The Evolution of a Shopify Store

Find out where your ecommerce store is on its evolutionary timeline and see how we can help you at each stage. That’s if yours is a Shopify store – if it’s not, it still could be.

"From migration or inception to birth, growth, optimization, and maintenance phases, as Shopify Experts, we are here to ensure the propagation of the Shopify species." Ross Allchorn - ShopCreatify's ever evolving Founder 

Shopify Store Migration: Don’t end up like the Dinosaurs

If that deeply ingrained survival instinct has you wanting to migrate your online store across to Shopify, you can read about the process here. Or feel free to contact us and we’ll do it for you.

Think of your Shopify store migration as getting on the right evolutionary timeline. This is a luxury the Dinosaurs didn’t have. You don’t want to end up like the Dinosaurs, do you? (not-so-subtle nudge).

Inception phase of a Shopify store: The primordial soup

This phase can be thought of as the prebiotic broth of your ecommerce journey – it’s the origin story you hope to look back on fondly one day. “He started out as a single cell in his garage,” they’ll say.

The evolutionary timeline looks long from here; it’s intimidating. Regardless, you have a big idea and you’ve decided to roll with it. Kudos! Ecommerce is survival of the fittest. Many challenges lie ahead…

1. Until you start generating income, you know you need to start at the lowest possible cost without negatively affecting the perception of your brand.
2. You need your online store to start making money quickly if you’re going to quit that 9 to 5, so speed to market is important too.
3. You know it’s important to start how you want to finish, so you want to launch with a robust and fully scalable online store.
4. Plus, you have the daunting and costly task of selecting and integrating all the right ecommerce tooling for your Shopify store.

We get it. But, in the immortal words of Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, “Life, uh, finds a way.” And that way is ShopFoundation – it’s ShopCreatify’s way of giving you a fair chance at realizing big ecommerce dreams. You can find out more about ShopFoundation here.

Birth of a Shopify Store: Survival of the fittest

Look at you, you beautiful multicellular organism you. You’re live! This is a nerve-racking phase for online merchants. Until there is traffic on your site and a trail of data crumbs to follow, it can be hard to optimize and boost conversions. So your number one focus at this stage should be getting traffic.

Zero to ten orders a day isn’t enough, you’re going to need to quickly evolve those big peacock feathers or bright petals if you’re going to get noticed or spread your pollen across the interweb…

Consider what you’re doing off-site to create awareness, like social media and paid ads on Google. You also need to consider what you are doing on-site, with respect to search engine optimization (SEO). If someone searches for keywords related to your offering, you want to be on page one of the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Be sure to have all the right tracking set up in all the right places from the get-go. You want to be able to start making data-driven decisions as soon as possible. We can help you set that up - in fact we do as part of the ShopFoundation offering. 

With a little adaptation here and a small mutation there, you do still have some control over your evolutionary destiny though. If this is where you find yourself, you should read: ‘Your Shopify store is live, now what?’

Growth of a Shopify store: Natural selection

If you’re starting to see 10 to 50 orders per day, then it looks like your store has the genetic code for success. You are slowly becoming your audience’s natural selection. You’re still hoping to see more conversions if you’re going to continue to avoid clocking in for the man, though.

If this is where your online store is at, you might want to read: Troubleshooting a low conversion rate.

Optimizing a Shopify store: Top of the food chain

If you’re an established merchant with an online business that is in full swing, seeing as many as 30 to 50 orders per day, then our Productized’ish service offering called *ConversionBoost is a no-brainer for you. You have enough traffic and sales for us to help you make data-driven decisions that will take your store to the top of the food chain.

*ConversionBoost is a structured working relationship between ShopCreatify and Shopify merchants, with the stated purpose of improving their online store’s sales and performance. It's our ecommerce conversion optimization service.

Maintaining and Improving a Highly evolved Shopify store: The Starship

By now it feels like over 4 billion years since you got started, ecommerce will do that to ya. Once you have been through all the phases in a Shopify store’s evolution, you are like a highly evolved interstellar traveler – your online store is a Starship, man.

Here, it takes serious and continuous lab styled testing (Like A/B tests, heat mapping, and SEO audits) to help you squeeze every last bit of juice out of the fusion reactor driving your online sales.

At this level, an SLA or retainer model between the merchant and ShopCreatify is how we take your store from interstellar to intergalactic heights. We call this ‘ConversionBoost phase 2.’

Contact us if you would like to see your store…

LIVE LONG AND PROSPER!