How to Grow to a Large Shopify Store

Blog Series Overview

Shopify is one of the largest, if not the largest, e-commerce platforms in the world. At the time of writing this article, there are more than 1.5 million Shopify merchants and 3.75 million Shopify websites. This number is growing exponentially every year. However, almost 50% of these stores are small in terms of size and revenue. While setting up a Shopify store is quite easy and takes just minutes, it is not quite as easy to grow & scale to a larger company. There are certain obstacles and non-technical hardships along the way that no one talks about. We aim to help these smaller-sized companies become more successful in Shopify. We are launching a new series of informative blogs. This is part 2 of the series, you can reach the other articles directly from below:

The 7 Golden Steps to Scale & Grow your Shopify Store:

• Part 1: A Guide for New Shopify Store Owners
• Part 2: How to Generate Traffic for your Shopify Store
• Part 3: Quality Traffic vs More Traffic for your Shopify Store
• Part 4: Remarketing 101 for your Shopify Store
• Part 5: Remarketing Tips No One Talks About
• Part 6: Getting Better Returns for Online Ads Spendings
• Part 7: How to Grow to a Large Shopify Store

Qualification & Justification

Firstly, an introduction is in order. Why would you take our points of view as a credible source of information? Well, I have been working as a data scientist in SaaS (Software as a Service) company, named Enhencer, for more than 4 years. Our goal as a company is to help e-commerce companies to dig out valuable visitors as their target audience from their website traffic and improve their returns on marketing campaigns. As an individual and as the company we have worked with many Shopify store owners ranging from small to large. We have encountered and solved many problems faced by these companies and helped many companies go from small-sized to larger sizes. As a result, we have seen a fair share of different scenarios that can emerge under different conditions.

Aim of this Article

This is the last part of the series. In previous parts, we have discussed how to attract quality traffic, how to retarget properly, and how to optimize online ad campaigns. In this part, we will discuss how to grow your Shopify store into a large company.

What it means to Grow a Shopify Store

How do you define growth? One bare-bone answer is to increase the Shopify store sales and grow the business. It is a continuous process rather than a final state. The hard part is to sustain this continuous process of growth. Look at the process cycle below.

First, you need to increase your existing website traffic. Traffic increase does not guarantee higher sales. Therefore, you need to reach this increased website traffic with remarketing campaigns. This gives you a chance to reach out and convince the people coming to your website to make a purchase. Remarketing campaigns will eventually increase website sales to a certain point. At this point, you need to go back to the very first step and invest again in gaining more traffic. Finally, rinse & repeat.

As I mentioned earlier, it is a continuous process that can sustain growth. However there are many ways you can do the individual parts, but it is important that you do so.

Not every website visitor ends up purchasing something from the website. In the e-commerce industry, on average, only 1% of visitors make a purchase. Therefore, stable traffic will only generate a stable amount of sales. Even with remarketing, you can only go so far.

As a solution to this, you need to increase the website traffic. There are many ways to achieve this. Read the following article for more info:

Part 2: How to Generate Traffic for your Shopify Store

Part 3: Quality Traffic vs More Traffic for your Shopify Store

There are two main sources of traffic category, namely, Paid Traffic & Organic Traffic. Paid traffic can be achieved in the short run using online ad platforms, like Facebook ads & Google Ads. Organic traffic is a long-term solution that can be achieved by optimizing your website SEO, content marketing, influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, and so on. This blog will focus on the Short run paid traffic category.

Spend More to Earn More

Organic traffic takes a long time to take effect. It should only be considered for the long run. Just because you spend hours on SEO & content marketing does not mean you will see the fruits of your labor right away. Rest assured, you will see the effects in the long run.

Instead of waiting for the organic traffic to grow, you can spend on paid traffic to get a faster response.

“Stopping advertising to save money is like stopping your watch to save time.” — Henry Ford

There is no other way around it. The fastest way to do this would be to launch a traffic campaign on online ad platforms like Facebook Ads & Google Ads.

The scenarios can be painted as such:

1. Launch a traffic campaign on Facebook & Google Ads — But try to optimize your campaign to get quality traffic to your Shopify store. Read Quality Traffic vs More Traffic for your Shopify Store for more info.
2. As the traffic increases, the number of website purchases will increase, but the conversion rate might stay the same. For instance, if you had 1000 traffic and 10 sales per day, then the conversion rate is 1%. If the traffic increases to 10000, then the number of website purchases might increase to 100, but the conversion rate stays the same. More or Less. This is without remarketing campaign.
3. In order to grow, you need to launch remarketing campaigns as well. Remarketing lets you reach out to the people who visited your Shopify store and convince them to make a website purchase. This increases the conversion rate and the number of sales on the website. Read the articles below to understand more about remarketing campaigns.
   
   Part 4: Remarketing 101 for your Shopify Store
   Part 5: Remarketing Tips No One Talks About
   Part 6: Getting Better Returns for Online Ads Spendings

When done right, it creates a cycle that sustains each element. Look at the picture above.

Our next blog series will be about how to launch these campaigns, kind of a hands-on tutorial. Keep an eye out for future articles.