5 Ways to Create Effective Shopify Email Notifications

As Shopify continues to take the eCommerce world by storm, users can now either receive or send customized Shopify email notifications. These notifications serve as the following:

  • Frequent requests from clients who are looking to optimize their communications with customers, OR
  • A way for senders to personalize a Shopify store.

As you carefully design emails, you can make a powerful tool for communication out of it. It allows clients to add a personal touch at different points of the purchase journey. And this can be an extra valuable tool during busy shopping events.

Plus,

Shopify emails differ from the traditional business email format because these types of emails are sent automatically following an order to update customers on shipping, abandoned checkouts, customer accounts, etc. This also allows you to upsell to clients on bespoke emails and to add extra value to your project.

In this article, we’ll look at five best ways to add additional functionality to Shopify email notifications.

Ensure Consistency

First and foremost, your Shopify email notifications must be consistent, no matter what. That means you should have polished notifs while using the same effective templates; only switch out templates when necessary. If you decide to switch templates constantly, it might confuse your email recipients. Have an efficient starting point for all your emails, which you can easily apply to each of the notifications that Shopify sends.

If you’re not sure which templates and features to use for your notifs, then it’s important to see which ones are doing well and which ones are problematic for recipients. Use those that work as much as possible until your clients want something new.

Have Responsive Emails

As much as you try to have clients read your emails, they can still ignore them, no matter how much work you put into their creation. While emails can be responsive, not all clients want to read them, to begin with.

One major problem is having your recipients try to read your email. If you try to send your email in an insufficient format, you’ll be forcing your readers to either squint and zoom in to read, or not read it at all.

Therefore, it’s better to do one of the following:

  • Use a flexible layout that can expand or shrink to fit the user’s screen, OR
  • Pick a width between 400 and 600 pixels.
5 Ways to Create Effective Shopify Email Notifications | Mageworx Shopify Blog

Either way, you’ll provide a happy medium that doesn’t require mobile users to have to zoom in too much to read your emails.

Offer Discounts in Abandoned-Cart Emails

Let’s face it: abandoned-cart emails can be tedious on the shopper’s end.

However,

If that email is generic, then the tedious part will be even worse. In fact, according to the Baymard Institute, 69% of online shopping carts are abandoned before the customer can complete a sale. Although this might not affect shoppers, it can affect businesses, since it triggers a huge loss of potential sales for your clients. Therefore, you can reduce the number of abandoned carts by recovering them if you find a way to improve results in this area.

First, let’s look at abandoned checkouts.

Whenever someone abandons a cart before buying something online, an email explaining this will (and should) be sent a few hours after the potential customer has “bounced” away from making a purchase.

So, what can you do?

One of the best ways to rope customers back to make a purchase is to offer discounts. In fact, people love to save money on things; therefore, why not feed them this desire? If they receive an encouraging abandoned-checkout email with a discount code, they would be more apt to go back to the store and complete the sale. Therefore, it’s considered a call-to-action method (if you haven’t thought of a CTA already).

So, how can you implement this strategy? Here’s how:

  • Create a percentage discount code or a monetary discount code (depending on the type of promotion you would like to offer to your client),
  • Make a note of the name assigned to the discount code (i.e., “WelcomeBack”),
  • Use that name when needed, so that you can make a customized template for future use,
  • Create a call-to-action button labeled “Complete Purchase,” along with a dedicated destination for it.

All in all, this CTA is to try and sweeten the deal for clients and customers, thus turning them into conversions.

Provide Content

Who doesn’t want great content in an email? Otherwise, a plain-look email will receive no interactions and get tossed in the Trash folder. Besides the obvious content that’s included in the Shopify email notifications (i.e., order information), notifs are also a great way to add additional content or promotional info that recipients may be interested in. Here are just a few examples of additional incentives:

  • Customer service information,
  • Links to your social media,
  • Special offers,
  • Upcoming events/sales,
  • Requests for reviews,
  • “How to” content,
  • Helpful links to instruction manuals or other guides,
  • Links to various sections of your site,
  • “Refer a friend” program info,
  • Content that spotlights your most popular product,s
  • Links to featured blog posts.

Also, you might want to display specific content for individual products on an email by using conditional Liquid operators. With a Liquid operator, you can add text or images that will appear when a product fulfills the criteria that you create.

Besides Liquid operators, you can also use the line item object to reference particular properties of a product that’s in shopping carts. How it works is that each line item represents a single line in a customer’s shopping cart, and they can also be used in email notifications to isolate individual properties of a product. Thus, you’re creating a product-specific content within emails, so that you save customers from saying “What product are you talking about?” or “I don’t get why I’m receiving this email!” Instead, you’ll entice them with great content and excellent reasons why to buy something.

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Test Emails

So, now that you have a design and a goal for your emails, what do you do next? Send them? Not quite.

First and foremost, you must do some testing. Regardless of design, test each email to ensure the output looks right from a customer’s perspective. In other words, step into your customers’ shoes and see what they will and won’t like. As a developer, you have to always think about how the end product will look, as well as be empathetic to your clients’ customers.

The good news is, there are two options for testing that you can find and enable on the notification settings page:

  • Preview the notification, OR
  • Send a test email.

Just keep in mind:

While the preview function can be very helpful if you want to make some quick edits, sending a test email is highly recommended once you’re finished working on a template.

Overall, you have to have a sufficient process for testing your emails, so that you can spot any possible errors that need to be fixed right away before launch, and ensure that everything will run smoothly.

Conclusion

Once you have your Shopify theme up and running, you may want to take the time to extend the professional look of your shop by sending effective notification emails, regardless if you do so after key events or after customers shop.

However, as we’ve discussed in this article, it’s not enough to just send your emails without checking them or send them without effort. In fact, sending a generic confirmation email is no longer good enough. Plus, you don’t want to just say, “Your order is on the way.”

Instead, it’s important to customize your emails; personalize notifications so that your customers feel appreciated for their decision to shop from you. Therefore, as you follow these five simple tips, and let your Shopify store shine through your emails!

Molly Crockett is a writer and editor at Ukwritings.com. As a tech enthusiast, she blogs about the latest trends in technology.

5 Powerful Reasons Why Your Retail Business Should Use Shopify

As a business looking to make it in the online world, you’ll come across the massive online eCommerce solution known as Shopify. Not to be confused with the online music streaming platform, Shopify is a powerhouse that anybody can use to create their online stores from start to finish.

However, while Shopify is definitely the go-to for many businesses, it’s worth remembering there are plenty of other options out there, so the real question is; why choose Spotify? Why not choose any of the other great solutions out there? Why could Shopify be the platform for you?

To answer this question, today we’re going to explore the five important reasons why your business should seriously consider using Shopify as their eCommerce platform of choice, and why it now powers over 500,000 stores in over 175 countries.

1. Everything is Mobile

5 Reasons to Use Shopify for a Retail Business | Mageworx Shopify Blog

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There’s no denying that nowadays, everything is mobile-orientated. Over half of all internet traffic comes from a mobile device, whether that’s a smartphone or a tablet, and this includes activity happening in the shopping industry. More people are shopping on their mobile phones than ever before, and this means your website needs to be mobile-friendly.

Fortunately, Shopify takes all the pain and stress out of doing this by offering all their services, websites, and stores in a mobile-optimized format. In comparison to self-hosted websites, this means no having to code or optimize anything. It all just comes ready as standard.

It allows customers to log onto your website and make purchases without having to deal with messy and complicated websites. Put yourself in that position. You want to buy something, but you head over to a website that just doesn’t work on mobile. You need to pinch, zoom in and out, and adjust everything to try and find what you’re looking for.

Are you going to keep shopping here?

Probably not.

Instead, Shopify automatically creates a lovely streamlined experience you’re going to love, with plenty of stylish templates and designs to choose from to get started. If you want to make a custom website down the line, there’s the option to do so.

And there’s more.

Shopify allows you also to control your website and your retail store directly from your mobile device. Whether you’re managing your products, confirming sales, checking information on customers, or changing prices, all can be changed via the Shopify app that can be downloaded directly to your smartphone.

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2. Emphasis on Security

When it comes to shopping, retail, and just generally using sensitive information online, it’s so important that security is made aware of. If you’re not protecting your own information, it could be stolen, and your website hacked. If your customer’s information is stolen or acquired, this is going to look very bad on you.

Nowadays, customers expect online stores and communities to keep their personal data safe, but thankfully Shopify has made it easy. Shopify operates using only the highest form of encryption and online security, meaning your store gets to benefit from what it has to offer.

As a store owner, Shopify will meet all your security requirements, and you get to enjoy all the benefits and updates that Shopify will bring out in the future as technology advances.

3. It’s Easy and Affordable

5 Reasons to Use Shopify for a Retail Business | Mageworx Shopify Blog

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By far, one of the most significant benefits of using Shopify is the fact that it’s so beginner-friendly, both in terms of being incredibly easy to set up, even if you’re not very technically minded, as well as being inexpensive, which is great if you’re just starting out and want a platform to get your store up and running for next to no cost at all.

There are plenty of payment options to choose from, so you can customize your needs and requirements with the budget you’re happy to spend, and you can easily upgrade and downgrade depending on how successful your store is and the direction you want to take it.

As above, Shopify is effortless to set up. There’s no coding or complicated computer stuff to do. Just sign up, log into your new account, and follow the onscreen wizard. If there’s something you want to do specifically, there’s a ton of Shopify apps out there or you can turn to support for help, but more on that later.

4. You Can Easily Go Global

With Shopify, you have everything you need to go international with your business, in whatever sense that means to you. As mentioned in the introduction, Shopify is used and can be accessed in over 175 countries, which is amazing if you’re looking to take your business to a global audience.

“As standard, Shopify supports multiple languages on your website, and you don’t even need to do anything extra. Just add your products, and your text will change automatically depending on the language packs you’ve installed and the location the user is looking at your store from” explains Mary Taylor, a shopping expert at Researchpapersuk and Draft beyond.

There’s such a variety of plugins as well to help you achieve this, including Langify, Multi Lingo, and Weglot Translate, all of which give you full control over your language settings.

In addition to this, multiple payment options are covered as standard. In most cases, it really doesn’t matter what kind of payment platform your customers want to use. Shopify supports it and will get your money into your account.

Of course, regardless of the platforms your customers used, all information will be kept safe and secure, so you won’t have to worry about anything there. This rids the problem you would have of trying to cover every potential payment platform when you use a self-hosted site instead of Shopify.

5. The Level of Support is Unparalleled

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When you’re working with Shopify, the level of support you get at every stage of managing your online store is like no other platform. Whether you’re a fully-fledged business network with multiple websites, or you’re a sole trader who wants to sell a collection of handmade things you’ve created, Shopify will help you every step of the way.

Shopify offers complete 24-hour support to all its users in a multitude of ways. For urgent assistance, you can get in touch with the real-time live chat service, or you can get in touch over the phone or via email.

What Shopify prides itself on is being able to offer real-time assistance where you only need to get in touch once to get your problem solved. There’s no having to call up to get passed around from person to person, but rather just getting everything sorted out as quickly as possible.

“However, Shopify as a whole goes further than this. Since there are so many users onboard, the online community and support you can get is unlike any other platform. If you have a problem, you can search and find answers on the forum, or there are plenty of people who are willing to help,” shares Jason Duncan, a tech writer at Writinity and Gum essays.

Since Shopify also allows plugins of so many different varieties, it only makes sense that each developer is also able to support shop owners with their plugins in the easiest way possible.

All in all, even if using Shopify is the first time you’ve ever used an eCommerce platform, it doesn’t matter if you find yourself in a different position or not sure how to proceed, they’ll always be someone on hand to help you out.

As you can see from all this combined, Shopify is a fantastic e-commerce platform that’s incredibly proactive at putting you first. It doesn’t matter what kind of business you’re trying to run; Shopify is there to help ensure your next venture is as successful as possible.


Elizabeth S. Kinder is an experienced content writer and blogger at Luckyassignments.com. She is driven by the passion for writing; she takes pride in providing the best content possible. As a writer/blogger, her goals include quality content and reader satisfaction.

Shopify Owners: These 8 Tips are Essential for You to Know

This is a guest post by Michael Dehoyos.

When you’re working on your Shopify store, especially if you’re creating one for the first time, getting your head around everything and trying to learn all the little features to get your shop how you want it to be can be tough. There’s a learning curve, and when you add all the other aspects of your business, you need to be thinking about, it can get a bit stressful.

However, mastering Shopify is a step on your journey to starting your own business, which doesn’t make it any less exciting. It’s all about learning what you need to know, which is precisely what we’re going to focus on today.

Below, I’m going to share with you some of the top, most essential tips and tricks you need to know when it comes to owning, creating, and using your own Shopify store, as well as helping you get up on your own two feet as quickly as possible.

Using a Draw Tool to Remove all Logos

First things first. If you’re dropshipping or getting your products remotely from a supplier, then chances are you’re using the images they provide you, or the images from their website. This is essential when starting up because you probably don’t have enough budget to take your own good-looking photos, and your customers need to see what they’re buying.

However, supplier photos tend to have logos in their images and aren’t taken on an all-white background that looks professional. Using a drawing tool―whether that’s a free tool like GIMP or a professional suite like Adobe PhotoShop―remove the logos to make your images look fresh and irresistible.

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Changing Your Product Pricing

Look at the pricing of your products and try to figure out ways you can make them better and more attractive to potential buyers. After all, if someone looks at your prices first and doesn’t like what they see, they’re instantly going to back up and take their business and their money elsewhere.

9 Essential Tips for Shopify Store Owners | MageWorx Shopify Blog

Look at the bigger brands and retailers, like Amazon. Many products will end with prices like ‘0.99’ or ‘0.96’. This is a proven way to make your products look more attractive and more suitable for someone’s budget, even though it’s only a few cents off.

Fortunately, you don’t need to go through all your prices individually. Simply, go into your Shopify settings menu and follow General > Store Currency > Change Formatting, and pick the 0.00 setting to apply this instantly.

Adding all Your Policies into Your Store Footer

9 Essential Tips for Shopify Store Owners | MageWorx Shopify Blog

Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of all new Shopify store owners is putting your policies in the footer of your store and website. This includes things like privacy policies and disclaimers, but most importantly, policies like your refund and returns policies.

These are essential policies that add trust and recognition to your website and store, and even just displaying them will help people trust in the service and experience you’re offering. Of course, you can make these policies from scratch if you want or hire an external company to write some up for you that can help you cover all eventualities.

However, you don’t need too. Instead, Shopify offers a range of default policy options and templates you can use and edit from the Shopify admin area.

Always Update Inventory Monthly

One of the most common ways that potential customers and individuals in your target market are going to find your store is through Google. This means getting your website as high as possible in the Google search engine rankings. As a Shopify store, this is a little harder than a traditional website.

The most common problem here is making sure your website is regularly updated and has new content. For a traditional website, this is easy since they can just add new blog posts and upload new content, signaling to Google that the website is regularly updated and therefore is a viable option to rank highly.

“As a Shopify store, this refreshment of content needs to come in the form of update your product inventory. Even if you’re not actively adding new products, maintain your existing products, and add and remove products here and there (preferably on a schedule to make things easy for you) to ensure Google is happy to rank you,” shares Emma Austin, a tech blogger.

As a rule of thumb and for the best results, try adding up to 25 products every month, not just updating them all in one go and then leaving your Shopify store to do its thing.

Use Free Marketing Channels Where Possible

Hand in hand with the consideration above, of course, ranking high on Google organically is great. Still, at some point, you’re going to need to invest time and resources in marketing. But this can be expensive, especially if you don’t have the budget. So, what options do you have?

9 Essential Tips for Shopify Store Owners | MageWorx Shopify Blog

Well, before you spend a small fortune on Facebook Ads, instead use free channels to market, allowing you to free up funds to spend elsewhere instead. This includes platforms like Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram. Spend time creating high-quality posts and building up a following and a community for people to get involved in.

Sure, growth can be slow and takes work to put in, but it’s so much better than spending a ton of your budget on ads and getting very little return. Focus on methods of free traffic is one of the best ways at the beginning to build up a profitable eCommerce store.

Optimize Your Store for Mobile Devices

With over half of the world’s internet traffic coming through mobile devices, that includes both smartphones and tablets, it’s absolutely imperative that your Shopify store and website is fully optimized for all mobile devices.

“You need to make sure you’re doing this before you even launch your store, or as soon as possible if it’s launched already. Try to remember what it’s like to go onto a website or online store and have to pinch-zoom in and out while trying to press the buttons you want to press. It’s not worth your time, and it will force people to go elsewhere” explains Nick Harper, a marketer.

Optimize. It.

Leave Default Themes Intact with Minimal Editing

While Shopify offers a huge number of tools and features that allow you to customize the theme of your store in practically any way you want, that doesn’t mean you have to, and when you’re just starting out, this is probably going to take up so much time that you could be spending on other things.

Sure, you probably have plans on what you want your website to look like, but the default themes, to begin with, are good enough to get started. Once you’re profiting and looking to expand, then you can invest in the services of a professional designer. Focus on business aspects first.

Use Text Logos

The final consideration you’re going to want to think about is creating a logo. Logos are essential for any business, but as a start-up Shopify store, you perhaps don’t know exactly where your business is going or what direction you’re heading in. With this in mind, don’t fork out potentially hundreds of dollars off the bat for a logo you might not want to use in the long run, nor may fit the design of your website.

Instead, opt for a basic text logo that’s recognizable and easily says everything you need to say. You can always invest later when you’re ready to update it.


Michael Dehoyos is an eCommerce designer and consultant at Thesis writing service and Write my coursework. He assists companies in their marketing strategy concepts and contributes to numerous sites and publications.

An Ultimate Guide on Shopify Handling Fees

Leveraged by both B2C or B2B businesses, handling fee is the number one additional fee that allows passing on fulfillment costs to a customer. For you as a merchant, it allows absorbing costs related to order assembly, packaging, shipping, and avoiding profit losses.

On the surface, handling fees seem easy to implement. However, for the many, they are dreaded―complicated both methodologically and technically for business owners, and disliked by customers, if introduced incorrectly.

This article is more than getting you familiar with the extra fees notion. It is aimed at giving you practical hints on how to make handling fees work for your benefit. We have collected useful insights, use cases, examples from experts to aid you in implementing extra fees in an eCommerce business.

An Ultimate Guide on Shopify Handling Fees | MageWorx Shopify Blog

Defining Handling Fees

Running a business assumes specific expenses. Being a means to reduce them, handling fee is a specific amount charged to an online shopper on top of the order subtotal, product price, taxes, and shipping fees.

An Ultimate Guide on Shopify Handling Fees | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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What Extra Fees are Handling Fees?

Having understood the notion, the why’s behind handling fees become clear. No business wants their profit to be eaten by postal service or labor. These expenses are not seen upfront right off the bat. But they are unavoidable and must be taken good care of.

The following expenses or their combination are most frequently considered handling expenses and added as handling fees at the checkout, or within the initial product price:

  • Cost of labels, boxes, tape, and other materials that are required to ensure safe shipping of an order.
  • Fragile orders packaging, or other offset costs related to preparing delicate orders for shipment.
  • Employees’ time required to pick and package an order. Or, a separate trip to the post office to drop the parcels off should be considered as a reason for higher handling costs.
  • Warehouse storage costs.
  • Charges for using foreign currencies that differ from the initial account currencies (less frequently).
An Ultimate Guide on Shopify Handling Fees | MageWorx Shopify Blog

A Few Flies in the Ointment

With all the advantages that adding handling fees brings, e-merchants should consider the following negative aspects of displaying handling fees at the checkout, whether on Shopify or elsewhere:

  • Checkout abandonment. This is certainly a pain point. Business owners do their best to approximate the checkout process to one step. Any unexpected charges at the checkout increase the chances of cart abandonment. According to the stats provided by Transaction Agency, 60% of e-shoppers will abandon their carts because of unexpected extra costs. Alas! Meanwhile, losing money on each order wouldn’t be viable for businesses that run on razor-thin margins.
  • Lower conversion rate. This drawback follows the previous point. If your e-store lookers do not get turned into buyers, then there is no profit.
  • Spoiled customer shopping experience. According to Optinomster, 65% of buyers check for price comparisons when shopping. If they find your offer well-priced when compared to the competition, extra charges at the checkout can be disappointing. 

Consequently, these disadvantages are substantial and should be carefully considered when developing your handling fee extra charge integration. When done right, and with the solicit support of your Marketing Team, its usage will be of benefit for your business.

An Ultimate Guide on Shopify Handling Fees | MageWorx Shopify Blog

Basics of Handling Fees Calculation

Setting up a fair handling fee is critical. If you do not want your customers to take handling fees as a means to gauge them, it’s vital to think through the methodology. 

For example, if you’re selling both domestically and internationally, it’s important to find a happy medium for different locales. Let’s assume your handling fee for domestic customers is $5, while you decide to charge international buyers $20 for the same orders. Such practices are commonly considered unfair and can influence your reputation overseas

Shoppers prefer to buy from an honest seller. Clearly articulate the grounds for such chargers and their reasonability.

Do the Research

To remain competitive with rates charged by other sellers and to add healthy handling charges to your checkout pages, you need to:

  • survey the market and see what your same-niche competition or sellers of similar items are charging. 
  • find ways to save on the shipping costs, charge the going rates, or less, and set the rest as a handling fee. As shipping is a decision-maker for the majority of customers, that’s what they will primarily pay attention to. Thus, offering the cheapest way to ship, or the price that is average or below what is commonly charged by similar items sellers would be your competitive advantage. 
  • keep domestic and international handling fees on the same level. Clearly, this scenario seems like a never-never land, but don’t mix handling and shipping expenses. That’s another story.
  • research the international markets and their characteristic patterns. For instance, for many European countries, there is not even a sales tax at the checkout. It’s an all-inclusive price or no price most of the time.
  • stick to the handling fees best practices. There is a perception that the handling fee for an order shall not exceed $5. Evidently, this figure is much generalized, and all depends on a specific business and the products you’re selling, but it would do well to keep the number in mind.
  • make sure to clearly label handling fees in your order invoices so that a customer doesn’t think you are overcharging them.
An Ultimate Guide on Shopify Handling Fees | MageWorx Shopify Blog

Do the Maths

If you think of how to calculate handling fees, you would need to answer some questions before doing the maths. These questions will aid you to figure out what types of handling expenses your business has and calculate the optimal handling fee you could safely add at the checkout.

1.How many minutes do you or your employee(s) need to prepare an item for shipping?

After you figure it out, follow this formula to make the calculations:

(Time to prepare an order/ 60) * the employee’s hourly rate = handling fee

For example, it takes 5 minutes for a person in charge to pack and order. Their hourly rate is $12 per hour. Then, we get (5/60)*12 = $1.

Please note that even if it’s you who runs the business and prepares the order for shipping, such a fee should be calculated and added too. Your time is valuable, don’t underestimate it.

2.What is the cost of the packing materials?

Do you use recyclable card boxes, biodegradable wrap, or something else? You’ll need to calculate the average cost of such materials for each order. For instance, let’s say we use an average box at $1.50, and $0.50 for a packing wrap per order. Then, the total handling fee for packing materials would be $2 per order.

Thus, in total, the handling fee for labor and material would be $1 (labor) + $2 (material) = $3. 

3.Are your sales volumes high?

If you answer ‘yes’ to this question, then you need to follow a different path. Calculating the handling fee per order would be overwhelming for a business that has hundreds of orders to fulfill.

To do the maths in such a case, it is recommended to apply handling fees as a percentage of an order. You might want to set up a price benchmark for orders that take as much time to pick, and twice as much material to pack. The figures we calculated earlier could be doubled for such orders. Plus, you can think of adding extra $0.50 for foam peanuts for such orders. Such extra charges could apply to fragile items too.

Can I  Avoid Adding Handling Fees?

With regard to the handling fee drawbacks we’ve previously discussed, there are cases when businesses might want to avoid such extra charges displayed at the checkout. As a workaround, you might want to consider:

  • Cheaper or minimal packaging. This will reduce your handling expenses. Meanwhile, less quality packaging materials could leave to the increased order damages, further exchanges, or returns. Negative customer experience would go with that. This is certainly the measure thy cloth ten times type of the decision to make. 
  • Increasing product cost. This can work for items that are not low-priced. Then, adding handling fees within product price would not be critical and turn heads. Furthermore, it’s much easier to build value in the price for an item a customer is already paying for.
  • Boosting shipping rates. Operating costs can be also included within shipping. You might have probably noticed before that some merchants even specify ‘Handling & Shipping Fees’ at the checkout to avoid an extra line with charges on the final destination.

Scenarios for Handling Fees

To have a better understanding of how handling fees could be applied in real life, let’s briefly overview the following use cases and get inspired:

Free Shipping + Handling Fees

An Ultimate Guide on Shopify Handling Fees | MageWorx Shopify Blog

As you can see, Frames for Portraits has followed a different path. Knowing how effective free shipping option is, this Shopify-based company has combined it with package and handling fees. In other words, they included the cost of shipping in the available extra charge option.

Service Fee

An Ultimate Guide on Shopify Handling Fees | MageWorx Shopify Blog

Market ATUPUERTA offers a service fee to its customers. It’s applied to products that are marked with an ‘M’ and depends on the order total.

StubHub places a message to explain the importance of fees to tickets purchasers:

An Ultimate Guide on Shopify Handling Fees | MageWorx Shopify Blog

How to Add a Handling Fee to Shopify Orders?

Natively, Shopify does not allow adding handling fees for merchants who have opted for this CMS. However, there are several workarounds to help you achieve that:

Method 1. Change Flat Rate Shipping Prices

You will need to use carrier calculated shipping rates. Adding a flat $ value on top of the estimated rates at the checkout could be a way out. Thus, the total that includes shipping and handling fees will be displayed to your customer. Please, follow this official web guide by Shopify to aid you in adding handling fee to shipping on Shopify.

Method 2. Add Handling Fee as a Product Variant

This is probably not the most convenient means to set up extra charges on Shopify, but still an option.

For example, if a customer chooses 4 kitchen chairs, the variant drop-down could be +$4. Otherwise, if a customer selects 2 kitchen chairs, the handling fee charge would be half of that, or $2. This method offers adding a Shopify product-specific handling fee. Such a means would work for handling fees that differ depending on a product.

For the official Shopify instructions on this option setup, please refer to this online document.

Method 3. Opt for a Third-Party App on the Shopify App Store

The Shopify app store boasts a pool of solutions with different capabilities to meet business-specific requirements. Thus, the best thing you could do is to opt for a third-party app, which will give you more opportunities to add extra order and product charges more efficiently. Furthermore, it’s an easier way to tweak such charges to appear when specific conditions are met.

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Order & Product Fees App by MageWorx

An Ultimate Guide on Shopify Handling Fees | MageWorx Shopify Blog

All third-party applications are tailored to meet specific business needs. Without minimizing the significance of similar apps, this solution is a have-it-all. No special technical skills are required to tweak Order & Product Fees. It lets create any nature of additional fees and charges that can be added to a specific product offering.

An Ultimate Guide on Shopify Handling Fees | MageWorx Shopify Blog

In comparison with the Shopify’s built-in features, this allows you to create an unlimited number of product and cart fees, including handling fees.

Additionally, you’ll be able to customize the ways options are displayed:

  • checkbox,
  • drop-down menu,
  • radio button,
  • text,
  • date, or
  • hidden, i.e., without a possibility for a customer to unselect the fee.
An Ultimate Guide on Shopify Handling Fees | MageWorx Shopify Blog

Order fees conditions allow displaying/hiding fees on the frontend only when certain conditions are met. Thus, your conditions for handling fees can be based on:

  • product type, vendor, weight, price, SKU, title, etc.
  • cart subtotal or total quantity of items in the cart.
  • segmented list of customers.
  • locations, and more.

How to Add the App?

If you’ve decided to add Product & Order Fees to your Shopify-based store, you are welcome to benefit from the assistance of the free installation service we offer. After you install the app, feel free to contact the Support Team at apps@mageworx.com, and we will install the app gratis. Otherwise, you can tweak it on your own following the recommendations of the user guide.

An Ultimate Guide on Shopify Handling Fees | MageWorx Shopify Blog

Why Select this App?

It’s no secret that Shopify is a most user-friendly CMS. To expand its default possibilities, the Order & Product Fees app would be the right choice, because:

  • it’s easy to use,
  • you get the freedom of extra fees setup,
  • it adds more pricing flexibility to your business,
  • it brings the opportunity to unobtrusively add handling fees at the checkout,
  • Support Team behind the app is stellar,
  • it is instantly updated by the company that has been tailoring eCommerce solutions for more than a decade.

Final Words

Making adjustments to the checkout page always needs a reasonable and balanced approach. Adding a handling fee Shopify is a fine line and no exception. On the one hand, it’s a great means to share your business expenses with customers transparently. On the other hand, such extra fees at the checkout can increase cart abandonment and lower conversion rate.

Armed with insights we’ve just recently shared, handling fees can benefit your business. Don’t forget about one thing, all you do must bring value to your customer. Unless such charges start looking as you intend to rip the buyer off, a customer does not care who gets the excess, the seller, or the carrier. If your shoppers go all the way to the checkout page, they want the product you are selling.   

Memorial Day Marketing Ideas for a Shopify-Based Business

Memorial Day has become a federal holiday since 1967 and is celebrated on May 25. It is about commemorating and honoring those who have died in battle on behalf of their county. Furthermore, it’s the unofficial beginning of summer used to gather with family and friends, barbecue, and a trip to the beach. This day is a great chance for businesses to get a significant boost in revenue as it’s associated with summer-focused sales.

Make use of Memorial Day to improve awareness of your Shopify-based business, attract new buyers, and boost your profits. Here are some marketing ideas you can implement to benefit your business.

Memorial Day Stats and Facts

  • 43 million consumers celebrate and travel for Memorial Day.
  • In 2019, there was an increase of 3.5% of people traveling from 2018 during this weekend. 
  • Over Memorial Day, it is observed a 73% increase in retail traffic.
  • An average American customer spends nearly $500 over the Memorial Day weekend.
  • Men outspend women by 150%.
  • 93% of buyers were going to shop in brick-and-mortar and online stores last year. 
  • The most popular retail categories for Memorial Day weekend shopping are apparel, department stores. and electronics. 56% of men buy electronics compared to 31% of women. 72% of women purchased at apparel stores compared to 56% of men (AdWeek). 
  • Memorial Day sales and promotions are chosen by 45.5% of adults 18-years-old, and almost 60% of adults between 18 and 34.

Memorial Day Marketing Ideas

Implement Email Marketing

Memorial Day is the best excuse to start up your email marketing. You can send out emails inviting your subscribers to participate in Memorial Day promotions, events, and contests. Otherwise, offer special deals and grow your marketing audience. An email marketing campaign is proven to have one of the strongest returns on investment with a higher conversion rate of 66%, according to Campaign Monitor.

To make your email marketing campaign more effective, you should be creative, use eye-catchy titles and themed templates to stimulate buyers. What is more important, all your Memorial Day offers should have value for buyers.

Memorial Day Marketing Ideas for a Shopify-Based Business | MageWorx Shopify Blog

Ralph Lauren, for example, offered its customers up to 55% off during Memorial Day Weekend. Hardly any consumer will refuse to get such a tempting discount.

Memorial Day Marketing Ideas for a Shopify-Based Business | MageWorx Shopify Blog

At the same time, Alex and Ani, in their emails, suggested shoppers free shipping options on all orders on Memorial Day that can entice 93% of buyers to make purchases. 

Use Motivators

The surest way to stimulate customers to purchase more on Memorial Day is to offer something buyers can’t resist. Discounts are one of the best motivators. As Memorial Day is originally celebrated to honor those who have died in uniform. This day, you can honor the living active and veteran military members by offering a flat discount to them and their families. Memorial Day is also a chance to increase the number of your subscribers by offering a discount for signing up just this day. Furthermore, you may think about specific products to give away as gifts or freebies to all the shoppers this day. Free shipping can also become a stimulus to entice customers to make purchases. To make all your offers more attractive and eye-catchy, you can use promo banners with the help of the Free shipping & Promo bars plugin by MageWorx. 

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No Contact Delivery app
FREE
Add new 'No-contact' delivery option to your store.

Create Deals

Different kinds of deals also should be on your list of Memorial Day marketing ideas. They can be as follows:

  • Time-sensitive or last-minute deals that create a sense of urgency among buyers. The main features of such deals are quick-ending and limited availability. For instance, ‘May 25 only, get 25% off all orders’.
  • VIP exclusive deals are personal recommendations and offers only for the participants of your loyalty program. It can be something like ‘A VIP Member Exclusive: Make a $20 order today and get your Memorial Day special’.
  • Happy hour is a common type of promotion that allows buyers to get some benefits during a certain period of time. For example, ‘Get an extra 25% off your Memorial Day orders between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m.’
  • Whisper code is a kind of a secret between you and your subscribers. As they can know it only if they follow you on social media. Otherwise, customers sign up and get emails with a certain Memorial Day code. To ensure your loyal buyers get it, ask them to enter this code at the checkout promo code box.

You can advertise Memorial Day deals via emails, messages, your online store, or social media. The main thing is all of them should be extremely good that customers couldn’t pass by. 

Be Active on Social Media

Memorial Day Marketing Ideas for a Shopify-Based Business | MageWorx Shopify Blog

Interacting with potential customers is the surest way to increase conversions and boost your sales. All it’s possible to do on social media. No matter what is sold in your Shopify store, you may start a Memorial Day campaign on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or any other social media. To start, you can download Memorial Day-themed videos or pictures. Otherwise, introduce your summer products or services, and promote certain deals. For example, Jeep garnered more than 76K interactions, having published a powerful image of Wrangler with the American flag in the background on Memorial Day last year.

Social media is a great sales channel to be used during the holidays. If you want to lure potential customers to your website, you should make use of relevant content during Memorial Day weekend.

Make Relevant Product Recommendations

Holidays are the best time to introduce, promote, and recommend new products. On Memorial Day you can release summer-related goods. For example, apparel stores can bundle summer products and offer them as put-together outfits. Bookstores can recommend a catalog of beach reading. To create the most attractive and appropriate recommendations that will help you boost your sales, you can make use of the Cross-sell & Upsell Suite app by MageWorx.

Host a Memorial Day Contest

One of the best Memorial Day marketing ideas is to host a contest that is able to increase your audience by 34%. Moreover, due to this marketing strategy, the number of customers signing up to receive emails also can gain 33%. Here are some ideas for Memorial Day contests:

  • Photo contests are easy to implement and don’t require a lot of buyers. You may ask them to upload photos of their pets, outfit, kids, or something else relevant to Memorial Day on social media and sign them with a certain hashtag.
  • Sweepstakes are also a good idea for a contest. You can offer certain benefits for a randomly drawn entrant. Thanks to sweepstakes you’ll be able to collect more emails, and the number of your subscribers can increase.
  • Recipe contests are a good idea for groceries, health food stores, fitness businesses, etc. Ask your consumers to share their recipes for Memorial Day cookouts and promise a certain gift for the winner.
  • With an essay contest, you may offer your buyers to write what Memorial Day means to them and award the best one with a prize or a certain sum of money for shopping in your store.

Don’t Forget About the Mobile Experience

As the number of current mobile users is 5.11 billion, it makes sense to offer some benefits for customers ordering via mobile devices. Thus, you can offer free shipping when making purchases on Memorial Day. Otherwise, you may suggest mobile users a certain discount for orders on this day.

Bottom Line

Every single holiday is a particular opportunity for any business to improve customers’ experience and boost profits. Memorial Day is no exception. With the offered marketing ideas, you’ll be able to make this day special and memorable for all your consumers and profitable for your Shopify store.

Announcing New Free App for Shopify―No-Contact Delivery

How to sell online to serve customers during COVID-19?

What to do to keep business-related things on an even keel at the times of the Corona pandemic?

How to arrange safe order delivery to the customers during the quarantine?

Many businesses are taken aback by the current situation in the world as we do not have a coherent picture of what we can expect tomorrow. Numerous Shdeliveryopify merchants adjust their product ranges to meet the new market demand urgently. Many of us are willing to contribute to the betterment of all.

To do the coronavirus small business help for Shopify-based businesses, we announce the launch of the new free appNo-Contact Delivery. It is aimed at helping you provide a safe way for your customers to receive orders without any contact with the courier.

Features Overview

The No-Contact Delivery app allows informing your e-shoppers about the available contact-free delivery option right on product pages. In the dedicated comments field, it boasts the possibility to let shoppers specify, where they would like the order to be left. Or, it can be a request for a prior phone call, for instance. The app can help you create a unique selling advantage during these unprecedented times and build a unique shopping experience.

Consequently, the plugin empowers you with the following capabilities:

  • 1-minute automatic installation. The app supports the automatic installation functionality that works flawlessly with the most themes. Thus, no developer is required as you do not need to insert the code manually to launch the app. If you still have difficulties in the process of app installation, feel free to reach our support team at apps@mageworx.com and request a free app installation service.
  • Message about contactless delivery availability. Easily inform your online shoppers about the new safe delivery option by adding the label to product pages. You can also disable this feature on product pages.
  • Tooltips with descriptions. Explain to your shoppers what the non-contact delivery option implies.
  • No-contact delivery toggle on the cart page to easily enable or disable this delivery option by the buyers.
  • Front-end comments field to let your customers share their contactless delivery preferences.
  • Ability to translate the app to any language, or adjust the text according to your brand’s writing style guide.

Today, the value of the app translates into the possibility for you as a business to keep delivering orders safely, while letting your customers receive the much-needed goods. Predictably, it should help you minimize the negative effect of COVID-19 on your business.

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No Contact Delivery app
FREE
Add new 'No-contact' delivery option to your store.

How to Get Started with the Contactless Delivery App

To make the best use of the free functionality the extension offers, you need to follow two easy steps:

Step 1. On the Shopify app store, click the ‘Add app’ button.

The app is free. Thus, no extra fees or charges will be applied.

Step 2. Complete the automatic installation.

For advanced manual installation instructions, look through the following user guide.

You know what to do in case there are any difficulties. Don’t hesitate to contact us with questions or even feature requests. Our highly responsive Support Team is always there to assist.

To tweak the app, go to the admin page of your Shopify store. Then, select Apps > No-Contact Delivery. You’ll navigate to the main app settings directly.

How to Configure No-Contact Delivery?

The configuration process is fast and intuitive.

Enabling/disabling the app

In the general section, you can easily enable or disable the app on the front-end by clicking the corresponding button.

The app is enabled by default.

Product page setup

The ‘Display ‘No-contact delivery’ on product pages’ checkbox allows choosing to display or hide the option on product pages.

The Label and Description settings let you adjust the configurations according to your business preferences, as well as specify them in your store language.

Use Label to inform your shoppers about the available no-contact delivery option on product pages. In Description (the tooltip will be available upon hovering the cursor over the question mark sign), include the full detailed description of the new delivery option you offer.

New Free App for Shopify―No-Contact Delivery | MageWorx Shopify Blog

On the screenshot above, the front-end experience configuration area is represented. You are welcome to translate the text to localize fields related to the app-enabled functionality.

Cart page setup

The app features two groups of settings to configure the cart page. The first group offers checkboxes. They’ll allow you to display or hide the comments field for the customers on the front-end or make the new delivery option pre-selected on the checkout by default. The second group is intended for providing context for what stands behind no-contact order delivery.

Use Label to inform your shoppers about the available no-contact delivery option on the cart page. In Description ( the tooltip will be available upon hovering the cursor over the question mark sign), include the full detailed description of the new delivery option you offer.

New Free App for Shopify―No-Contact Delivery | MageWorx Shopify Blog

On the screenshot above, you can see the front-end experience configuration area. You are welcome to translate the text to localize fields related to the app-enabled functionality.

Contact-Free Delivery: Front-End Experience

That’s how the no-contact delivery functionality is displayed on product pages:

New Free App for Shopify―No-Contact Delivery | MageWorx Shopify Blog

Here’s how the no-contact delivery functionality is displayed on the cart page:

New Free App for Shopify―No-Contact Delivery | MageWorx Shopify Blog

Once you go through the above setting, the No-Contact Delivery app is ready to use. It can give you a hand as things stand in the moment. Should you need more details about the settings, feel free to acknowledge the complete user guide.

Instead of Final Words

The MageWorx team hopes our new free solution will bring value to your Shopify-based business.

May you, your family and friends stay safe!

Coronavirus: the Effects on eCommerce and Insights into Trends

The COVID-19 black swan has arrived—to shatter and transform our lifestyles. Though eCommerce seems to handle the situation better than brick-and-mortar stores, its landscape has altered significantly under the impact of the coronavirus storm. As the world moves massively into virtual reality, online retail has both a good harvest to reap and urgent issues to address. 

Want to know the rules of antivirus care in eCommerce? Read on. In this article, you will find an overview of the current state in the online retail sector, information about the latest sales trends, as well as useful tips on how to survive through the havoc.

What COVID-19 Brought to the Online Retail Sector

The only sure thing these days is that everything is constantly changing. ECommerce has to adapt unceasingly to how the coronavirus affects people’s needs and hence—the consumer demand. The latest developments are as follows:

  • Shoppers are stocking up on basic goods, such as food, water, and healthcare products, in wholesale numbers.
  • Since lots of people have switched to the remote mode of working, fitting out a comfortable home office is a major concern.
  • The dress code is different—less fancy and fashionable pieces, more comfy homewear. 
  • Parents rack their brains for ideas to keep children entertained and busy throughout the day.
  • Stuck at home, consumers have more time to devote to their hobbies and various leisure activities. 
  • Eating out is not possible, so cooking is back to private kitchens.

According to experts, the coronavirus will have a positive impact on eCommerce in the long run. Online shopping becomes a matter of safety and survival rather than personal choice.

The short-term implications are not so optimistic. Not all businesses will stay afloat, considering the challenges that online retail is facing now and is to face in the near future:

  • ECommerce giants, such as Amazon, are expected to hit hard to get as big a share of the demand surge as possible. This leaves smaller businesses with fewer chances to pull through.
  • Supply chains have suffered a major blow due to vendors closing their factories or reducing production rates because of the virus threat. Therefore, merchants often find it difficult to maintain enough stock to satisfy growing demands for specific items. 
  • Online retailers have issues with arranging delivery, both internationally and locally. Borders are closed and patrolled stringently, and the current courier numbers are insufficient to cover the existing demand for the services.
  • The global economic crisis is in full swing. People lose jobs and other income sources, which affects their buying capacity. It is only natural to expect customers to get thrifty and more reasonable about purchasing choices. Instead of buying another piece of clothes, they’d rather stock up on the basics, such as food, water, and hygiene items.

Also, there are obvious geographic trends that reflect the economic impacts of the coronavirus pandemics in different regions. Both North and South Americas have seen a surge in online retail transactions, whereas Spain is experiencing a steady plato. In Russia and China, eCommerce sales have been negative so far. 

Coronavirus: Effects on eCommerce and Insights into Trends | MageWorx Shopify Blog

Year-on-year online transaction rates

The general sentiment is that customers are still willing and do spend money to shop online. However, their priorities have changed, shifting towards the new essentials that differ from the 2020 predicted trends. Read on to learn the details.

New Consumer Essentials and Trends

Based on a recent survey, eCommerce businesses today have divided into three categories:

  • those with negative performance indicators,
  • those where sales have reached a steady Plato,
  • those with the turnover going up.

Surplus sellers make up 28% of respondents. Most of them work with the following merchandise categories:

  • Healthcare goods. The highest demand is for face masks, disinfecting agents, hand sanitizers, etc.—anything that’s needed for preventive care and protection from the coronavirus. Pharmaceuticals, including sleep aids and sedatives, are among best-seller items, obviously due to the pandemics-infused panic.
Coronavirus: Effects on eCommerce and Insights into Trends | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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  • Baby products. The category of goods has seen an almost 690% spike in sales recently. Much like with the toilet paper craze, consumers are just stocking up on the basics—mostly baby formula and diapers.
Coronavirus: Effects on eCommerce and Insights into Trends | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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  • Food and beverages. Stringent quarantine measures and fears to catch the disease when standing in a queue cause people to shop online even for meals. Besides, eating out possibilities are either scarce or zero in most locations.
Coronavirus: Effects on eCommerce and Insights into Trends | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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  • Fitness gear. A healthier lifestyle is also believed to curb the coronavirus risks. Since gyms are closed, people are turning to home workouts to stay fit and fulfill the 10,000 step minimum. It is not only sports equipment that’s become trendy but also specific content, online exercise routines, and special nutrition.
Coronavirus: Effects on eCommerce and Insights into Trends | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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  • Beauty and personal care goods. Many customers use the opportunity of home isolation to devote more time to self-care. In addition, beauty routines have a widely known stress-relieving effect. Those are the main drivers of market growth. Related content has top impression rates, too.
Coronavirus: Effects on eCommerce and Insights into Trends | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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  • Houseware. These days, when restaurants and cafes are banned entertainment, consumers have to remodel their kitchens for eating in. Therefore, the demand for merchandise, such as pots, pans, cutlery, dishes, has been stably high lately.
Coronavirus: Effects on eCommerce and Insights into Trends | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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  • Office supplies. While some are losing jobs because of the pandemics and the global economic crisis, others are just switching to the remote format. Though lucky to stay employed, distance workers struggle to make their improvised home offices a comfortable place to work at.
Coronavirus: Effects on eCommerce and Insights into Trends | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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  • Hobby goods and toys. The merchandise is meant to solve the problem of entertaining both adults and children while they are locked down inside houses.
Coronavirus: Effects on eCommerce and Insights into Trends | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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  • Homewear. Stay-at-home work and leisure call for a different dress code. Consumers prefer clothes that are functional, look neat, wear well, and feel comfortable.
Coronavirus: Effects on eCommerce and Insights into Trends | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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There’s also this surprising trio that does not belong to the above new essentials but has top sales rates—alcohol, cannabidiol-containing products, and religious accessories. Indeed, each seeks their own consolation.

As for negative trends, apparel and handbag businesses sustain the greatest losses. The sales rates for the merchandise have dropped by 20% on average. Proceeds from selling jewelry and electronics have decreased, too.

Coronavirus: Effects on eCommerce and Insights into Trends | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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What Can Businesses Do to Keep Losses At Bay?

Even if you happen to be among the misfortuned ones, lamenting about things going astray and giving up on your long-nurtured business is never a good way out. Why don’t you make an effort and seek remedies instead of counting losses?

Below, we have provided a number of useful tips on how vendors worldwide—whether trading at Shopify and other platforms—can address the coronavirus-invoked issues.

Tip#1. Modify Your Business to Match the New Reality

This can involve different strategies—from totally changing the assortment to reformulating promo statements. For instance, manufacturers and sellers of apparel and handbags switch from producing and vending their regular goods to face masks. The measure is not only efficient in terms of minimizing damages but also contributes to building a great business reputation.

Coronavirus: Effects on eCommerce and Insights into Trends | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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To respond to the upward trend in loungewear sales, famous brands launch dedicated collections. What has been previously offered as offline classes, events, or consultations is now becoming virtual. New promo mottos are phrased to appeal to the people who feel isolated and deprived of the usual ways to indulge themselves, whereby shopping is often positioned as a therapy.

Tip#2. Figure Out a Solution To Delivery Problems

Shipping and inventory tracking are burning issues in the eCommerce industry amidst the virus havoc—so work your way to resolve them faster and more efficiently than competitors. 

Use software tools to aid the store’s personnel in managing merchandise flows and enhance the customer’s experience with delivery. For instance, Shopify vendors can install the free-of-charge Delivery Date & Time Suite or the No-Contact Delivery plugin.

Tip#3. Lure Clients With Promo Discounts

There’s nothing like a discount to keep up the turnover and boost profits even in these crazy times. To stand out and provide a wider range of customer options, vary the way you reduce prices—for quantities, certain types of goods, or bundled sets.

In the Shopify app store you can find a collection of plugins to help you with the task—e.g., the Volume and Tiered Discounts Kit by MageWorx.  

Tip#4. Adapt the Content To the Latest Events

Find the right balance between updating the clientele on the latest issues and being positive about the situation. While you are working on the content, try to be empathetic and considerate to the feelings and needs of your audience.

You also can seize the chance of people spending more time online and connect closer to your clients. Tell them more about the brand, the values behind it, the products you sell. Incentivize customers to build a community to support each other throughout the difficult period, which is a great technique to win a loyal clientele.

Tip#5. Communicate with Customers Through Emails

Email campaigns are not only efficient in reviving abandoned carts but also work really well when you need to engage customers in communication without being intrusive.

Send out newsletters reporting the current state of your business after the COVID-19 outbreak. Use emails to express gratitude to loyal clients or ask for support from the community. Promote bulk discounts for families and friends and advise customers on the best ways to adapt to life in isolation.

Tip#6. Untap the Power of Social Media

Though locked at homes, people can’t but ignore the need to socialize. Social media, such as Facebook or Instagram, serves the purpose all right. There, people also seek guidance on how they can change their lifestyles to stay positive, healthy, and fit and read the latest pandemic news.

You can appeal to any of the above to promote your business: provide guidance through influencers, post expert opinions, and engage your clients in conversations. This will help to build greater brand awareness and create a loyal customer community.

Tip#7. Support Charity Initiatives

Make the initiatives part and parcel of promo campaigns. In this way, you can kill two birds with one stone—incentivize customers to buy by appealing to their emotions and help the society to handle the crisis.

For instance, you can build a special promo bundle with the Advanced Bundle Products plugin and announce that some portion of the product proceeds is to be used for charity.

Conclusion      

The COVID-19 virus has taken its toll not only on the human population but also on retail trade, both online and offline. The recipe to stop the disease progression is pretty much the same—whether for humans or for commercial entities.

First, you have to take preventive measures and respond adequately to the changed circumstances. Second, keep your flows running as long as you can—our tips will sure be useful. Third, ask for help when you no longer can and wait patiently for recovery.   

12 ECommerce Design Mistakes That Could Hurt Your Sales

This is a guest post by Jake Rheude.

Getting users to check out your eCommerce store is challenging enough. But once they are already there, you have to convince them to buy.

When you design your store the right way, you can create a great first impression with site visitors, establish trust with prospects, and it lets you stand out from your competitors. In short, you will be in a great position to generate more sales.

But building a highly converting eCommerce site can still be challenging because it involves more than visual elements.

In this post, we will talk about the most common eCommerce design mistakes that could hurt your sales and how you can avoid them:

Failure to Make the First Impression

The thing is, when you make an eCommerce website, you only have a few seconds to make a great first impression to people that you’re talking to.

Now, how is that different from the people that you interact with online?

Well, you have less time! It only takes users 50 milliseconds to form an opinion about your website.

That gives you a very limited time to attract people and form a positive image of your site (and business as a whole). If you fail at this, then the ones that are browsing your site will be skeptical.

Having no Clear Value Proposition

12 ECommerce Design Mistakes That Could Hurt Your Sales | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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An important element that will determine whether or not prospects will keep on checking your site is your value proposition.

It will define the attractiveness of your products towards prospective buyers. It will also determine your product’s uniqueness and brand, which will make you rise above your competitors.

Meaning, your value proposition will convince them to purchase your product.

Unfortunately, a lot of eCommerce sites have no clear or bad value propositions. Most of them fail to communicate the most distinctive aspects of their product. As a result, buyers couldn’t make up their minds whether to purchase the product or not.

Best Shopify Apps - MageWorx

Designed for Desktop Users Only

More than half of the total internet traffic online comes from mobile devices. Therefore, you could be missing 20% to 60% of your customers simply because your site isn’t mobile-friendly.

Even websites that try to cross-platform fall on these expectations. Try to miss an element or two, and customers will leave without a doubt.

Bad User Experience

Having a UX eCommerce design is important for several reasons. For one, the effective user experience will engage your prospects and boost your eCommerce marketing strategy.

Users deserve the best user experience when they land on your site. Not only will this boost your conversion rates, but you’ll get better reviews and improved awareness when you get people to be excited with your brand.

Apart from that, the better the user experience that your website provides, the higher search engines (such as Google) will rank you on the search engine results pages.

Absence of Visual Hierarchy

Having a visual hierarchy will make it easy for users to be able to navigate through your site.

When you utilize a clear visual hierarchy, your call-to-action button also becomes easily recognizable because of the design. For example, accent-colored texts are easily clickable, but the base texts aren’t.

But when you try to juggle various sizes with contrasting colors and spacing, together with the overall layout, you’ll be able to determine which will be noticed first. This includes which elements on your site have more value.

It’s because you’re discreetly guiding web visitors to key components on your site, and making their journey more time-efficient. They could easily get from one point to another on your site as quickly and as intuitively as possible.

Missing Call-to-Action

Where do you place your call-to-action?

While this might seem a relatively easy question, you would be surprised to know that not a lot of sites have a prominent “Buy Now” button.

With every item that you have listed, they should be able to see and click a button to complete a purchase. Also, do not be afraid to enlarge those call-to-action buttons.

Place a lot of clear languages on what that particular button does. Use bright, contrasting colors to make it stand out from various elements on your page. You can even let users know what particular item went to the cart.

And if you have a single-product website, redirect web visitors to the checkout page.

Ineffective Product Pages

A lot of eCommerce businesses fail to get the results they want because they delivered ineffective product pages. Meanwhile, effective product pages turn viewers into paying customers.

Product pages are crucial because they tend to get more traffic than your homepage. They are often shared more, as well.

Also, because a lot of users search for the actual products than the brand itself when they go to search engines, most users will come across product pages before any other page on your eCommerce website.

If you do not focus enough on creating effective product pages, then you will be making a huge mistake.

Poor Quality Product Images

12 ECommerce Design Mistakes That Could Hurt Your Sales | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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A lot of consumers won’t buy your products based on just words alone. In fact, a lot of small eCommerce stores hurt their chances of making more profits simply because they don’t work hard to produce high-quality product photos.

So, if you’re selling custom products, then you might need to work with a professional who will take the photos for you.

You don’t have to invest in expensive cameras and equipment, either necessarily. All you need is an excellent brand style that will showcase your products in all shapes and dimensions.

No Search, Sort, and Filter Options

The thing is, most people don’t know what they’re looking for. Therefore, your product display should be aesthetically pleasing enough to grab their attention.

But placing a “Buy Button” simply won’t cut that. Apart from that, you should also help shoppers find whatever they’re looking for without too much trouble.

You can do so by categorizing your products, letting users sort and filter through them. Having a search option can help a lot, as well.

Complicated Checkout Process

12 ECommerce Design Mistakes That Could Hurt Your Sales | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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Having a complicated checkout process is one of the main reasons why a lot of people abandon their carts before paying anything, and you lose out on sales.

If there are too many steps before the checkout process, they’ll become easily impatient, abandon your cart, and leave.

That’s precisely why you should ask customers for information that you only need to process their orders and deliver the product.

Also, the last thing that users want to encounter is surprise charges during checkout. There’s nothing worse than finding a product that they like, only to abandon at the last minute because of an unexpected shipping charge.

Unreliable Website Hosting

A slow loading site will kill the overall user experience a prospect will have on your site.

Shoppers expect all eCommerce stores to load faster than ever before. So, when it comes to making your eCommerce store load faster, your site’s hosting plays a crucial role.

So, it’s high time that you skip the shared hosting plan and go with a quality cloud hosting or VPS option.

Lack of Trust Signals

Brand recognition will always play a key role in attracting more and more customers, as well as competing against giant brands in the market.

It’s not enough that you win over your client’s confidence and trust in your products. You also need to adopt a more customer-centered approach.

Place vital elements like customer feedback, as well as other important information about your company. You can also install an SSL certificate on your eCommerce site.

People will always feel comfortable in handing in their payment details, such as their credit card information if they feel that they’re in a safe environment.

Final Thoughts

There you have it. Those are the biggest eCommerce design mistakes that you should stay away from.

Hopefully, by learning from these mistakes, you’ll gain valuable insight into how you can improve the performance of your eCommerce store, and ultimately boost your sales.

What Sells Best on Shopify? 20 Best-Seller Ideas

Coronavirus pacing the planet and people isolating themselves massively at homes—the events leave little chance for offline retail to survive undamaged through the mess. The gravy train of online stores has come in. Make sure to catch the train with Shopify before it is too late.   

This article caters to both Shopify newbies and long-time users who are stuck on the questions: “What should I sell in my store?” and “What should I add to the assortment in 2020?” Read on to learn about 20 best-selling products based on the latest trends and ideas on how to look for the right merchandise to build a successful business.

How do I Find Best Products to Sell on Shopify?

This is perhaps the number one question one should ask before getting down to actual business. As trivial as the answer may seem—the way to success is always a deeply personal story of research and decision-making that comes down essentially to the two steps below.

Step 1. Look Around For Inspiration

  • Leverage SEO power. With the store specialization already known or at least established, you can conduct research to find out related popular queries. Keywords will not only help you to identify the goods to sell but also to build a marketing and content creation strategy.
  • Explore large marketplaces. ECommerce giants, such as Amazon or eBay, can provide valuable insights into purchasing choices to prompt which products it is best to sell at the moment. The easiest method is to note down the autofill suggestions that appear in the search line as you begin to input words randomly. Alternatively, review the comments at best-selling shops to find the quality or servicing gaps you could possibly turn into competitive advantages.
What Sells Best on Shopify? | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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  • Follow eCommerce trends. One way is to use public web resources, such as Trendhunter, that feature a collection of breakthrough ideas and emerging opportunities. It would also be unwise to disregard the opinions of renowned experts and retail influencers and news from competitors.
  • Reach out to customers. No eCommerce business would have survived without clients. So, get to know your clientele: what their needs or challenges are, what causes them pain or inconvenience, what inspires them, and what they value most. The key to success in the mission of finding best-seller products may well be hidden in the answers to the questions. Established sellers can request customers for ideas directly through crowdsourcing.
  • Pursue your own dreams. The pathos of the phrase fades easily once you remember the numerous examples when a multi-billion business has grown out of a hobby. On Shopify, the Beardbrand grooming shop has transformed from a personal blog into a top merchant with a monthly turnover of £120,000.

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  • Monitor social media. Those are not only efficient as a distribution channel but can also aid in measuring the popularity of a product to sell. Explore the large shopping communities, such as Wanelo. Seek product ideas across Pinterest and Polyvore. Read Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter feeds on a regular basis to know what people talk about.
  • Take a journey into the past. As they say, everything old can become new again. Study past trends and fashion styles, products sold in the previous centuries—reviving traditions and crafts are all the rage now. Besides, nostalgia is a great soul string to touch to set a customer in the right mood for buying.

In fact, ideas for products to sell in a Shopify store are everywhere—just look around. It may hit you as you stroll down the aisles in a next-door shop or as you walk your dog. However, any idea requires a reasonable approach to become a bestseller. That’s where Step 2 comes into play.

Step 2. Check Ideas for Viability

Once you’ve finally come up with a list of best-seller items (or at least one), it is time to make sure the idea of distributing them through an online store is feasible. Here’s a number of questions to guide you through the feasibility test:

  • What is the potential demand for the products?

The market size and the prospective target audience are major indicators to aid you in decision-making. The larger, the better, of course. However, a small market or shopping community can be an advantage—if you are planning to launch a niche product. 

  • What are your competitors? How well are they doing?

The answers are crucial for understanding the state of the market you are planning to enter. Unfortunately, the measurement scale is relative. Too many thriving competitors is bad because you will have to fight fiercely for a place in the sun. Few rivals or degrading businesses are hardly good news, either. This means the market you’ve chosen is experiencing a decline.

  • Has the demand for the chosen product been stable over time?

Do some online research to study historical data—how long the item has been in demand and what the market forecasts are. If the merchandise is associated with stable year-on-year demand rates, then the choice is perfect for growing your business. If it is just a publicly supported fashion whim, the chances are high that you’ll soon find yourself in a financial trap.

After your newly opened shop grows into an established business, you can reassess demand rates on a regular basis to stir its development in the right direction. The Shopify app store features a collection of tools to help you with the task—e.g., the SavvyCube Analytics and Reports plugin by MageWorx.

What Are the Best Things to Sell on Shopify in 2020?

In case an independent investigation is too burdensome for you to accomplish, you can take an easier path—study the top 20 Shopify best-seller items below.

#1. Healthcare Products

A healthy lifestyle has been a hot trend for years. In connection with the COVID-19 pandemics, health has become the highest priority for the majority of the earth population. The focus will hardly shift anytime soon.

Apart from the fancy healthcare gear, such as electric toothbrushes or essential oil diffusers, hand sanitizers are now hitting the list of top queries.

What Sells Best on Shopify? | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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#2. Homeware

Within the merchandise category, the leading demand driver is functionality. People are seeking to make their homes more comfortable. Best-seller items include smart kitchen or bathroom gear and changeable sofa covers.

What Sells Best on Shopify? | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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#3. Jewelry

These goods have invariably taken top positions in terms of sales proceeds. The only thing that varies is the type of jewelry that enjoys the most popularity. This season, the best-selling products are choker necklaces and pieces of minimalistic design.

Wolf Circus is an example of a popular Shopify project selling self-produced jewelry. Their products are manufactured from recycled silver and bronze—a point that makes them stand out among the crowd of competitors on the big-size market.

What Sells Best on Shopify? | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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#4. Grooming Products

The special care products for men are becoming increasingly popular from year to year since wearing a beard or a mustache—and wearing it clean and neat—is a hot trend. According to the latest statistics, the market size is expected to reach over 81 billion USD by 2024. At the same time, the niche is still a novelty, so the opportunities to introduce new merchandise or ideas are ample.

What Sells Best on Shopify? | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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#5. Women’s Underwear

No matter how styles and trends change over time, quality lingerie is never out of fashion. And each woman understands the quality part in its particular way, which accounts for the mind-boggling variety of offers on the market. Some seek comfort and practicality. Others need panties and bras to be sexy and fancy.

One of the most famous Shopify lingerie brands—Negative Underwear—has made a fortune on selling lingerie where comfort and beauty come together in the right proportions. In this niche, making a statement that would appeal to women is obviously the key to success. 

What Sells Best on Shopify? | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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#6. Phone accessories

Smartphones have become part and parcel of our daily life. Over 1.5 billion units were sold worldwide in 2019, and the market is expected to increase further. So, you can imagine the potential for the sales of accessories—chargers, earphones, protective screens, cases, holders, etc.

What Sells Best on Shopify? | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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Shopify merchants often sell these products as part of bundle offers that you can preset and manage using special-purpose plugins—e.g., Advanced Bundle Products by MageWorx.

#7. Makeup and beauty tools

The range of products to sell in the category is exceptionally wide—from lipstick and conventional cosmetics to novelty gadgets, such as touchscreen mirrors. The impressive sales rates of such Shopify brands as Kylie Cosmetics and KKW Beauty prove the best-seller status of the merchandise.

What Sells Best on Shopify? | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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In case you have decided to explore the niche, the best three options to promote goods are as follows:

  • to build a personal brand in collaboration with a celebrity (or to become one)
  • to opt for organic ingredients in line with the conscious consumption trend
  • to add the high-tech touch to your range with smart beauty tools

#8. Bags

The scope of products represented in the niche covers handbags, backpacks, purses, wallets, etc. Apart from the offer diversity, the accessory market is promising in terms of customization upsells—personalized patterns, prints, engravings, etc.

To succeed in the market, make sure to deliver a unique brand message. For example, the selling point of Shopify’s Hardgraft shop is a particular design that combines luxury and functionality.

What Sells Best on Shopify? | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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#9. Smart electronics

The devices embody the spirit of the new high-tech era and cater to the inherent desires of a human to make its life comfy. In 2020, the global market for these electronic gadgets is reported to amount to over 223 million USD. One of the most popular items is smartwatches.

What Sells Best on Shopify? | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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The demand for the products is always on the rise as technologies evolve constantly. To capitalize on early sales of such goods, Shopify merchants introduce pre-order functionality, such as offered by the Pre-Order Autopilot plugin.

#10. Watches

Watches are one of those items that hold steady on top year in year out and all year around. Similarly to jewelry or bags, the merchandise type is associated with diversity—offers ranging from luxury models to trendy seasonal best-sellers. In addition, they cater to a wide audience, covering women, men, and even children.

What Sells Best on Shopify? | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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#11. E-cigarettes

The demand for these items has been rising recently to reflect the general trend for healthier habits, backed by the anti-smoking measures taken in numerous communities. With numerous designs of the devices and flavors to refill them, diversification of the assortment is never a problem.

What Sells Best on Shopify? | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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#12. Weight Loss Food

Slimming is a popular hobby for ordinary people and a blessed opportunity to start with for beginner retailers. In 2020, the weight loss market size is predicted to total over 420 billion USD. Matcha powder is one of the best-selling goods in the category.

What Sells Best on Shopify? | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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#13. Athleisure

The category embraces clothing and shoes that one can wear both outdoor and at home while doing sports or having leisure time. Leggings, T-shirts, tank tops, sports bras, sweatpants are just a few examples of what an athleisure store can sell at Shopify. Offering custom styles, patterns, prints can be a way to stand out of the large-size competitors’ herd. 

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#14. Pet beds

Opening a pet store is a good idea because the 2024 estimate for the total size of the market is over 115 billion USD. Cat and dog beds are 2020 best sellers in the niche, including among Shopify merchants.

What Sells Best on Shopify? | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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#15. Maternity products

With today’s conscious approach, women hardly ever economize on goods to prepare for the special period in their lives or to help them through it. The merchandise ranges from maternity apparel to books and videos about pregnancy, upbringing, and early education.

What Sells Best on Shopify? | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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#16. Baby products

Things to sell in a Shopify baby store range from diapers to toys. Best-selling items include infant carriers and child seats, baby safety devices, feeding gear, and toiletries. In general, the highest demand is for goods that are easy-to-use, hard-to-break, and lightweight.

What Sells Best on Shopify? | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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#17. Shapewear

The merchandise type is a traditional leader among best-seller products in Shopify stores—whether specializing in it or selling it as part of a more varied assortment. By 2022, shapewear sales are estimated to bring a total of 5.6 billion USD.

What Sells Best on Shopify? | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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#18. Fitness gear

Soaring sales of fitness gear are due to the already-mentioned aspiration for a healthier lifestyle. Considering the worldwide quarantine, home fitness equipment is aiming at the top of the Shopify best-seller list.

What Sells Best on Shopify? | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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#19. Reusable bags

Being conscious about shopping is another trend—just as major as a healthy lifestyle. Therefore, reusable shopper accessories are among the best-selling Shopify merchandise. With a proper marketing approach or a remarkable statement, the goods can make you a fortune.

What Sells Best on Shopify? | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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#20. Intangible merchandise

Apart from material items, there’s this large and prospective niche of non-physical products. These include expert consultations, impressions, experiences, classes, workshops, customized gift cards in the digital format, etc. With the looming perspective of the world’s population stuck at homes, this is a great niche to explore.

Buti Yoga is a successful example of a Shopify store in the category. It sells online fitness classes and certifications.

What Sells Best on Shopify? | MageWorx Shopify Blog

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A Few Words to Conclude

Knowledge is undoubtedly power. Now, the knowledge of the top 20 Shopify products and tips on finding more is under your belt. However, becoming the best seller takes a lot more than just knowing how things are on the market. Put the knowledge into practice and keep your eyes wide open for what’s to happen—this is how you grow to become a successful Shopify merchant.

Justin Cener, eCommerce Bootcamp Mentor, Features MageWorx Apps

To be noticed, marked, and recommended by a trustworthy person is precious. We are pleased to share that two MageWorx apps have recently got positive feedback and recommendations from Justin Cener, the eCommerce bootcamp mentor and influencer. It’s a great honor and luck for our team to see our products featured and selected from the pool of similar solutions.

Who is Justin Cener and Why His Estimate Matters?

Justin Cener is not only a lifelong entrepreneur having created the fastest growing sports app. Now, he is also a trustworthy eCommerce bootcamp mentor. He has 615+ student success stories, 1000+ hours of training, 5+ years of coaching. He has become popular due to the Wolf Mug ads that also gave birth to a new intro many other Youtubers started using ’if you give me 60 seconds’. Over the past six years, Justin has been able to build four multi-million dollar businesses from scratches. It sounds fascinating!

At his famous bootcamp course, consisting of several sections, Justin Cener:

  • helps choose a niche,
  • helps start a Shopify store,
  • explains advantages of the Shopify setup over other similar products,
  • tells about print-on-demand setup,
  • teaches dropshipping with Shopify and Facebook ads, and more.

Considering Justin Cener’s bio, his success, achievements and experience, and how much he can help eCommerce businesses develop, his feedback and estimate of our apps are so important and precious.

MageWorx Apps Featured by Justin Cener  

On his Youtube channel with 32k+ subscribers, Justin Cener shares his experience. He uploads instructional videos and recommendations for his students, real and future eCommerce entrepreneurs, and just Shopify amateurs.

Order and Product Fees App

In one of his numerous videos on Youtube, Justin Cener gave advice on how to make more money on every sale with Shopify. He explained how to do it with no extra expenditures, no additional ads or traffic no matter what type of store you have or what type of products you are selling.

Justin Cener suggested understanding the concept of average order value (AOV). That is the total number of sales divided by the total number of orders. Thus, every retailer should increase AOV to make more money. According to Justin Cener, bundles, upsells, down-sells, cross-sells, small add-ons, order bumps, etc. are prefect to help you with that.

To make it all possible on Shopify, Justin recommends using a 3rd-party app. To our common pleasure, in his pet personalization store, he personally uses and strongly recommends the Order & Product Fees plugin by MageWorx. Justin Cener finds this app to be incredibly powerful and flexible. The app does exactly what is required for increasing your AOV.

Advanced Bundle Products App

This video will teach you how to create product bundles in Shopify without losing print-on-demand integration. The bootcamp mentor considers bundling to be the best strategy as every single product could be bundled together. Justin Cener suggests several popular bundle ideas that will drastically increase conversion rate and expand your product catalog.

In the video, the entrepreneur also marks the pros and cons of bundling. As for the positive sides, this strategy is extremely effective, gives a feeling of personalization, increases AOV and gives your catalog an update. The main disadvantage of bundling is not built in Shopify by default and some bundling apps will not work with print-on-demand or dropshipping apps.

Justin Cener recommends using the Advance Bundle Products plugin to create the perfect product bundle in Shopify. For the eCommerce bootcamp mentor, it was important for this app to integrate with print-on-demand and dropshipping apps, not create any duplicates or clones, and keep original products. Justin Cener admitted that the plugin has everything to increase AOV and conversion rates, as well as make customers spend more. Furthermore, the app allows having full control over pricing, discounts, and display. Ease of use has also influenced the decision of the entrepreneur to use and recommend this app.

Final Thoughts

We thank Justin Cener for taking his time to mention our Shopify apps on his channel. It’s an honor for us to know that the niche experts like himself use and recommend our apps. Thank you!