening a website. It not only ruins the user experience but can increase the loading time. So, as a Shopify owner, we recommend that you disable pop-ups altogether or keep them minimal.
- The second recommendation is to optimise the images. Reduce their size so that they load quickly.
- Most users browse the internet through their mobile devices. So, optimise the website for hand-held devices.
- Reduce the code.
- Reduce redirects.
- Remove broken links.
2. Product fields
No 2 e-commerce should be the same. Shopify does not provide an easy way to add product fields; a store that sells Protein Bars will want to add a field for “Nutrition Information,” while a website that sells flashlights will want to add a field for “Batteries Included.”
The only way to do this is by including it in the product description, that is often not intuitive, and not acceptable if you want a page layout that has different areas of information.
What you can do is use meta fields, and if you have long term plans for your website you should consider this before using meta fields.
Besides for the complexity of adding metadata to each item through meta fields, you don’t have access to that data. If you ever want to migrate to another platform or start selling on other marketplaces you cannot just do a product export and get those meta fields; Shopify does not include that data in the product export.
A better solution would be if Shopify implemented a way for store owners to add product fields – we don’t see it happening shortly, but we sure hope it does.
3. Lack of Shopify Themes
Shopify counts only 71+ themes (free and paid) on their official theme store, this is not enough if you are in a specific niche and would like to look for a specifi theme
4. Multi-Channel Selling
Buyers use multiple devices to make purchases nowadays. It means that Shopify store owners need to develop distinct strategies for the different selling channels. There are various tools available for this purpose. These tools integrate your store to allow a seamless selling experience across different channels. You can hire a web development company to integrate your store with such tools.
5. Traffic
The traffic is the most common issue for a new or well-established Shopify store. The higher the traffic, the better the sales. There are multiple ways to increase traffic to your website. We recommend that you invest in search engine optimisation (SEO). When you hire an SEO company, please be patient. The reason is that SEO is an ongoing process, and it will take a while before you start seeing the results.
In addition to SEO, you can opt for paid advertising. Invest in paid marketing campaigns on Facebook and Google Ads. You can even hire an influencer to market your products.
Wrap Up
It concludes our article on the five most common problems that Shopify websites face along with their solutions. As technology improves, you can expect better solutions to the above problems. Lastly, please get in touch with us if you have any queries or suggestions regarding the above content. Thank You.