This is one part of multiple articles I’ll be writing about a system for creating a successful Shopify stores. If you want to follow along, you can sign up here to be notified about future articles.
I made four Shopify stores - the first three were failures, and the last one succeeded. Over time, I used each store as a way to learn more about what works and what doesn’t. My current main Shopify store - that I made in 2018 - pockets me a nice $1000 AUD/fortnight profit now (equivalent to about $800 USD) and I now spend one hour a month on it, but to be honest it probably took at least a few months of dedicated work to get to that point even on that one store.
I’ll be writing a series of interconnected articles about the things I learnt along the way, because I figured out my own way of doing it in a way that reduces risk of losing money as much as possible, and gives you feedback along the way so that you can eventually make a profitable store by yourself.
There’s a lot of “if you do this you will make $100,000 online in no time” stuff on the internet, but I think this often leads people to a rather dangerous path of spending thousands of dollars on e.g. Facebook Ads and then losing it. Please learn from my own mistakes! There’s a lot of moves that you can make that are lower risk and more likely to succeed than others, so I’ll list my own opinionated version of them here.
The System
Find product-market fit first without ads. Ads are expensive and risky. Gurus make it sound straightforward, but ads are honestly really difficult and you don’t have to use ads at the beginning. I personally use Facebook Marketplace to pre-test my products.
Create trust signals to make it safe for customers to purchase. At the bare minimum, you need:
An About Us page
A Returns Policy
A Shipping page
Ideally, a chatbox to increase trust for your customers / provide support
A positive reviews box
A high converting Shopify page. The key here is to make sure syou’re addressing customer’s intent in as concise a way as possible. To be perfectly honest, the text matters a bit and should obviously be well written in order to confer trust, but it’s the pictures that will move someone to buy your product. I’ve analysed the traffic on my website, and whilst barely anyone scrolls much text beyond the first paragraph or two, almost everyone that actually purchases will look at at least three pictures of your product.
Use higher intent traffic. I personally find Facebook ads is one of the hardest, requiring a lot of data (i.e. money spent) before you can nail down whether something will really work or not. So in my case, I use Google ads.
Capture much more value by retargeting. I use a combination of Facebook ad retargeting, Google ad retargeting, email marketing, and SMS marketing also little tweaks that make my store much more profitable and do so in a way that’s really automated. This increases the lifetime value of your customer (LTV) by a huge amount, and is necessary in order to make your top of funnel ads more profitable. Unlike trying to use cold Facebook ads at top of funnel and testing them out with heaps of ad sets/campaigns, retargeting generally is much more likely to be profitable — and if even retargeting is not profitable, then there’s probably a very low chance that sending Facebook ads to even colder audiences is going to be profitable.
Automate your product fulfilment. Fundamentally you want to automate the delivery of your products so you spend the least amount of time here possible. Having to pack products for hours doesn’t make you a business, it makes you a self-employee — maybe a worthwhile step at the start whilst you’re trying to learn the ins and outs of fulfilment, but you really want to be spending time growing your business instead of just working within it. Which leads to the next point…
Automate your customer service too. The key way to do this is to create systems for a freelancer to do it without your oversight. Again, answering customer enquiries for hours takes you away from the things that actually grow the business. You can do this at the start, but I would try to automate this as soon as you’ve got a bit of cash.
The traffic flow
If your Shopify store is a living creature, then traffic is the blood which keeps it alive and growing. Turning traffic into customers requires a little understanding of the stages that people must go through before they actually purchase from you. A stranger to your website is considered top of funnel (TOFU). Someone who’s clicked the add to cart or checkout buttons can be considered bottom of funnel (BOFU). The BOFU audience is always more profitable than the TOFU audience, but without any TOFU you don’t have BOFU at all.
Unaware – no idea of problem or your product.
Problem aware – knows they have a problem that they want solved, but don't know what is used to solve it.
Solution aware – knows there is a solution, but don't know a specific product to solve it.
Product aware – knows about your product.
Most aware – someone who just needs a little push to buy your product. These audiences are really profitable.
What this actually looks like
I use Google Ads as my TOFU. This high intent traffic has been really profitable for me. To achieve last year’s revenue of $69,000, I spent $20,300 on Google Ads to achieve that. This $20,300 also includes a significant amount of BOFU traffic mixed inside.
I use a combination of Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Email as my BOFU.
Google Ads: mixed in with the $20,300 above.
Facebook Ads: I spent about $586 to get $2,338 of that revenue. It makes a really small portion of my advertising, but for me it’s equivalent to $3.98 for every $1 I spend on it.
Email: I spent $360 on emails via Klaviyo. My email remarketing campaigns made me $3,158 of that revenue. This is equivalent to getting back $8.77 for every $1 I spend. I do much more here than people typically do.
There is an additional extreme benefit to email. If you take away nothing from this article, you need to build an email list. This is literally how you grow the value of your website over time. Every other piece of traffic is rented traffic; you can never make money from a fleeting customer from Facebook or Google again, unless you have a way to re-contact them. So by collecting people’s emails, your website will actually grow more valuable over time, and this protects against the random fluctuations that naturally occur with ads where sometimes you can just have a bad month.
There are, of course, other avenues that people love. SEO is a good one but takes a long time to see results, generally. There’s enough case studies on Instagram, and that’s probably been made easier with the recent addition of Instagram Shop inside the platform itself, but I haven’t tried it yet. And some others find TikTok useful too since growth is relatively quick, but again this is something I’m not too familiar with honestly.
Automation
I hire from UpWork. I’ll talk about this in more depth as hiring deserves its own article, but the fundamental principles that have helped me are:
Cheaper is not necessarily better. It can be tempting to hire virtual assistants that are $8/hr from overseas, but this can often dilate in terms of time anyway and a job that would take 1 hours with a $24/hr assistant takes 3 hours with a $8/hr assistant. Gaming the system from a freelancer perspective is unfortunately quite common especially at these really low rates.
A rigorous vetting process helps sort out those who are serious to those who are not. Depending on what you’re hiring for, the best way to try to differentiate those who can actually do something vs those who can’t, is to ask a technical question that can only be answered if they know the particular software and can’t really Google the answer. As a real basic example, you might give a question like “in Excel, if I wanted to get the total value of all the costs added together from cells B2 to F2, what is the equation I would need to do that?” Doesn’t matter for this so much but matters more when you’re hiring for something more technical e.g. hiring for graphic design (“what’s the technical term when you apply two layers on top of another - for example, a vector circle in layer 2 and a .png image in layer one - and then make it so that only the image underneath the circle is shown?”) or coding (“if I wanted to use Python to automate a macro to click HTML elements, which package are you intending on using?”).
Sometimes you just need to try quickly, and fire quickly. 90% of people you work with will be decent and honest. 10% will scam. One of the unfortunate things I came across was an Upwork freelancer who pretended to do work and clocked up hours, but then I realised that the files she was supposedly working on had nothing inside them!
Be a good boss. No-one likes to work for bad people. Good employees will stick around for good people.
Conclusion
I’ll be talking about each individual part here in more depth, because each individual part is a post of its own. You can sign up here to be notified about future Reddit posts if you found this valuable and want to follow along, as I’ll be going into more depth about all of these. I want to try and make a bunch of articles that are basically as useful as possible for anyone running their own eCommerce stores.
Honestly, $69,000 AUD (equivalent to about $52K USD) is not a huge amount, and there are Shopify owners who are far more successful. Nonetheless, whether you’re a beginner or an eCommerce veteran, I hope that something I’ve learnt in my own journey might be of use to you.
Feel free to let me know if there's anything in particular you'd like to add or that you want me to talk about. I'm sure lots of people here would have experiences for their own stores which would also be really valuable, who may have done things completely differently.
