Common Mistakes Made by Shopify Merchants

- Anand Katakwar

August 21, 2021


A Shopify store owner has to juggle with a lot of things on a daily basis. Between order fulfillment, Marketing, Operations, inventory management, order returns & more, the store owner has to constantly keep an eye on all these things to run his online store smoothly. No matter how much attention the store owner gives to his business, he is most likely going to make some common mistakes in his online store. Let me share the top 3 common mistakes that we have observed across the different types of online stores.

Mistake 1 – No Personalization on Online Store

We are living in an era where the attention span of customers is decreasing day by day as they are constantly receiving information from various digital channels. Converting a visitor into a potential customer on an online store requires understanding customers purchasing intent signals. Depending on what the customer is browsing, how much time he is spending on the store determines if the customer is going to make the purchase from that online store. It is extremely important for the online store to constantly understand these intent signals from their browsing behaviour.

Most store owners do not implement personalization apps on their store due to which the visitors are not able to find the products that they are looking for & the store, in turn, loses that customer.

Using personalisation apps in Shopify app store, it is very easy to add desired personalization & recommendation widgets right from home page till cart page so that the customers are always shown with products that they want to buy & most likely going to buy.

Mistake 2 – Unable to understand Customer Segment Behaviour

The customers who visit a Shopify store have dynamic behaviour which evolves over a period of time. A first time visitor is most likely going to become a subscriber to the store newsletter & may create an account on the store at some interval. It is extremely important to understand when the customer has signed up on the store when he has created an account on the store, when did he make his first purchase, When he did browse something on the store, How many times he has browsed on the store, How much money a customer has spent on the store, etc.

Most Shopify store owners will not be able to get answers to these questions about their customer behaviour as they do not use apps that can help them understand the customer journey on their online store. In the absence of this customer behaviour knowledge, store owners are unable to create smart customer segments & in turn, are not able to engage with them.

Not understanding customer behaviour at an individual level & at a segment level is a mistake that can prove costly to Shopify store owners. If the store owner does not have clarity on which set of customers the store is about to lose or AT RISK of losing, he can’t run a Win Back engagement campaign for those customers.

Shopify store owners can use apps like Enalito from the Shopify app store can easily show customer segments such as Defection Risk Customers, Defected Customers, New Customers, Promising New Customers, Loyal Customers, VIP Customers & more.

Mistake 3 : Unable to understand Inventory & Product Behaviour

Most eCommerce businesses have no clue about their inventory behaviour which results in stacking up wrong products in the inventory as they have no idea of which products are getting sold more as compared to the other. If you have an inventory of 100 SKUs, it’s easy to know what’s happening with the products but if you have a large inventory size it is difficult to understand which products are SHELF RISK, which products need to be removed from the store as they are no longer getting purchased, Which are Best Products,Which are Promising New Products, etc.

By understanding inventory behaviour, an eCommerce store owner will not have to worry about losing money on account of unsold inventory as he can take decisions on selling them through Sales Event without compromising on margins. As most eCommerce businesses buy a large inventory based on the previous years purchases that have happened, it is quite important for them to constantly analyze their inventory behaviour so that they can avoid selling out their unsold inventory at rock bottom prices.

Using Inventory analytics app from shopify app store, an eCommerce store owner can easily get actionable intelligence about their inventory behaviour & then take decisions to promote specific products to customers who are interested in them.

By fixing these 3 common mistakes, a shopify merchant can easily run a profitable business & have constant revenue growth year on year. Setting up any app from shopify app store is quite easy & can make a lot of regular operational tasks on auto pilot allowing you to focus more on your business growth & brand building efforts.