If you are in ecommerce, this article is for you. Let’s take a look at how building your ecommerce store on a scalable platform like Shopify can support your brand building journey.

Z21 Studio is an ecommerce growth agency that specialises in growing brands. Having worked with brand partners like Oxwhite, Machines, Getha and Clef Skincare, we understand the importance of building not just a great looking site, but also one that’s able to turn visitors into customers.

Through auditing 100s of ecommerce stores, we find that these are the most common (website) reasons brands are unable to grow as quickly as they should:

1. Website is not optimised for mobile view

• Among our partners, we see that users browsing from mobile devices (e.g. smartphones, tablets) account for roughly 85% of the total traffic. Shopify has a mobile-friendly user interface, and loads fast on mobile. 

2. Incorrect Meta Pixel/Google ad tracking

• Ad platforms like Meta and Google update their tracking requirements frequently, therefore it is important to be able to keep up with those changes to ensure that your Meta/Google advertisements perform at optimum. Shopify updates quickly to accommodate for these new requirements, e.g. when Meta launched Conversions API to improve data connectivity, Shopify enabled this feature within a month. 

3. Outdated product catalogue feed 

• Many catalogue integrations either require too much manual work or auto update infrequently, often causing product prices and stock availability to be different on the website (actual) and on ad channels. When the catalogue is out of sync, customers receive and click on ads for products that are actually out of stock on the site. Shopify’s product catalogue feed is seamlessly integrated.

4. Web servers unable to handle a surge in traffic during campaign days

• It is not uncommon for ecommerce websites to crash when there is a huge campaign that pulls in a large amount of traffic, resulting in abundant lost sales. Unlike most ecommerce platforms, Shopify hosts your site on their servers which supports huge traffic fluctuations. For our client Oxwhite, we have experienced upwards of 4,000 orders in a single campaign day without any hiccups.

5. Unable/ slow to implement a new website feature 

• Marketing teams always have new ideas - bundle sets (to increase average order value), launching a loyalty program (to increase lifetime amount spent per customer), etc. The bottleneck? Developing features to implement these systems can be expensive and time consuming. With the Shopify app ecosystem, it’s possible to have a new feature up and running in hours, not weeks. 

Bonus:

For our data analytics efforts, we use tools like Supermetrics to pull data out of Shopify, Meta and Google ads, Google Analytics, etc. on a daily basis. This has enabled our team to monitor and react swiftly to daily fluctuations in metrics such as cost per purchase, new vs existing customer share, site loading speeds, click through rate etc. to plan ahead for next steps.