Managing and maintaining a Shopify site is more work than it seems. The work doesn’t end once we hit the launch date, think about a website as a living and breathing being – websites and trends are constantly evolving and to remain at the forefront of your competitors it’s imperative to maintain, optimize and enhance your storefront.
The primary focus of website management is usually based on the front-end design and user experience. User habits evolve over time. What worked great for UX design 5 years ago is probably not going to be on-trend now – using heat mapping software like Hotjar and Lucky Orange is a great way of tracking your visitors’ behaviour on the site and making educated decisions on how to move the site forward.
Some UX Design Action Points:
- User Experience
- User Journey
- CTA’s
- Landing Pages
- Pre-Sell Landing Pages
- CRO
- Tone of Voice
Once you have all of the niceties out of the way – it’s time to dig deep into the functionality. Functionality can be approached in numerous ways, it could be looking at replacing an existing tech stack, checking you’re using the tech stack to its maximum capabilities or introducing new pieces of functionality that are going to elevate the user experience, AOV, CR and Customer LTV.
If you’re a Shopify Plus merchant, that could involve looking into things a little more technical, here are some ideas on what you could achieve with being on Shopify Plus:
Built for scalability
- A fully hosted SaaS platform guarantees 99.99% uptime, with server hits handling up to 4 million hits per second and thousands of orders per minute without impacting site performance.
- Unlimited bandwidth and up to 200TB of storage capacity.
Extended Customisation
- Fully customisable checkout experience – this is one thing that would require regular development updates – although if this isn’t something needed to change the Shopify checkout is great and updates automatically if no code is edited. This feature isn’t available on standard Shopify.
- Built with sections allows you to easily make edits and updates without the need of a developer.
Powerful Customisable Discount Logic
The ability to create custom scripts to allow gifts with purchases, tiered pricing and special discounts to VIP customers and more.
Launchpad
-
This tool allows you to schedule bulk changes to coincide with the beginning and end of events in your online store.
-
Eg of things to schedule:
- Visibility of product pricing, inventory, and products per selling channel
- Changes at the theme level for altering the visibility of event-specific content
- Lockdown your store for a preset length of time to help build anticipation
- Captcha integration for product launches to prevent automated bot purchasing
-
Eg of things to schedule:
Shopify Pay
- Shopify’s CC processor fees are significantly less when you’re on the Plus plan.
- Shopify Pay also allows repeat customers to checkout quickly and securely increasing your conversions.
Wholesale
Wholesale functionality is inbuilt into Plus without the need for an app.
- Automate your wholesale process from signup to checkout, allowing your B2B customers to easily purchase, track, and reorder online
- Create custom price lists and percentage-based or volume-based discounts with simple purchase orders and invoicing
- Sync your B2B and D2C inventory, orders, and customers with Shopify or your third-party software
Shopify Flow
- Customize your workflow for inventory and order management, you can set custom triggers and conditions to allow your team important actions and create a seamless transaction from order to fulfilment to shipping.
Simplify your multi-channel selling with a unified back office
- Access all of your store’s information in one easy to use backend system.
Create localized Customer Storefronts
- Sell in multi-currency and target key markets with localized content on expansion stores.
Headless Commerce
-
Integrate all external tools and systems into your website
- CMS, ERP, PIM or CRM
NFTs:
Brands can now mint, list and sell NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) with Shopify Plus. If you’re a brand that has a digitalised/collectable product offering, or that wants to offer customers a digital collectable version of a product they’re bought, NFTs are the next big thing for your brand.
Benefits of upgrading to Plus:
- More customisation and control
- Greater automation
- Improved multichannel and omnichannel functions
- Much faster speeds
- The ability to reliably handle massive amounts of traffic and sales
Benefits of Shopify Plus:
- Easy integrations. Shopify Plus integrates with thousands of systems, allowing you to connect with platforms that best suit your business.
- Low maintenance. One of the main reasons many brands make the move to Shopify Plus is due to how low maintenance it is. When you do need to carry out a bit of maintenance, you’ll have an account manager and 24/7 support team who will help with minor development work.
- No need to worry about hosting. With Shopify Plus being a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, you don’t have to manage the hosting yourself.
- Global storefronts. Global storefronts and localised customer experiences make it easy for you to show off your brand around the world.
- Customised Checkout Experience. If you do need to make any changes to your checkout experience, with Shopify Plus you can
At Rainy City, we love to partner with our brands over the long term, we act as a proactive partnership and extension of your team. We don’t just wait for a list of ‘To-Do’s’ to work through, we’re constantly looking for fresh ideas, ways to optimise and based on our experience give you projects to look at from a different perspective – we’ve helped over 500 brands transform their eCommerce experience – so we’d say we know a thing or two!
Once we get started working with a brand we’ll look at the following:
- Where you’re currently at – Revenue, Conversion Rate, AOV, LTV
- Where you want to be in the next 6 months – Revenue, Conversion Rate, AOV, LTV
- What we can do to get you there
With any new brand, our first steps are to conduct an in-depth UX Analysis of the site. This will look at your site with a fresh pair of eyes and put together a list of areas for improvement, issues and suggestions. We typically start by looking at your core pages across Desktop and Mobile – Home, Collection, PDP, Cart. This will also give you the opportunity to look at our thought process and how we would approach website changes.
We then look at your tech stack and provide an analysis of any 3rd party functionality that we can remove/code in, update or provide you with alternatives based on your goals.
We use Trello as our Merchant – Agency project management tool, this will give you a full overview of our ideas, projects you are submitting, where they’re up to and once they’re ready for sign off. This reduces a lot of back and forth over email and allows you to have a clear visual on how and where your hours are being spent.
Here’s an example of how we manage our Trello boards:
We work very closely with each brand, as a smaller agency we really are an extension of your team – your success is our success. We provide an end of week report on what’s been worked on and the plan for the following week, bi-weekly catch up calls with your PM and bi-annual strategy sessions with the wider team.
Communication, trust and reliability are at the forefront of what we do. Here’s what Braden from Sparkle In Pink had to say about us…
