Shopify hosts over 1.58 million websites all over the world a majority of which are independent businesses run by entrepreneurs and small teams. Shopify has had the power to revolutionize small businesses for the better. However, for some businesses, its standard features can fall short, especially when you want to set your brand apart.
The out-of-the-box version of Shopify might not cut it for businesses that are growing. Typically, these businesses need to integrate seamlessly with apps or their unique processes. Below are some of the most common questions we’re asked:
- How Can I Make My Shopify Store Stand Out?
- How Can I Improve the Customer Experience on My Shopify Site?
- Can Shopify Handle the Growth of My Business?
- How Can I Integrate Shopify with my other business systems?
At Fahrenheit Marketing, we have spent more than 16 years answering these questions and others like them. We know the potential of Shopify and are passionate about unlocking it for you. How? Through tailored customization and expertise.
With small tweaks and focused enhancements, we can dramatically improve how your store functions and feels. This isn’t just about making your site look good—it’s about making it work brilliantly.
Below, we look at these common questions. We answer how targeted custom themes, smart integrations, and thoughtful store customizations can make significant differences to your site. We also look at how to help you take the weight off your teams and help you scale.
These changes are more than a store makeover; they’re about enhancing the Shopify experience and optimizing your Shopify store.
Not only that – we recommend ways to do so that truly embody your brand and business needs.
How Can I Make My Shopify Store Stand Out?
Customization is key. Shopify out-of-the-box is a fantastic tool, but businesses will often have problems with it when they can’t customize. When you are unable to personalize your customer experience, it’s more likely that your customers will abandon their carts. This is lost revenue which can eventually sink a business.
By aligning your store with your brand and focusing on the customer experience, you can decrease the number of carts that are abandoned. At Fahrenheit, we help with tailored Shopify design and store development. Customers feel like their purchase is personalized, which improves their experience and makes them more likely to finish their buying journey.
Here’s how to do it:
- Themes and Layouts: by reflecting your brand identity through custom store themes, you reinforce the feeling of trust and comfort felt by your customers. This means they will spend more time on the site and feel happier browsing. Then, when they wish to purchase, they can enjoy a fully customized cart designed by you.
- Branding Elements: consistent logos, color schemes, and fonts across all pages strengthen brand recognition and ensure a cohesive visual experience for your customers. This helps your store stand out, making it more likely that customers will share their experience with others.
- Navigation and User Interface: Improving the navigation of your store makes it more intuitive and user-friendly. Custom layouts or our Shopify templates help to increase conversion rates by removing the frustration customers can sometimes feel when they can’t find what they’re looking for.
How Can I Improve the Customer Experience on My Shopify Site?
One of the most off-putting things when buying something online is having a bad experience. Long load times, bad lag, and poor latency – these are responsible for a huge number of abandoned carts. But, once again, with the right tools this can be easily fixed.
At the most fundamental level, your Shopify store needs to work on the customer’s screen. With an estimated 50% of purchases now being done on mobile, this means customizing Shopify so that it works on any type of screen that a customer could possibly use.
Desktop, tablets, and mobile – the key three – all have slightly different customization and design parameters.
The better your store design for each, the more likely you are to convert the curious into customers.
Here are some ideas to help improve your customer experience:
- Be quick: Keep an eye on load times. By keeping images efficient, code streamlined, and using modern technology, you can ensure that customers enjoy a smooth experience that is both engaging and comfortable.
- Be responsive: By designing for all mediums, from tablets to desktops, you can ensure an optimal layout. This will ensure your store responds well to customer input. The more responsive the experience, the happier the customer. The last thing you want is for a customer to have to scroll to click buy. Bugs like this create frustration and massively impact the customer’s flow (and often their intention to buy from you).
- Be interactive: Include features that help you zoom into products without clicking or opening new pages. Utilize Google or Microsoft tools so that customers can fill in their details easily. Include wish lists or buy-now options that make the customer buying journey as easy as possible, with as few clicks as necessary. By working with the customers’ existing technology, you can improve the frequency with which they’ll return to your Shopify store.
The faster you can be, the better. The more responsive your store is to customer input, the less friction customers experience. The more interactive your store, the more engaged customers become. Focussing on the smaller aspects and customizing your Shopify store for experience will facilitate purchases in the moment, as well as customer loyalty over time.
Can Shopify Handle the Growth of My Business?
Scale is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s great to see business booming. It’s better for customers, better for staff, stakeholders, executives – everyone. On the other hand, with great scale comes great responsibility.
As your business grows, you will need things that the basic version of Shopify struggles with. Adding more variety becomes challenging. The standard Shopify cart can be frustrating for customers. Financial reporting and tax become a burden, due to sheer volume if nothing else.
A trickle can very quickly become a flood without the right tools to help you.
So what are the key considerations if you’re at the point where you want more from your Shopify store?
- Integrate your systems: By integrating Shopify with Xero, Blaze, Facebook, Business One—whatever you’re using—you can change the nature of your back office overnight. Using Shopify’s inherent flexibility, you can revolutionize your store’s efficiency. It’s so important that we’ve included a whole other section on this below.
- Strong Site Architecture: More traffic comes with its own problems. As your site grows, with more product pages, landing pages, blog posts, and news items, you will need the infrastructure to support it. This makes sure the site runs smoothly. But it’s not just about performance. A clean and customized architecture will help customers get where they want without guesswork. It helps retain a strong SEO so that your site remains high in the rankings. Looking forward, it means you can grow simply and easily, without the need for a complete redesign (which is far more common than you might expect!).
- Customize your Cart: Want to add next-day delivery? Suggest related products that might be useful to customers? Or improve their experience by giving them shipping or tax estimates? The cart customization in Shopify is a great way to improve customer experience and reduce the number of abandoned carts. It also gives you the opportunity to truly personalize the experience for your customers in ways that simply aren’t possible in the standard version.
Working with a partner like Fahrenheit can dramatically improve your customer experience, and not just in terms of their browsing and buying. We can customize accessibility options to ensure that your site is inclusive and enhance security so that your customers’ data is protected.
How Can I Integrate Shopify with my other business systems?
Integrating Shopify with your other apps and systems is an incredible time saver. Without it, businesses can be swamped. Without integration, everything takes more time. As you scale, this means either more expensive headcount or more unhappy customers—or, increasingly, both.
So what type of integrations should you be focusing on?
- Shopify CRM Integration: By linking Shopify to your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, you can be responsive in real-time. As soon as a customer buys something, your team will know. This also gives you access to powerful reporting and analysis. In turn, this will help you plan customer incentives and communications.
- Shopify Stock Integration: Linking Shopify with your inventory, tills, and logistics systems means that you’ll never be caught off balance by a big order. By ensuring your inventory and stock are where they need to be, you can minimize order times. By improving reliability, you can ensure that customers have a great experience and come back for more.
- Shopify Accounts Integration: By automatically updating your finance software as purchases are made, you remove the need to reconcile this information yourself. This makes everything easier, from tax to payroll. By keeping your finance team agile, they can focus on other things that are important to the business.
- Shopify Custom Workflows: Building custom workflows can completely automate things that would otherwise require time and headcount. They can adjust stock or connect the right customer to the right service, without error or delay.
- Integrations are important to get right and can be daunting to do by yourself. If you want to integrate Shopify but don’t code yourself, this is where Fahrenheit comes in. With many thousands of customers touching the tools we’ve developed, we are more than comfortable building customized integrations. We use modern and secure API tools, with expertise that will save you time and money.
Fahrenheit Marketing is proud of the work we have done with Healthy Pet of Austin, Texas. Throughout this article, we pull from the work we’ve done on their website. Showing only a few examples that are applicable to most Shopify users, we demonstrate how subtle customizations can make ANY Shopify site stand out from its competition. But our work did not stop there. We have done many customizations such as:
- Incorporating a subscription purchase-renewal program and the guidance to use it
- Searchable filters to find products customers need quickly
- Adding social media sharing links to a customized events calendar page
- Developing a format for the client to create custom pages based by tagging and labeling product families
- Creating and programming logic for custom delivery zones from the physical locations.
- Designing myriad hover-states and tooltips to help customers navigate their own checkout process
Fahrenheit has worked with Healthy Pet to create some truly remarkable, custom applications that automate and unite formerly separate elements of their business.
Shopify calculates shipping and tax rates for the US and Canada, along with a variety of currencies, but not local service/delivery. During the pandemic, millions of stores maintained solvency by offering delivery. It was important to calculate accurate delivery rates. Service industries keep giant neighborhood maps posted on walls to establish service zones. ECommerce has no walls! Take advantage of smart delivery zones for your business. Using mileage, highways, or zip codes, your business knows which areas are profitable and which require an increased delivery fee. The coding requires a professional developer but can be added to Shopify. By customizing the checkout experience, your customers will feel like your site is consistent and unique throughout.
Every experience can be modified with coding, from the product or service pages, home page, and all the way through to your thank you emails. You go the extra mile in your customer service. Your website should convey the same level of detail. While most of your Shopify site will follow your theme and allow you to fill content, make even your notifications and emails reflect your brand and style. These custom modifications add credibility and wow factor.
How Can a Marketing Partner Help Customize My Shopify Store?
The biggest turn-off when looking at customizing your store is usually time. Not every business has a savvy eCommerce manager to hand who can customize Shopify, code Shopify integrations, personalize the Shopify website, and spin lots of other plates at the same time. But what if you could convert 10% of those abandoned carts into customers? What about 20%? What could you do with the additional revenue?
A marketing partner can lift the burden. By providing expertise in one focused area, your team is free to get back to the core of your business.
Not sure what key phrase to use? Can’t think of a meta description? A marketing partner can remove all of the jargon so that you can get back to the bits of the business that you enjoy. Need to integrate your Shopify store into your back-office systems but haven’t done it before? A marketing partner can provide experience and expertise as part of the package.
The main questions to ask when considering a partnership: Are my abandoned cart rates too high? Is my Shopify Store too basic to be customized in the best way for my customers? Am I too busy to learn how to customize Shopify myself?
If the answer to these questions is yes – a marketing partnership could be right for you. Reach out to us to schedule a chat.