I’m familiar with on-page and off-page SEO, and I understand the importance of backlinks. My question isn’t theoretical, as I’m already implementing these techniques.
My store performs well; I achieve a 70% conversion rate whenever I run a campaign.
My primary reason for choosing Shopify was the platform’s promise of traffic from its community (Shop Pay, etc.). However, I’m not seeing any traffic from Shopify itself.
My question is: if I have to run paid campaigns to drive traffic, then why pay for Shopify? I could achieve the same results with a free WordPress setup. What is Shopify doing to generate traffic for my store?
I’ve had a “free WordPress” step up and it was definately not free (needed to subscribe to multiple apps to get the features I wanted) and is was also somewhat unreliable. Links were always breaking, payment systems malfunctioned, the hosting site was down often so my site wasn’t always live etc. Unless you pay someone to look after it you are the one who has to go in and check to makesure everthing is working all of the time. Everthing about the technical side of the store is on you and this is no small task, especially over time as sales grow and you get busy doing other things. Having said all of this though your question is a very good one, we pay monthly fees and a % of our sales to Shopify. We also pay in USD, I’m in Australia and the exchange rate is one $AUD is just over 60 cents USD so Shopify fees are not cheap. If it were possible for Shopify to drive traffic to my store that would be a feature that I would place a high value on. My current understanding is that this is not part of the arrangement though, sure wish it could be.
Thank you, Alex, for your input. Some of your concerns are legitimate, however I disagree with some of them because I am an experienced developer (you might say that I coded many of the top themes). I currently run four WordPress stores, all of which use free plugins or my own custom development. So, if you are knowledgeable enough to choose a suitable hosting provider, WordPress is much more cost-effective.
I believe that because I do not need somebody to administer my WordPress websites, it is much more cost effective and reliable. My only issue is that if Shopify isn’t driving traffic from its community, it’s a pricey alternative for me!