Two Factors That Will Make or Break Your Client’s E-Commerce Store

Author: Gerald Huffman
January 15, 2021

I hope you enjoy reading this blog post.

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Shopify has done an excellent job making e-commerce website development accessible for CMS developers. In the past, e-commerce development was extremely time consuming and difficult to get right. With Shopify, you can have a fully functioning e-commerce website with a flawless user experience.

Here at Syzmic, we’re big fans of Shopify and prefer it over WordPress/WooCommerce (check out our post about that here). 

There are two factors that can make or break your client’s e-commerce store: theme selection & shipping setup.

Theme selection

If you’ve worked with other CMS platforms (especially WordPress), you know how important theme selection is. Your theme is the foundation of the website and can dictate the overall look and feel of the website.

When it comes to e-commerce, theme selection is even more important. The overall structure, aesthetic, speed, and function of the site plays a huge role in making your store feel legitimate and trustworthy. If the store doesn’t look and feel professional, you’re going to have a hard time getting users to input their credit card information and the shopper is likely to bounce.

The good news is that there are several excellent Shopify themes. You can look through the catalog of themes at themes.shopify.com/themes. Shopify does a great job of categorizing the themes so you can search by a number of products, industry, and several other categories.

Price of the theme

When it comes to purchasing a theme, typically, you get what you pay for so we recommend buying a premium theme (around $180). There are a few reasons for this: 

  1. The code tends to be cleaner in the more expensive themes, which improves the functionality and speed.
  2. The developers that built the theme typically offer better support.
  3. There are more block options when it comes to designing the website, especially on the home page.

Ultimately, you’ll save money by purchasing a premium theme because you won’t have to spend the additional hours it takes to edit the code.

Shipping setup

Similar to the theme selection, your shipping setup can dramatically affect your conversion rate. We’ve worked on several e-commerce websites that have beautiful layouts and flow, but their bounce rate is high once the shipping is calculated.

The biggest mistake online retailers make is setting a flat rate shipping rate for all products. For example, a potential customer has $10 worth of merchandise in their cart and you have a $10 flat rate shipping setup. Once that potential customer gets to the checkout page and sees the price just doubled, they’ll bounce almost every time.

We recommend using dynamic rates. This is the most effective way to set up your shipping. As long as your product weights and package sizes are entered correctly, UPS will automatically calculate the rate and the customer will be charged accordingly during checkout.

This is super convenient because it gives the user the best available rate and you know your shipping cost is covered. Plus, you can print the labels right from the Shopify dashboard!

There are a few other ways to set up shipping that can work depending on the situation, such as, increasing product prices and decreasing shipping costs, plus price breaks for cart totals.

Conclusion

You’ll notice that bounce rates are mentioned quite a few times above, that’s because behind generating website traffic, it’s the most important factor.

Ultimately, getting a quality theme and setting up your shipping properly will significantly increase your conversions and decrease your bounce rate.

Have specific questions about yours or a clients Shopify store? Drop a comment below! I’d love to answer any questions you have.

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