Shopify Guide - Shopify Success Checklist
Do you want to grow your Shopify store and increase sales? This free checklist covers everything I have learnt over 10 years of helping Shopify stores ranging from $0 to $50M+ in sales improve their shopping experience and grow their conversions. Whether you are just getting started or looking at next steps for improving your store, take a look at my recommendations below.
The Basics
Get set up properly
Skipping crucial steps while setting up your Shopify store can lead to a number of problems that inhibit growth. Review my Shopify Launch Checklist to make sure you haven't missed any important tasks.
Read the checklistSource the best products
All of the recommendations on this page are no replacement for having a good product. If your products are not up to the standard of quality that people expect, you will have a very difficult time retaining customers and building a good reputation. Do your market research, test the quality of the products yourself, and avoid sourcing products from cheap websites targeted at high-volume dropshippers.
Check your grammar and replace placeholder content
Poor spelling or grammar can give a poor impression to customers, as it makes your site look less trustworthy. Similarly, placeholder images or text also make your website look unfinished, which will make customers concerned about purchasing anything off the store.
Use high quality photos
High quality photos are one of the most important factors in conversion rate. If you don't have good photos available, consider investing in a professional product photographer, or a lightbox for good quality product photos.
Check your website links
Click every link on every page of your website, and make sure that they all navigate to the right page, or use an online tool to scan for broken links.
Verify your sending email
Make sure you have verified your sending email in Shopify and have set up your DMARC policy. This is important because Google & Yahoo will mark your emails as spam if you do not have your email verified and DMARC set up, reducing the effectiveness of your email marketing & customer communication. Learn more about how to set this up below.
Learn moreWebsite Optimisations
Create a loyalty program
A loyalty program increases customer retention by giving them an incentive to make repeat orders to your store over shopping with competitors. The app I most often recommend for this is Smile.
Set up analytics
If you have not done so already, make sure you have connected Google Analytics using the Google app, as well as set Google Search Console. Another tracking tool to consider would be HotJar for site heatmaps and on-page surveys.
Referral program
A referral program encourages your existing customers to find you new customers for your online store, often with the incentive of discounts or cash reward. The loyalty program app Smile can also facilitate your referral program as well.
Add a product reviews app
Product reviews are valuable to help you build up social proof for your store. Use an app that automates collecting reviews for you and supports photo reviews, such as JudgeMe or Loox. Once you have collected enough reviews, feature them on your product pages, homepage, and a standalone "reviews" page.
Optimise with Google PageSpeed
Google PageSpeed is a tool by Google that evalulates the loading speed of your website. A faster website means an improved shopping experience for customers, and often a higher ranking in Google as well. Aim for a score of at least 75/100 for performance on desktop and mobile, and at least 90/100 on the rest.
Test your websiteMake your key selling points obvious
Your key selling points should be clearly seen on every page. For most stores, these may be your generous returns policy, free shipping offer, great customer service, loyalty program, quality of your products, or payment methods you support. Think about what you can provide to customer's shopping experience that makes you different from similar stores.
Show social proof
Another important factor of turning website visitors into paying customers is social proof. This can be in the form of product reviews, written testimonials, video testimonials, user generated content, awards you won, or good press. You should have at least one section featuring social proof on every page, and a standalone page linked in the main menu that aggregates all of your social proof.
Add an app for post-purchase feedback
Collecting feedback from customers is invaluable to know where you can improve and what to work on next. I use Zigpoll because it has a generous free plan.
Refine your navigation
Common links to include are links to collections, links to customer support and policy pages, a link to your informational pages, a link to customer reviews or other social proof, and and a link to your contact page. Use mega-menus where possible, and look at how similar stores structure their menus for inspiration.
Offer your products in bundles
Using Shopify's free bundle app, group your products into a bundle and offer a discount for purchasing them together, increasing your average order value and net sales. If you're looking for inspiration, The Oodie did this to great success.
Offer your products as a subscription
Similar to the bundling strategy, use a subscription app to offer your products on a recurring subscription with a small discount, increasing customer retention and repeat sales.
Review your competitors
Find at least the top 10 competitor websites for your specific industry & location segment, then go through their entire website noting what you think they did well, then do it on your website with your own unique twist. You can also find what Shopify apps they use with Storetrends.
Test that your website is mobile responsive
Use Google's official testing tool on each of your pages to confirm that it is mobile friendly. Also consider what design changes you can do to make your shopping experience better for mobile users.
Test your websiteCrosslink your website and social media profiles
All of your social media profile pages should link back to your website, and your website should link back to your social media profiles. This makes your website look more trustworthy, and helps you convert social media traffic into new customers.
Add 3-7 images to each product
Multiple images of a product gives the customer a better idea of the experience they will get if they purchase it. For most stores, this may look something like your featured image being the product with a transparent background, the second image being a mise en scène, and the rest being the product in different angles or contexts.
Add a video of your product
Product videos can sell the customer on the experience of purchasing or using the product, and when done correctly increase your conversion rate. This could be a demo video showing how it works, a "runway" video if you are selling clothing, or an "unboxing" video. If you do make any video content, make sure to also use it in your marketing and advertising for maximum impact.
Add more product information
The more information you can add to product pages, the more you can create trust with prospective customers. More content on product pages can also help their SEO ranking. Consider adding information as collaposible tabs, modals, or below the fold sections such as: shipping info, care instructions, a size guide, technical specifications, or customers testimonials.
Use autocomplete with fuzzy-searching for your search bar
When the customer types into the search bar, it should automatically suggest categories, products, or search terms related to what they are typing. Make sure the search is fuzzy as well, meaning that minor spelling errors will be automatically corrected in the suggestions. For this, I typically use this app.
Show your categories and brands on the homepage
If your website has a lot of different brands or product categories, display the most popular 8-20 collections on the homepage in either a grid or carousel format.
Show savings on discounted products
If a product is discounted, instead of only showing the old price, also show how much in total the customer saves. You can either display this as a percentage or fixed dollar value, whichever looks better.
Sticky add to cart button
When the customer scrolls past the buy button on mobile, show a copy of the buy button fixed to the bottom of the screen. This improves the conversion rate for mobile purchases, especially for product pages with a lot of content.
Turn popular filters into subcategories
Monitor which filters are used the most and turn them into a new collection to add to the main menu. For example, if you see customers often filter for a "Accessories" under the "Womens" collection, make a new collection called "Womens Accessories".
Avoid empty pages
Show suggested or popular products on your 404 page template, and on your search results page when there are no results. This increases the likelihood that customers will stay on your website.
Use product badges
Product badges convey key information or selling points to customers on the product card. Ideas for product badges are "Sale", "Pre Order", "Coming Soon", "Popular", "Staff Pick", and "Low Stock".
Make your featured product images consistent
Your website will look more professional if the featured image of each product follows a consistent format. Each product's featured image should either all have a transparent background or the same background colour, and be the same dimensions/aspect ratio.
Show a second image on hover for product cards
When a customer hovers over one of your product cards, show the second image in the gallery for that product. This makes your website feel more interactive, improving the shopping experience.
Show available sizes or colours on product cards
Each option available for a product should either be immediately visible on the product card, or shown upon hovering over the product, and visually show what options are out of stock. This improves the shopping experience for customers looking for a specific size, colour, or other option.
Order your filters by what is most used
Do not order your filters alphabetically, but instead order them by what is most used by your customers. Consider removing filter groups that are not used often to declutter your collection pages.
Show model size and fit
For clothing stores, showing the model's size and fit helps improve the shopping experience, and reduces the rate of customer returns due to ordering the wrong size/poor fit.
Suggest similar or alternative products
Suggest similar or alternative products on your product page to make it easier for customers to find what they are looking for. For example, if you were a fragrance company, you may show on the product page of a candle the same fragrance but in different sized candles, incense sticks, diffusers, etc.
Show recently viewed products
Show the products that the customer recently viewed at the bottom of your product pages, collection pages, and cart page.
Support mobile gestures
Supporting mobile gestures improves the shopping experience for mobile device customers. Any carousel or scrollable element on your website such as image galleries or slideshows should be swipeable on mobile. Mobile users should also be able to zoom in on a gallery image by tapping on it, and any tap elements, such as buttons, should be at least 48 pixels wide and tall.
Merchandise your collection pages
Merchants with physical stores will be familiar with the practice of merchandising, which is to promote a product or brand through use of techniques such as putting it closer to the entrance. Similarly, consider the order of products you would want customers to see first, and manually organise your collections to fit. Clothing stores will often do this on their new arrivals page by putting the most anticipated products at the top of the collection.
Use easily understood terminology
Do not invent your own names for categories and menu links. Use descriptive links, and look at how your competitors label theirs.
Marketing & Automations
Email & SMS marketing
Every time you launch a new line of products, run a promotion, or anything else substantial, share it with your customers in an email campaign. Consider also engaging with your customers on SMS, but be wary of over-sending through this channel (I would recommend once every two weeks at most).
Increase touchpoints
Increasing your touchpoints helps you stay top of mind with your customers, increases the trustworthiness of your website (due to customers recognising your brand), and gives you a way to push your latest products and promotions. Think about where your customers are, online and offline, then create a plan to authentically engage with them on these platforms or places.
Video content
Engaging, informative, or entertaining video content can help your brand reach new customers, convert website vistors into buyers, and make your brand be more authentic. Where possible, take videos of your products and put the video onto the product page, and always look for other opportunties to share video content such as short-form videos on YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Instagram/Facebook.
Optimise your on-page SEO
Your on-page SEO affects where and how your website will appear in Google and other search engine's search results. There is a lot to cover for this, but the basics are: Have a detailed (and accurate) title and description on each page, share valuable information, make sure the website loads quickly without errors, make sure your website is crawlable by search engines, and avoid AI-generated or duplicate content where possible.
Create custom landing pages
Take the competitive topics for your store or industry, such as key brands, product categories, or purchase intent questions, and turn them into a dedicated landing page. By creating a custom landing page for these topics, you can increase your ranking for the topic in the search results, and potentially run targeted advertising campaigns that direct customers to your custom landing page. On your custom landing page, you should include whatever is relevant to the buyer, such as relevant products, product guides, answering frequently asked questions, or curated inspiration.
Collect UGC
User generated content is a valuable form of social proof that can be displayed on your website, marketing, and advertising campaigns (with the creators consent) to show consumers that other customers love your products, customer service, and shopping experience. You may also want to consider rewarding customers that produce UGC on social channels as a form of micro-influencer engagement.
Offer free downloads
Offering a free download on your website is a quick and easy way to potentially net new email subscribers, get your brand shared online or through word of mouth, and engage prospective customers through a series of automated emails. Think about what tools or resources are relevant for your brand or industry, and turn them into a free download or online tool on your website.
Incentivise subscribers with a welcome discount
Offer a welcome discount in return for subscribing to your newsletter. Make the offer obvious on your website, such as in your website footer, on your product page, and in a popup. Test different types of discounts or other incentives such a giveaways.
Recover abandoned carts
An abandoned cart email gets sent to customers who reached the checkout but did not purchase, and is an effective sales recovery strategy. Make sure you have the abandoned cart recovery automation enabled in Shopify (or Klaviyo), and consider offering free shipping or a small discount to incentivise completing their purchase.
Customise your order notification email
Personalise the order notification emails that get automatically sent out by Shopify. Examples of what you could add are when they can expect the order to be fulfilled, restating your shipping & returns policy, sharing how they can contact customer service, or a short paragraph showing your appreciation for their order.
Email customers when they have enough points to get a discount code
If you have a points-based loyalty system, make sure an email is sent out to customers once they have enough points to redeem a reward. This encourages repeat purchases and loyalty system adoption.
Automated email for the customer's first and second order
The first three orders a customer makes are the most important, because after they place a third order on your store they are significantly more likely to purchase from you again. To help you reach this point, send an automated email after the customer's first and second order will a discount code to encourage their next purchase. Other good elements to include are thanking them for their order, a little bit of your story, reiterating your great returns policy, and restating any other selling points such as your loyalty program or fast shipping.
Re-engage inactive customers that have not ordered in over 90 days
The goal of this email automation is to re-engage inactive customers back to your store. Show them your latest products, restate your key selling points, and consider offering a discount code to incentvise their next purchase. For most stores they set this to 90 days of inactivity, but make sure to pick an amount of time that makes sense for your products & audience.
Marketing & ads plan
Every store needs a detailed marketing and advertising plan. This plan should encompass your short term and long term strategies for each touchpoint you have with your customers, including but not limited to Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, your website's blog, Tiktok, Pinterest, etc.
Be active on socials, communicate frequently
You should post at least once a week on your social media profiles to show that you are an active business, and to keep your customers engaged. Frequent communication with your customers keeps your store and products top of mind, securing their next purchase.
Send wishlist reminders
Leverage your customer's wishlists by sending out automated emails when a product on their wishlist goes on sale or is restocked.
Send back in stock notifications
If you have evergreen products, meaning you restock the same product(s) frequently, install a back in stock app and make sure to send email reminders when the product is restocked to get a quick surge in sales.
Send purchase reminders for items that customers restock
If your have products that are the kind that customers restock on a cycle, e.g. because they last for a fixed amount of time, then send automated reminders to customers when it's time to restock. Consider pairing this with a subscription app to convince customers to turn their next order into a regular subscription.
Ecommerce Strategy
Free shipping goal
Customers expect free shipping or free shipping on orders over a certain amount of spend. Presenting shipping rates at the checkout increase cart abandonment, and reduce your conversion rate. A free shipping goal can also be used as a way to increase average order value, and a selling point to share across your website, marketing & advertising.
Returns policy
A good returns policy increases conversion rate by building up confidence with your customers that they will not regret their purchase. Look at what your competitors offer for returns, and offer either an equally or even more generous returns policy on your store. Make your returns policy obvious on your website by adding it to your website footer and product page.
Fast shipping
Fast shipping is directly tied to customer satisfaction. How fast you can reliably ship will depend on your location and products, but do what you can to make it as fast as possible. Share shipping time estimates across the website as a selling point, and consider using it as a source of urgency on your product page, e.g. "Order before 12pm and get it tomorrow".
High touch sales
Store owners hate high touch sales because it's not a passive source of income, but if you are looking to increase your sales, a high-touch strategy can set you apart from competitors and help close some large orders. For clothing stores, this may look like a free personal styling session, or for furniture stores, this may be an interior design consultation for office spaces.
Sell your products wholesale
If you manufacture your own products, or if your supplier agreement allows for it, consider selling your products wholesale to other businesses. Wholesale orders help create reliable income sources and gives your products more ways to reach new customers.
Set up a dropshipping program
A dropshipping program is where you other stores sell your products, but you ship them on the store's behalf. This can be another great way to diversify your sales and reach new customers, but also make sure to closely vet each prospective dropshipper upfront, and set expectations for how invoicing, returns, and customer support will be handled. New Zealand stores can create a dropshipping program with Dropped.
Try DroppedDesign intrinsic virality
Intrinsic virality describes a phenomenon where your products or buying experience naturally encourages word of mouth with your customers, pushing your brand and products to new customers intrinsically. Think about what you can uniquely do to make your products, website, or shopping experience more viral. This could be unique packaging that inspires people to share it on social media, incentives for customer referrals, or selling your products in a way that's designed to be shared, such as a gift box.
Always be testing
Every store is unique in it's products, target audience, opportunties, and challenges. While it can be tempting to make decisions based solely on your experience or intuition, the only way to know for sure the best strategy or approach without bias is to test it. Test everything that you can realistically test, such as product pricing, website design, incentives, and communication. Ideally, when testing you should use an A/B or multivariant testing model so that you can truly measure the impact of your change against a control.
Seasonal promotions
Seasonal promotions are recurring events that happen within your industry or country every year at the same time, such as the Black Friday Cyber Monday promotion for New Zealand stores, or Australia Race day for Australian clothing retailers. Make sure you have a plan for every upcoming seasonal promotion that's applicable for your store, including an email marketing campaign, social marketing campaign, how you will update the website, what products you will be putting on sale (if applicable), and potentially an advertising strategy.
Find your flywheel
A flywheel for ecommerce describes a model where, when designed correctly, your customer base can grow by itself. This often takes the form of a strategy to attract new customers that involves engaging or leveraging your already existing customers or their sales. For Amazon, their flywheel was selling goods at lower prices with a wider range of options than their competitors, which attracted customers to Amazon, which allowed them to lower their prices further on a wider range of items, which attracted even more customers. You will likely will not be able to set up a flywheel as easy and as at a large scale as Amazon did, but think about what you can uniquely do to reinvest your sales into growth.
Administration
Back up your store
Many stores don't think about backing up their online store until it's too late. Backing up your store will give you a way to recover lost data in the event of an emergency, such as getting hacked or accidental deletions. For this, I recommend Rewind Backups.
Track admin activity
Similar to my previous recommendation, many stores think about tracking admin activity too late. Shopify has it's own built in activity log, but there's no ability to search with it, and not every admin action is recorded inside of it. Tracking admin activity will help you audit apps (including private apps) or incidents to understand how they modified your store and what actions you can take to prevent unwanted changes from happening again. For this, I use Smartlogs.
Create SOPs
SOPs, or standard operation procedures, are important for stores because they establish consistency and reduce errors made when handling routine tasks. They also help significantly when onboarding new hires and to avoid information silos. To help introduce SOPs with your team, document the procedures in a shared place everyone can acccess, such as Google Docs or Notion.
Don't use automatic discounts for sales
A lot of store owners use automatic discounts to run their sales or promotions because it's easy to set up, but this is not good for your shopping experience or conversion rate. Automatic discounts don't clearly show your products as discounted when viewed in collection pages, product pages, or through your other channels such as advertising or social media. Instead, using the bulk editor or one of the many bulk editing apps on Shopify, use the price and compare price field to run the sale.
Track broken links in Search Console
When a link on your website doesn't navigate to a page anymore, this is called a broken link. A surge in broken links often mean that the either a lot of pages, collections of products have changed their URL or have been deleted, which creates a bad experience for customers and hurts your SEO. To mitigate this, regularly check the broken links report in Google Search Console, and redirect broken links to valid pages on your website.
Limit fraud orders
Fraud orders can be a massive pain for Shopify stores. The common strategy is ordering products with a stolen card which will get a chargeback later, but even if you don't ship the order, processing the refund incurs losses from the transaction fees. To mitigate this, use Shopify's Fraud Filter and Fraud Control. If you find yourself heavily targeted by fraud orders, consider setting your payment capture method to manual to avoid the transaction fees from fraud orders.
Learn moreEnable online returns
Shopify's new online returns feature simplifies return requests for your customers, and gives you a simple dashboard to approve/reject returns. To enable this, active the new customer account experience in Shopify, then enable online returns.
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