- Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, so many website options.
Today we're gonna go through and tell you why I love Shopify
above all else, and covered nine mistakes
to avoid when setting up your store.
Just a disclaimer, I'm not paid by Shopify,
I just use them for all my stores.
I'm Davie, I've got 10 e-commerce brands,
we've got over two million customers
and we sell a product every 20 seconds,
and this is my YouTube guide.
The landscape of choosing an e-commerce website
has changed so much, even since I started,
and I only started about three and a half years ago.
Back then, you had ClickFunnels, Shopify, BigCommerce,
WooCommerce, and Magento.
Shopify is becoming the market leader,
which is pretty obvious based on the share price.
There are definite advantages
when picking your dominant player for your platform.
When you go to integrate either your warehouse
or certain apps, they're probably first and foremost,
gonna have a Shopify integration.
The other thing is with all of these data privacy changes,
it's gonna be amazing to have someone
with a dominant amount of traffic
to create first party solutions.
By the looks of things, Shopify is making headway with this,
with Shopify audiences.
They also did a fantastic job with Cappy
and the iOS 14.5 updates.
Shopify is getting so good that even existing stores
that probably did full custom build with a team
are now migrating over to Shopify.
Even JB Hi-Fi uses them,
have a look at this amazing list of brands
that actually use Shopify.
(cheerful music)
All right, so the first mistake
that I see a lot of people make
with designing websites, they over-design it.
They think that if it looks pretty, it's gonna work.
That is the complete opposite.
It needs to be incredibly easy to use
and digest on the user.
People do not want to have to learn to use your website.
This is why using one of the default themes
is actually really effective.
It's fast and it's simple.
People are familiar with it.
A lot of people laugh when they see our websites
and they say, how can you be doing this much money?
Of course we could design them better
and we've actually split tested
really nicely designed sites,
first, our current sites, and they almost always lose.
If you wanna improve your website's design
and therefore branding,
you need to do it through split tests.
CRO make constant positive iterations
in both design and function.
The second mistake that I often say people make,
and it's often because they've over-designed it,
is their website is so slow.
Use Google speed test or GTmetrix to test your site speed.
Again, Shopify has done an amazing job
at making a standard templates very, very fast,
and it's only getting better.
The third mistake that I see people make
is that their product imagery is just not up to scratch.
I've mentioned the content is so important for Facebook ads,
but it's also important for your website.
Make sure you have really high quality images.
Show the product being used in its best sense.
How does it actually function?
Show you product features, show close-ups of fabrics.
All of this can be done on an iPhone,
just make sure you have incredible lighting
and don't over-edit the photos.
If you wanna make it more branded,
you can get photography paper in your brand colors
and do a photo shoot. This will give you a website,
a very professional and functional look.
The fourth mistake is people over-complicate their copy.
It needs to be direct response copy.
You're not telling a narrative,
you're basically telling the customer
what you are going to do for them.
Make it conversational,
don't use long words that are hard to understand.
Again, you want it really easy to digest.
Fifth mistake is people leaving off any social proof.
You wanna get reviews, you wanna get customer feedback,
you wanna get publications to talk about your product,
all of this social proof is gonna create trust with the user
that you're not a scammer or a drop-shipper.
The next mistake that I see people make
is really hiding their shipping information.
You need to really be clear on your Product page,
how the product is actually gonna get to the person.
The duration and the fact that it's either free shipping
or whatever it is that I range in.
The seventh mistake that I see people make
is not having that customer service information
very, very clear.
This is gonna remove trust.
You either want a phone number or an email,
oh, and you also want a Contact Us page.
Great place to put all of this information
is actually in a FAQ spot on your Product page.
This is often referred to as an accordion.
The eighth mistake that I often see people use,
which is also avoided
by using just one of the default templates
is not focusing on mobile-first.
You need to make sure your mobile functionality is there.
80% of traffic is mobile, so don't ignore it.
You can even start by designing your website,
looking in the mobile editor.
And finally, I just really wanna reiterate,
you need to make sure that you are selling your features
and your benefits of your products.
This can be done through imagery, gifts, copy,
it doesn't matter, but you need to sell the product.
Is it gifts, or gifts?
Let's just go with gifts, or gifts.
Hit me in the comment section.
All right, so there are some rapid fire examples
of mistakes not to make.
The next thing I'm gonna teach you
is how to optimize your Shopify store.
Before I tell you the Shopify apps to add,
just be aware that adding some apps
can slow down your website.
There's often these crazy upsell apps
that can actually slow down your site
and cause more harm than good.
You will not be able to see this effect,
because this app will be reporting
that it's given you X amount of sales,
but it isn't calculating the sales that it's subtracting
because of its website speed.
So just be very aware before you download an app.
The main apps that I love
is obviously Klaviyo for email marketing.
We'll get into that later.
You can set up all your basic flows and automation
so that when you drive a customer from Facebook,
you're getting their email and nurturing them
and hopefully converting them down the line.
Another similar app is either Postscript or SMSBump.
These are SMS apps.
So if someone abandons their cart,
you can then message them and get them back to purchase.
In terms of reviews and getting social proof,
Okendo is a great app.
It can give you sizing options
to make customers really understand the product
before they buy.
A final one is a Fontify,
it's a cheap app and you can just change your font
of your website with a couple of clicks.
It saves you a bunch of time,
but you can also do it in the backend of Shopify
if you know what you're doing.
Again, I'm not sponsored by Shopify or any of these apps,
I just use them in my own store.
So that's basically all the main mistakes
that you need to avoid,
and if you can do that and the product's great,
you're gonna find a lot of success with Facebook ads.
We're gonna take sometime now to review some websites
from our community posts of our viewers.
Let's jump into it.
All right, so we've got Melbourne Bushfood.
Obviously, as an Australian, I love this.
My first bit of advice is this headline
needs to be extremely catchy.
It needs to, in the simplest terms,
explain what your business is.
A social mission is fantastic,
but this headline is incredibly important
to just explain what you do,
otherwise, people would just bounce off the page.
We've also got more about the mission down here.
It's kind of repeating itself.
I think you really need to make sure
that you're talking about the customer
as well as what you're trying to achieve.
So I'm halfway down the page
and I'm still not exactly sure of what this business does.
I think it's really important
that that top headline gets changed.
This has fantastic social proof.
Obviously as an Australian,
I know all of these places
and it's really making me feel that I can trust this site.
All right, so we're now down to a product page
and I'm starting to actually understand what this is.
They're selling a variety of Bushfood from Australia,
including spices and I think this looks like chocolate.
I don't mind this collection page changer,
I think the product imagery could be more uniform.
If they just got a white shade and proper light,
they could maybe shoot these all in the exact same way
and it would feel more cohesive.
Icons are great, they're very simple and easy to digest.
And now we've got reviews,
10,000 plus happy customers is great,
and they've also got some photos, which is awesome.
You really want photo reviews to increase the authenticity.
They've also got some blogs, which is awesome.
I'd like to know the strategy behind those blogs,
if it's an SEO play or if they're actually driving
traffic to it,
and then I can probably give a bit more advice
about how to structure it.
Finally, they've got their newsletter down here.
There's actually no offer here,
it's really important to put an offer such as a discount
or some kind of gift to incentivize people to subscribe.
They've got all of their payment icons, including Afterpay,
which is really important for Australians.
One thing I have noticed just scrolling down this page
is that I haven't actually had a popup yet.
There may not be utilizing email marketing enough.
I think this header bar is quite good,
Australian Made and Owned is awesome.
All right, let's go to the next one, Bricktown World.
So again, I'm a little bit unsure what they sell
when first clicking on here,
it's really important that we fix this.
I like this header bar,
they're telling that you can get free shipping
over a certain order, it's gonna bump up AOV.
I'm gonna take a different approach
and I'm gonna go through it
and try to pretend to be a customer.
When I click here, it looks like they're selling
pretty awesome t-shirts.
Their site selection all looks good,
let's see if their size chart works,
very informative and simple to read.
They've also got all of these features of their product,
which is really, really well laid out.
So that's gonna be easy to digest and understand,
even if people don't understand GSM, it almost sounds fancy,
they can definitely understand
100% percent pure organic cotton.
Washing instructions is also very important.
People love to know that they can wash it
in their washing machine.
They've got their shipping options,
which is also really important.
If I had to be critical,
may just because they've got a brand new product
is there's no reviews on this product yet.
Let's go to another product
and see if they've got those reviews on them.
Again, another really cool design, still no reviews.
I think they need to incentivize customers
to leave a review.
I also like how they've got this fits true to size
and the model height.
They've really informed the customer
about what they're gonna get.
All right, let's go to the next one, X Tools.
One of the most clear things that stands out
is they haven't set up their favicon yet.
Coming to this store,
I do lose a little bit of trust
because it isn't quite designed enough.
Just saying that brand's name there,
along with the logo,
doesn't really inform me of anything.
They could easily use like something like fun to fight
to also make this text a little bit more interesting
on own brand.
They definitely need to work on their copy,
and these either look like fake reviews
or just really, really short reviews,
in which case they probably need to be fleshed out.
Let's go to the Product page
and they've got one product
and not much structure to their copy or their design.
Definitely a lot of work that they need to do.
I suggest going to some other drop shipping sites
and actually dissecting what they're doing
before you run ads,
because I don't think this will work.
All right, let's go to the next one, Sentimental Lashes,
obviously a UK site with a .co.uk.
The first thing I noticed about this,
is that it's alternative to all the other themes
that we've been looking at.
And this is bad because this is gonna make up me,
actually think about how to use this website.
There's no call-to-action button here,
this button, if there was one here
would be the most clicked button on your website.
You really wanna have it here to push them
to achieve what you're trying to achieve,
which is probably a Product page and a sale.
I think this is hyperbole and it isn't really constructive.
I would say this line, Sentimental Lashes
gives you luxurious length and volume
without that false lash effect.
That is their value proposition.
I would say that is the most important line up here.
You can put that as your main headline.
Going down, we've got lashes here,
product imagery definitely needs to be more uniform.
If these are all different types of lashes,
it makes sense to have them as different products,
if not, you should probably just have one product
with a text and then the sizing
actually being a selection on this Product page.
The logo has a different color background,
so it actually needs to be removed
or the rest of the page needs to be pink.
I would probably remove it and just do a black line logo.
A lot to be fixed up on this site as well
before I would run Facebook ads.
Also, the AOV is gonna be incredibly low.
This probably needs to be a subscription play.
I'll definitely be looking at a lot of these other popular
lash brands and replicating their sites
before trying to run ads to this.
Vetori Watches, first thing I do notice
is the great product imagery,
they're on the right track,
but the actual layout of this homepage
is a little bit strange.
I'd be interested to see how this looks on mobile.
Again, some great imagery,
let's go to the Product page and see what we can see.
Definitely needs more copy on here.
I've kind of lost trust on what I'm actually buying.
The copy should probably be sitting up here,
what we refer to as above the fold,
you can use some dot points to easy to digest,
sell the features they'll watch.
What's the material?
What's the unique selling proposition?
They do have a floating Add To Cart, which is pretty good.
These can definitely increase conversion rates.
They don't have Afterpay though, which is a big bummer.
It's really important if they do sell in Australia
to have Afterpay.
Just gonna click, Add To Cart,
definitely sell in Australia,
I would probably have your logo here,
there's actually other apps that you can use
to pull these kinds of features into this right-hand column.
You can definitely do it with Shopify plus,
then you can have your logo and branding there,
which should increase some trust.
Overall, the founder is on the right track with the imagery
and just needs to make a couple of changes
before I'd probably run ads.
I think their product looks nice
and they've got some good imagery.
It may be a really saturated market,
which will make it tough,
but if they fix their website
and shoot some really good video ads,
they may be able to run some profitable Facebook ads.
All right, final website,
they've got their pop-up sale here,
giving the code straight away.
This should definitely be an email pop up,
if they're gonna give a code.
Say 20% off if you enter your email
and when they enter the email,
you'll give them the code.
That way you can put them through a nurture flow
and educate them further when they leave the site.
I'll click, Shop Now,
and it didn't actually change anything,
which is a little bit strange.
They're doing print on demand portraits for pets,
which is quite funny,
I haven't seen these working a fair bit on Facebook.
We can go through their Product page,
it's automatically converting to English, which is okay.
If you are running serious traffic from multiple regions,
you may wanna consider not setting up on a sub-domain
and actually buying the regional domain for that.
So for example, if it was UK, it was .co.uk,
or if it's France by .fa.
They're using Luke's down here,
which is pretty common,
a great photo reviewer to try to create trust.
The probably main thing that I'm looking at here
is there's just no explanation
of what happens after they order.
And there's just no instructions
about how to upload the photo or anything like that.
If you went to West and Willow, however,
a really popular brand doing a similar thing,
they would have far more information
actually on the Product pages,
trying to explain how it works.
So these are the simple mistakes a lot of people make.
If you want, leave a comment below
and what I'll do is I'll take you through the whole process,
we'll set up a store together,
I'll show you all of these features
that I've talked about and how they work.
I hope you enjoyed today's episode,
make sure you subscribe and I'll see you next week.
(whooshing)