How to Turn Your Shopify Store Into a Sales Machine

Getting a Shopify store off the ground is a cracking start. But turning it into a proper sales machine takes a bit more joined-up thinking, from the first impression right through to the final checkout.

Because having brilliant products and a lovely-looking website doesn’t necessarily mean customers are going to come flooding through the digital door.

What makes a successful Shopify store?

The best Shopify stores have a few things in common. Lovely branding, easy navigation, a smooth checkout and marketing that brings the right people popping in for a browse.

But the real trick is getting all those different bits working together. Luckily, you don’t need to give your entire store a makeover to make a difference. Here are nine things worth giving a little attention.

1. Build a Shopify Store That Feels Like Your Brand

Shopify gives you plenty of themes to get the ball rolling, but there’s a difference between having an online shop that does the job and one that feels unmistakably yours. 

Your branding should run through everything, from the homepage and collections to the colours, typography and photography. Especially when your competitors are only a few clicks away.

A lovely-looking brand is a cracking start, but the experience needs to live up to the good looks. From the moment somebody lands on your store to the point they check out, it should all feel like the same business.

Take our work with The Wool Library, for example. We brought together their brand identity, messaging and Shopify website to create an online experience that better reflected what the business was all about. 

And it wasn’t just a pretty face, either. Following the launch, The Wool Library reported a whopping 2,200% increase in website sales.

2. Improve Shopify Navigation, Collections and Search

You know that feeling when you walk into a shop looking for one thing and somehow end up wandering around for ages trying to find it? Your Shopify store shouldn’t be the online equivalent.

Keep your navigation straightforward and organise products into collections that make sense to the people actually buying them.

Clear categories, sensible menus and useful search functionality can all help people get where they want to go. And if you’ve got a particularly large catalogue, filters can make a world of difference.

Luckily, Shopify has a few tricks up its sleeve. Its Search & Discovery app can help you organise useful filters for price, availability and product type, provided your theme supports them. 

So whether customers are having a good old nose around or hunting for something specific, they can find what they need without all the unnecessary faff.

3. Get the Whole Mobile Shopping Journey Right

People aren’t always sitting at a desk when they fancy a little online shopping. They’re on the sofa, on the train or having a quick browse while the kettle boils.

And if your Shopify store feels like a desktop website that’s been awkwardly squeezed onto a smaller screen, they’re probably not going to stick around for long.

Think about the whole journey, not just how individual pages look.

Can customers move comfortably between collections? Does the search function work properly? Can they manage their basket and complete checkout without feeling like they’re wrestling with their phone?

Mobile optimisation isn’t simply about making everything smaller. It’s about making the entire shopping experience work, wherever somebody happens to be browsing.

4. Keep Your Shopify Store Running Smoothly

We’ve all clicked on a website, watched the loading wheel spin and eventually decided we’ve got better things to do.

Shopify takes care of plenty of the underlying technical infrastructure, but that doesn’t mean your website’s performance looks after itself.

Heavy themes, unnecessary apps, third-party scripts and overenthusiastic animations can all leave your store feeling a little sluggish.

It’s worth regularly reviewing what’s running behind the scenes. Are all those apps still serving a purpose? Is your theme performing properly? And have you added anything fancy that’s doing more harm than good?

Tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals can help highlight issues with loading speed, responsiveness and visual stability.

Because there’s not much point having a beautifully designed Shopify store if customers need the patience of a saint to use it.

5. Make Checkout as Painless as Possible

Your customers have found something they like, popped it in their basket and are ready to part with their hard-earned money. Lovely. Now would be a particularly unfortunate time to make life difficult for them.

Make delivery costs and times easy to understand, check that any promotional codes work properly and give customers payment options that suit them.

Depending on your setup and eligibility, Shopify supports accelerated checkout options such as Shop Pay, Apple Pay and Google Pay, helping eligible shoppers avoid entering the same details over and over again.

Don’t forget to give the mobile checkout a once-over, either. Because when somebody’s ready to buy, the last thing they need is an unexpected obstacle.

6. Improve Your Shopify SEO and Get Found

Even the loveliest Shopify website isn’t going to be much use if nobody can find it.

That’s where search engine optimisation comes in.

But good Shopify SEO is about more than squeezing keywords into a few pages and hoping Google takes the hint.

Think about your wider website structure. Do your collections have useful content? Are important pages linked together logically? Can search engines understand what each part of your store is about?

And don’t overlook the opportunity to create genuinely helpful content.

Buying guides, how-to articles and useful answers to common questions can help you reach people who aren’t quite ready to buy but are already looking for information.

But don’t let all that lovely content sit gathering dust. Link your buying guides to relevant collections, give those collections useful descriptions and make it easy for customers to go from doing their research to finding the right products.

It’s also worth making sure your technical foundations are in good shape, from crawlable pages and sensible redirects to accurate metadata.

If you want to go into more detail about individual products, we’ve also put together a guide to optimising Shopify product pages for more sales.

7. Bring Your Marketing and Your Shopify Store Together

Your website shouldn’t be working in splendid isolation while your social media, email marketing and advertising all do their own thing.

Different jobs. Same direction.

Whether somebody discovers your business through Instagram, Google or an email campaign, the journey should feel consistent.

That means sending people to relevant pages, keeping your messaging joined up and making sure the promises you’re making in your marketing are reflected when somebody lands on your store.

Shopify also supports integrations with various marketing channels and tools, making it possible to connect more of the customer journey.

But don’t mistake a collection of connected tools for a proper strategy. Your emails, campaigns and website should all be doing their own jobs while working towards the same goal.

8. Improve Customer Retention and Repeat Purchases

There’s nothing quite like winning over a new customer. Apart from getting them to come back, of course.

Yet so many online stores spend all their energy attracting new faces while forgetting about the people who’ve already bought from them.

A thoughtful welcome email, relevant product updates, useful post-purchase advice or the occasional well-timed offer can all help keep the relationship going.

Shopify also gives you ways to segment customers and automate follow-up marketing, so you can share more relevant messages with people who’ve already bought from you, rather than treating everybody like a first-time visitor.

Just don’t confuse staying in touch with bombarding somebody’s inbox every other day.

The aim is to stay on your customers’ minds, not get on their nerves. Give them something worth hearing about, rather than another email to send straight to the bin.

9. Measure What Actually Matters to Your Business

When sales take a little dip, it’s tempting to start fiddling with everything in sight. A new homepage banner here, another discount code there, maybe a cheeky pop-up for good measure. Anything to get things moving again.

But before you start throwing the kitchen sink at your Shopify store, have a proper look at the bigger picture.

There’s plenty of useful information tucked away in Shopify Analytics. Sales, conversion rates, average order value, returning customers. The lot. But the interesting bit is working out what those numbers actually mean. 

Where are your best customers coming from? Which collections are pulling their weight? And who’s coming back for more?

A campaign bringing in thousands of visitors might sound like a roaring success, but if nobody’s buying, what’s the point? 

It’s about understanding what those numbers are telling you and making changes for a reason, rather than just crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.

Getting the Most Out of Your Shopify Store?

Can people find your products? Is shopping on mobile straightforward? Does checkout feel like a breeze? Are customers coming back? And do you actually know what’s working?

If you’ve answered ‘not really’ to a few of those, there’s probably a little room for improvement.

But don’t go changing everything at once. Work out what’s causing the biggest headaches and tackle those first.

At Giant Peach, we bring together Shopify design and development, UX, SEO and marketing to create online stores that look the part and work just as hard behind the scenes.

Fancy giving your Shopify store a bit of a boost? Speak to the experts.