Hi Shopify community,
Just want to point out a few things you want to pay attention to, especially if you are new on shopify, and generally new to selling online.
We are a cyber security company who happens to have a shopify store as well, so we just want to share some thoughts we experienced.
-To become a legit, client safe business you will have to share contact details on the site at some point, when you do this expect an influx of people offering you their expertise on seo, marketing, boosting your sales. Be careful and do your do-diligence before giving anyone access to your site or other accounts.
-From time to time you might get fraudulent purchases, purchases made by someones else’s credit card or paypal account, fortunately shopify does a great job filtering these out, so on the order page, on the left side you have the “fraud analysis tab” with Low - Medium - High. Low is a normal, legit purchase, for the other two it’s worth looking into it. If you scroll down further there is a “full analysis” link, where you can see why the purchase was flagged, from that list it should be clear to you if the purchase is legit or not, if the order was made through paypal also check if the name on the paypal account is the same as the name on the order, if the emails match, or if they are even from the same country.
Shopify explains stuff pretty well on this page / video:
https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/orders/fraud-analysis
-Expect an influx of bots on your facebook/messenger, whatsapp contacting you, this eventually dies off, but for a fresh store its common. You can spot them by generally asking you the exact same question, if you reply they never check the message, if you look up their profile, there is barely anything there or it’s clearly a hacked account as the person on the account has barely any chance of being interested in your products(age). Also these messages tend to come from a different country you are selling from.
-Google ads are a good tool to boost sales but do your research on how to set it up correctly. In our experience, "smart campaigns’ ’ or “performance max” don’t work at the minute, but I think it will work in the near future. Use shopping campaigns, but set them up manually, look for “manual campaigns”
Create campaign>Setup without goals>Shopping>Standard Shopping campaign, and then set up the conversion as you would do with the others. Later on don’t forget to set the ads scheduling if you are not selling globally. By default google was sending traffic around 1am, resulting in zero sales.
Also expect an influx of bots few times, this is due to them analyzing the site, and yeah you will be charged for this traffic, but in the long term you will get it back on sales. Don’t do campaigns which are less than 3 weeks, you won’t get a great result from these.
-Facebook ads work for niche products, if you are selling something where the market is saturated, you won’t get much value from it.
-Google merchant integration is a great tool to boost your traffic and you should add this through the shopify marketplace. The app is a little bit broken but there is a workaround for things. If you use the google merchant app, you need a GTIN otherwise after a while your product will be taken off from google. What EVERYONE forgets to mention Barcode (ISBN, UPC, etc.) IS THE SAME AS GTIN, recently Shopify updated this field in the products description and it does say Gtin as well, so it’s clear where to put it. If you are NOT SELLING A CUSTOM PRODUCT you have to go to the google sales chanel>manage availability and set the “CUSTOM PRODUCT” field to FALSE otherwise the merchant store won’t accept your gtin. If you are uploading stock with the csv sheet, unfortunately you can’t set this field in the sheet… They are working on it but at this time this is not possible.
-Research your product competitiveness in the merchant store and set your prices according to that, it’s a great tool to get your pricing right.
-Submit your sitemaps to google search console as soon as your shop is complete and ready for selling. You will get loads of “non indexed” page notifications, but most of this should be fine. These will be pages that don’t lead anywhere or they can be products which are out of stock, but make sure you look at these from time to time. Time to time you might see something here that’s indexed but its not actually your products, these are so cold SPAM BACKLINKS, there are annoying but not dangerous, refer to this solutions for more info:
Final advice: DON’T GIVE UP TOO SOON, this is a longer journey than most people usually think, but it’s worth it! Shopify is still the best platform for your e-commerce venture, but you have to put some work into it.
GOOD LUCK!
p.s. if you think you need help in cyber security related stuff, drop us a dm and we will look into it if we can help you out.