Hi all! I've been a freelance Shopify developer for 6-7 years now, and I've seen such a wide variety of businesses in all different types of markets.
Over the past 3 years (especially since COVID), there has been a huge uptick in Shopify stores opening in the food sector. Before COVID, this was less common, but since the pandemic caused most shoppers to stay at home, more and more people are looking to buy groceries / ingredients online.
While food / recipe blogs have always existed on platforms like Wordpress, I think that Shopify is in a fantastic position right now to bring over businesses like grocery stores, recipe blogs, and niche food item stores (for example; hot sauce companies, specialty cooking tool creators, etc.) into the Shopify world.
Recipes are the perfect intersection of content + e-commerce, that any business in the food sector should, in my opinion, be taking advantage of.
E-commerce + Recipes = Win-Win
If you sell a physical food item, Shopify is truly the best opportunity for you to both gain consistent readers / users, while selling more of your product.
Using Shopify for your recipe blog is a smart call as you are able to not only attract customers to your website via your delicious recipes, but also take advantage of the time they spend on your website by pitching and selling them your recipe's ingredients.
Using a Shopify app like Recipe Kit, you can:
- Create beautiful recipes with gorgeous designs that live in your Shopify website blog
- Attach your products as ingredients so that customers can one-click buy them while reading the product
- Provide Google with all the lovely SEO optimized rich data schema, so your recipes show up high in search results while displaying information like the recipe image, calories, cooking time, etc.
This truly is the best scenario for both food blog owners, and recipe readers alike. Readers get to read your delicious recipe, and they have the easy opportunity to purchase your product from within the recipe card so that they receive the exact products that the recipe was built using.
Shopify Is Investing In Content
Years ago, when Shopify first launched, the platform was missing some critical features for store owners that wanted to create content to compete with blogs and websites built on extensive CMS platforms like Wordpress.
Recently, with the introduction of Shopify's OS2.0 platform, Shopify stores can now take advantage of a detailed drag-and-drop editor which allows them to build better looking, and more full featured, pages and blogs posts.
Embedding photo galleries, recipe cards, featured products, and more, are now possible with Shopify's upgraded editor.
Each and every new update from Shopify shows them moving towards building a platform that allows store owners & bloggers to build a e-commerce website that not only features slick product purchasing & checkout options, but also a easily customizable content-heavy blog that attracts new customers, organically!
All in all...
If I was a store owner / thinking of creating an online business, I would be rushing towards the food / online grocery market and building a store on Shopify.
Everyone is cooking these days, so why not make it easier for recipe blog readers to get the specific ingredient that your recipe calls for?
What are your thoughts on this? I think the food blog world has always been a great marketing opportunity, so combining it with e-commerce just makes perfect sense to me.
