In the world of online sales and shops, Shopify is a platform that’s been playing one of the leading roles for some time now.
Its intuitive design and ease of setting up your online store and selling your products are what made this platform so popular in the first place.
That said, even the most popular platforms don’t come entirely free of issues. Some Shopify store owners find it tough to attract new customers. The others are not sure how to approach the delicate task of assessing their analytics sheets. Then there are those who just want to place their products on their virtual store’s virtual shelf, but glitches and bugs won’t let them.
In this article, we’re going to address some of the most common pet peeves that grind the gears of the folks who otherwise appreciate the platform.
As you will see in the passages below, Shopify isn’t one of the most popular eCommerce platforms for no reason, but even the best platforms have an issue or two that needs to be sorted out.
Read on to learn more.
What is Shopify?
Used by over 1,000,000 firms in 175 countries, Shopify represents one of the most prominent e-commerce platforms today.
Thanks to its smart online editor that comes as an inbuilt part of this platform’s architecture, you can easily create new pages for your products.
What these pages represent is a kind of digital shelf where you can store your products and sell them from there to your customers.
Also, Shopify is well-known and beloved for being secure and for having a large database of different languages. This can be quite helpful when it comes to setting up a local store in your local language.
What Makes Shopify Such a Good Choice for e-Commerce
The biggest overall reason why Shopify is so popular would certainly be its well-roundedness. Even if you’re a complete rookie, setting up a Shopify shop is a piece of cake. Upgrading it is also a fairly straightforward endeavor, so you won’t have to worry about scaling if you’re going with Shopify as your choice of the sales platform.
Another great thing about this platform would certainly be that it gives both small and larger businesses a place to expand sales and attract new customers.
As a small trader, setting up a regular Shopify account will get you your own little online fruit stand, so to speak. As a bigger company, Shopify offers a special version of its platform called Shopify Plus, which gets you more options and online sales tools to work with.
Here are a couple of the most important reasons why Shopify is so popular:
Easy Setup
Whether you’re an eCommerce veteran or a complete novice with a T-shirt business you want to take online, setting up a Shopify store will be a walk in the park.
The digital engineers at Shopify purposefully made their platform easy to navigate to help new users. For this reason, setting up an account in a matter of minutes and in only a couple of steps is of great importance for new users.
Helps You Create Your Store Design with Customization
The true beauty of Shopify is not only in its simplicity. The simple layout is there as a starter to get you interested in this platform.
What makes marketers big and small stick with Shopify is its immense potential when it comes to customizing your online store premises. Using Shopify Liquid, for example, you can make your store stand out from the rest by adding special visuals, pieces of code, and other personalized assets.
Powerful Sales Tools Supported
Other than the excellent visual properties that this platform comes with, Shopify also comes with its fair share of sales tools and inbuilt pieces of software that can make your shop successful.
For example, different payment and shipment options, sales analytics, as well as advanced inventory management, all make Shopify a platform that makes your online shop run like a well-oiled engine.
That said, let’s get into the main section of this article – Shopify’s rare but existent issues. Here’s the deal:
Common Shopify Issues
So far in this text, we’ve had some pretty kind words for Shopify as a sales platform. This is for a couple of good reasons, too.
At the same time, Shopify’s not exactly without its problems and areas that need some improvement. Here are some of those important areas where the folks at Shopify might want to improve in the future:
ERP Integration
Representing one of the probably most noteworthy problems when it comes to Shopify, the lack of a comprehensive approach to ERP integration remains a major downside when it comes to scaling your business on Shopify.
ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning, and it refers to software that business owners use to handle billing, shipments, updates, and pretty much all core needs of running a business.
Now, Shopify itself as a platform offers some ERP features. That said, if you’re running some rather complex and specific business, you will probably require specialized software that would answer your needs.
The problem with Spotify is the lack of a way to integrate these pieces of third-party software. For this reason, if you have some sort of complex business model, you may encounter problems with trying to use other software in addition to Shopify.
Sales Stagnation
To be fair to Shopify, this problem, although fairly common, isn’t the fault of the folks running Shopify.
What tends to happen to a lot of marketers on Shopify is that finding the right wavelength that would resonate with their customers can be kind of tough. Since Shopify is so popular, finding your voice and pushing your brand in a sea of other brands can be difficult – especially for beginners.
If these kinds of issues have been pestering your Shopify eCommerce store, there are luckily a couple of solutions that you can try out right away. For example, you can go for setting up a brand new marketing campaign. This can include writing articles, buyer’s guides, as well as product reviews for your ware.
On the other hand, you can also hire visual designers to come up with a new logo for your brand. If you’re in the US, you can look for Seattle web designers, or contact us to get your online store to the next level.
Analytics Issues
When it comes to Shopify analytics, the problem that many sellers complain about is that it’s not detailed enough.
The thing is, since Shopify represents a platform that deals with a rather large market where demand and supply fluctuate all the time, analytics are of great value to the sellers.
There are quite a few specialized apps that claim to offer top-tier Shopify analytics. The problem with these, however, is that they are mostly connected to Google Analytics and general Shopify data. While this is not bad, it is quite limiting in the sense of how much info you can get from these apps that are relevant to your business.
Typically, these analytics apps are quite well-developed visually, but in terms of their functionality – they typically do not offer that much.
Marketing Management
Another pet peeve where Shopify is not to blame, in all fairness, would be the management aspect of your marketing campaign.
One of the biggest reasons why Shopify doesn’t work that well for many sellers is the lack of management skills and poor marketing campaigns or even the absence of a marketing campaign altogether.
Of course, it’s not the job of Shopify to help you figure out your marketing campaign. That said, the sellers that are on this platform typically report this as their biggest challenge with Shopify, so it has to be taken into consideration.
Now, if you approach the question of management seriously enough, you can get this issue sorted out fairly easily.
While describing this in detail would require a new article entirely, here are a couple of things that you can do right away:
- Set up a social media automatic updater app account. (These apps allow you to write social media posts in advance and they will post them for you.)
- Consider starting a blog and posting product reviews of your products.
- Start making an email marketing list.
Difficulties Finding New Customers
The number of people preferring to make purchases online as opposed to walking or driving to a store has been gradually but steadily increasing during the past decades.
Similarly to the reason above, one of the most important things to pay attention to would be that finding new customers can be quite challenging – especially for a beginner.
The answer to this issue mostly comes down to obtaining more store traffic. This means getting more visitors, more clicks, and ultimately – more products sold.
Conclusion
Thanks to its intuitive interface, beginner-friendly layout, and popularity which gives this platform the role in the eCommerce market it has, Shopify is a safe bet to go for if you’re starting out an online store.
As is the case with any other online platform, though, Shopify does come with some issues. That said, if you’re willing to invest some time and effort to work your way around these, you will see that sticking with this platform more than makes sense.
Author’s Bio
Christopher is a Digital Marketing specialist, Project Manager and Editor at Find Digital Agency and a passionate blogger. He is a devoted and experienced author who loves to pay attention to quality research and details. Focused on new digital trends and voice distribution across different channels, he starts the day scrolling digest on new digital trends while sipping a cup of coffee. In his free time Christopher plays drums and Magic: the Gathering.