Top 10 Reasons Why Shopify Stores Fail and How to Avoid Them

As an e-commerce platform, Shopify has gained immense popularity among entrepreneurs and small business owners. It offers a user-friendly interface, various customization options, and a wide range of apps to enhance the functionality of a store. However, despite its many advantages, some Shopify stores fail to attract customers and generate revenue.

There are multiple reasons why these stores fail: low traffic footprint, unclear objectives, poor production quality, increased competition, or insufficient conversions.

However, following a few mindful strategies can prevent your store from an operative failure. In this blog, we got you covered with everything you should do to run a successful store on Shopify. So let's get started!

What is the Success Rate of Shopify Stores?

Shopify success rate is not a standard definable term as it depends on various factors such as the business niche and the type of your business. But some data might give you a clear idea of what the success rate is or should be.

The Shopify Success Rate of eCommerce stores ranges between 5% to 10%. These stats denote that out of every 100 businesses using Shopify, only about 5 to 10 businesses become successful and stay successful.

Top 10 Reasons Why Shopify Stores Fail

1. Lack of well-defined goals  

You must have a well-defined goal to position your store in the right place on Shopify. Your store must be able to present its value proposition to stand out from the rest. The performance of your eCommerce website solely depends on it.

Your buyers will only be able to appreciate your worth based on what is different from you that others don’t have to offer. 

2. Obsolete Marketing Tactics

Doing marketing the right way is essential for your Shopify store. You need to have the following:  

• Well-designed website 
• Search Engine Optimization 
• Active Social Media presence 
• Multiple marketing channels such as email marketing, and PPC

3. Insufficient Mobile Optimization

You have to make sure that your Shopify store is accessible on all mobile devices. Design your website to be responsive to make it functional on multiple devices, with easy navigation and faster loading times. 

 4. Bad User Experience

A bad user experience is your number one enemy when it comes to getting more traffic to your store or even having repeat customers. Nobody wants to stick around for something that offers them no value.

To avoid deterring customers away, make sure your store is easy to navigate and performs at its optimal best across multiple devices.  

5. No point of differentiation

Again uniqueness is key. If you offer what others also offer, particularly your competitors, you won’t have a lot of customers. Your products must be unique with a highly distinctive Unique Selling Proposition (USP). 

6. Lack of Upsells, Cross sells, and Related Products

You can motivate people to stay on your website only with enough relevant product suggestions. If customers find fewer products or if there are more products that are hard to find, the next thing they do is, leave your store.

So add all your products to your store and keep them updated regularly and also make your products easy to find. Add sufficient Upsell, Cross sell, and Downsell techniques to keep the crowd coming in. You can easily build relevant upsell offers by studying customer data to know their likes and dislikes.

Upsell apps like Selleasy can help increase the average order value and higher ROI. You will get a lot of features like FBT bundles, product add-ons, thank you and cart page upsell, and minimalistic design with no impact on store speed.

7. Irrelevant Product Image

A poor image of your products is nothing but an eyesore that customers just hate to see. After all, the product image is what they look for before making a purchase. No one would spend on something that they don’t get to see.

Therefore, optimize your product images to allow customers to make purchase decisions efficiently.  

8. Little to no reviews

Potential customers make their purchase decisions from what others have to say. Word of mouth is impactful and you should never underestimate it. Getting good reviews and adding those reviews to your store makes you trustworthy in the eyes of your customers.

You can also track customers' valuable inputs to enhance the performance of your store.

9. Lack of Social Proof

Make sure you stay active on social media. A good way to gain quick credibility is to share your positive customer reviews on all social media platforms. When people keep talking about your brand, it gains more eyeballs and leads to quick conversions as there is a quick establishment of trust when people hear others talk about you. 

Read more: 9 Best Social Proof Apps for Shopify

10. Lack of personalized Email Marketing:

Email marketing is a powerful tool to direct your customers to your store. It is like a personal note that offers an insight into what you have for them. This will motivate them to visit your store and most likely make a purchase.

Start it by segmenting your list and running a successful email marketing campaign with personalized messages. The more personalized service you offer the more productive you become. Make this a mandatory part of your customer loyalty program.

From Zero to Hero: How to Make Your Shopify Store a Success

Now let’s move to improve your Shopify store for the best success rates.

1. Make your website SEO optimized

The best way to enhance your Shopify store’s success rate is to improve your website’s SEO.

This positions your website to rank higher on the search engine results page. These are some of the procedures you can do to improve your website’s SEO: 

• Increase your knowledge base on SEO
• High-Quality Content
• Building backlinks to your website 
• Optimizing with Primary Keywords
• Improving the Loading Speed
• Make your website Mobile-Friendly 

Moreover, Shopify also has built-in tools to get your SEO optimized, the right way. You can also perk up your store’s SERP ranking using these built-in features. You can use a number of Shopify SEO tools, such as:

Take advantage of Shopify's built-in features, like Shopify Title and Meta Tags, Product Descriptions, and Rich Snippets. Utilize various SEO tools to optimize your online store.

2. Amp up your advertising budget

Increase your advertising budget to improve your success rate as advertising is a great way to drive traffic to your Shop.

You can use advertising platforms like: 

• Google Ads 
• Facebook Ads 
• Instagram Ads
• YouTube Ads
• TikTok Ads
• LinkedIn Ads
• Twitter Ads and other such ad platforms

3. Load only high-quality Product Images

As we discussed earlier, product images on product pages are very important if you want to improve your Shopify success rate. Uploading only high-quality product images will make your products stand out.

Top Shopify stores always have their product images intact to offer a smooth user experience.

Use tactics like:

• High-quality pictures
• Shooting multiple images and Close-up shots

4. Provide Free Shipping

Whether it is in-season or off-season, free shipping motivates customers like no other. Your existing customers can attest to this if you have been offering free shipping. You can easily encourage customers to use free shipping by offering:  

• Free shipping on all orders
• Free shipping on threshold beyond a certain amount
• Cross a set spending limit for free delivery to certain areas.

To set your shipping rules, you can utilize Shipeasy, one of the best Shipping rules for Shopify. This app lets you decide rates based on more than 20 parameters.

5. Offer Discounts and Coupons

Give discounts/coupons to boost sales. Offering discounts or coupons to customers increases your chances to achieve a high Shopify store success rate. This in turn gets more customers to your store.

You can do this by:

• Using the Shopify store’s discount section
• Using a third-party app to automate adding discounts
• Promoting your discounts and coupons through social media and through email marketing

6. Improve Your Customer Service

Good customer service is key to building customer loyalty and increased customer satisfaction. And great customer service can be made to be a part of your value proposition. It depends on how creative you can get that raises the bar for you, which also entices customers to make repeat purchases.  

You can make sure your store offers great customer experiences by:

• Having a well-trained customer support team
• Training your support team to be friendly
• Making sure that your customer support team is easily accessible. 

7. Build a user-friendly website

Excellent customer service begins with a user-friendly e-commerce site. If customers find it hard to navigate your store, or if there are many broken links that restrict them, they will exit your store without thought. 

You can make sure your website is easy to use by:

• Using simple and easy-to-use navigation by using appropriate website builders
• Incorporating a clean minimalist website design 
• Providing a simple checkout process  

8. Offer a Wide range of Payment Options

If you want to run a successful Shopify store, you have to offer more than one way that will allow your customers to make payments.  

Offer multiple payment options, like:  

• Credit cards and Debit cards
• PayPal
• Google Pay
• Amazon Pay
• World Pay
• Stripe 

9. Make your website mobile-friendly

Online shopping predominantly happens on mobile phones. So make sure that your website works great on all mobile devices, across multiple platforms.  

Make your website mobile-friendly by making sure you include these simple steps:

• Incorporate a responsive design into your website.
• Ensure mobile compatibility of your checkout process
• Utilize Social Media to advertise your store
• Lastly, social media is a great way to promote

10. Use Social Media to Promote Your Store

Lastly, social media is a great way to get your store’s name out there and reach many people.

There are many ways to promote your store on social media:

• Creating a social media profile for your store
• Posting about your store on social media
• Advertising your store on social media

Improving the success rate of your Shopify store becomes easy when you follow the aforementioned steps precisely. 

FAQs 

How much does an average Shopify store make?

The average Shopify store generates about $2000 in sales per month. However, this number varies depending on the type of goods sold, the price point of the products, the marketing efforts of the store owner, and various other factors.  

Wrapping Up

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To wrap it up, there could be more than one reason why a Shopify store can fail. Mostly, it turns out to be the lack of customers. And this happens because of a lack of products, bad user experience, ineffective SEO practices, or a weak social media presence, it could be anything.

Determining the main reasons why you don’t get as many customers as you should will help you fine-tune your strategies for better results.