8 Shopify Mistakes You Need to Avoid While Running Your Store

Everyone makes mistakes when they’re starting a business, so you don’t need to be terrified of making your own mistakes. But that doesn’t mean that you need to make the same mistakes that others already have. Here’s a list of the most common Shopify mistakes that you should avoid making.

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8 most common Shopify mistakes

Not defining your buyer persona

If you’re not defining your buyer persona, that means you’re just selling random products to random people. You don’t know who your products are meant for, you don’t care who will get the most value from your products or why they should buy from you… instead, you’re just happy that someone at all buys from you. That means you’re going to have trouble targeting your marketing campaigns, and you won’t even be able to make the right decisions regarding product development, because you don’t know who your buyer persona is, much less what they want.

It’s also going to make it tougher for you to pick the right messaging for your brand. First, you don’t know what tone your customers would resonate with the most, and secondly, if you don’t know what they want, you don’t know how you should position your brand. You could say that your brand is the best, but ‘the best’ is very subjective. What are you the best at? If two customers have differing priorities, then their idea of ‘the best’ is also going to be different. You need to know who your buyer persona is so that you can figure out what you need to be the best at.

Not optimizing your landing page for conversions

A half-baked landing page is not going to do much good for you. You can’t just build a landing page for the sake of building it and leave it as it is. You need to be continuously working on improving your CTAs, using better images, tweaking your webpage copy, and making any other changes that can help you improve your conversion rate.

Here’s a powerful hack to improve your conversion rate - use the conversion triggers that you get when you deploy an Engati chatbot on your Shopify store. The bot will trigger promotional messages with discount codes whenever a shopper lands on a page, spends a certain amount of time on it, scrolls through it, is about to exit the page, or even adds a product to their cart or removes it. It essentially hits your customers with the right level of temptation at the right time. It’s far more effective than a pop-up because, unlike pop-ups which cover your screen, the conversion triggers are not intrusive and annoying, but still manage to grab your attention.

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Using low-quality images

If the images you use aren’t of a high-enough quality and resolution, that’s a big red flag for your customers. If the pictures seem blurred or pixelated, they’re going to think your brand isn’t legitimate and they’re going to be worried about getting scammed. Basically, you need to use high-quality images on your Shopify store or else your shoppers simply aren’t going to trust you and just won’t bother doing business with you. 

There is a caveat here though, in your attempts to use high-quality images, don’t let the file size go too high, or your online store simply won’t load fast enough and your shoppers will run away anyways. 

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Trying to be a one person army

Being able to do everything on your own may sound glorious. It may even sound economical to you. But that’s only till you consider the opportunity cost. There’s a lot of work that doesn’t require you to spend your own energy doing, you could just hire someone else to take care of those tasks, or even invest in WhatsApp automation to deal with monotonous tasks. 

Let’s just take customer service as an example. You don’t need to manually deal with every query that comes in. A lot of these queries are repetitive, monotonous, and the answers to them are mentioned in your store policies. You could just use a chatbot to answer all these queries while you focus your time and energy on tasks that actually require your attention. An Engati bot could even parse through your store policies on its own and pull answers directly from there.

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Forgetting to set up a primary domain

If you don’t set up a primary domain and redirect all traffic to it, customers are not going to see your custom domain name. Instead, they’re just going to end up seeing a URL in the yourstore.myshopify.com format. If your customers see such a URL, they’re going to assume that you’re a new store that hasn’t figured everything out yet… and they don’t want to be the guinea pigs who try your brand before everyone else.

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Inadequate product descriptions

Maybe you’re writing shorter product descriptions to avoid intimidating your shoppers, but a lot of shoppers will then end up having questions to which they cannot find answers in your product descriptions. Since 53% of online shoppers abandon their purchases when they do not get instant answers to their questions, you need to find a give for them to find answers with minimum effort. If you don’t want to clutter your  product pages with extra long descriptions, you could even set up a Shopify chatbot that could answer your customers’ questions and provide them with all the information that they need in no time.

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Stretching the check-out process

Putting a longer check-out process in place just gives your shoppers more chances to reconsider their purchase before making the payment. It’s also a rather frustrating experience for your customers when they have to navigate through a million pages before they can actually finish the purchase. Ever been in the checkout line at a supermarket, saw someone ahead of you with 27987 items in their cart and feel like jumping out of the line, abandoning your cart because of how long it would take you to check out? Your customers are going through pretty much the same thing when you have a ridiculously long checkout process.

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Giving up on abandoned carts

If you aren’t chasing after abandoned carts, you’re giving up a huge amount of potential revenue without a fight. When a shopper abandons their cart, you need to retarget them because they’ve shown the ultimate sign of interest (and intent) by adding your products to their cart. It’s going to be easier for you to convince these customers to make the purchase than to convince another random customer (who has never done business with you) about the benefits of your products, the value that they’d gain from them, and why they should make a purchase from your Shopify store.

So let’s say you do try to recover these abandoned carts. What are you going to do to make that happen? Are you going to just send out cart abandonment emails to your shoppers? The average open rate for that kind of business is only around 40%... but if you send these messages out on WhatsApp, you get an open rate of 99%.

Your Shopify chatbot available on the Engati app can help you by automatically shooting out abandoned cart recovery messages with buttons and links directly over WhatsApp.

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