Common Problems We Encounter Scaling a Shopify Business

Shopify is a great platform for quickly building an eCommerce site and selling product. Its also a great tool for scaling eCommerce. However, its not always easy to scale Shopify and there are many hurdles that come with that.

Here are some of the things we have seen that are necessary to figure out to scale Shopify.

Scaling Ad Spend Profitably: It’s very difficult to grow an eCommerce business without ad spend. There are always some edge cases but typically you have to invest in ads as part of your strategy. Making this profitable at a small scale is usually not that hard. However at scale this is not easy. You have to get creative around how you are targeting different audiences and segments and optimizing different paid channels like Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads, Google Shopping, Display Ads, Pinterest and more.

Scaling ROAs of 2,3,4 or higher at large volumes becomes increasingly difficult. You may need to go international to do this.

Building SEO Value: SEO is both an art and a science. I think many companies over think it. Focus on the basics of Google Search Console and good page titles, content and other On Page SEO best practices. Once you have that down you have to invest in a realistic keyword strategy you can achieve and build content around that.

Building Direct Traffic & Brand: Building brand value comes in so many forms. Social media, in person events, SEO, paid ads, referrals, etc. Over time the more you invest in your brand the more direct traffic you should receive that results in direct sales without paying for ads etc!

Reviews & UGC: Reviews and user generated content are critically to scaling Shopify for most businesses. In some industries this might not apply but in almost all it does. Leveraging platforms like Yotpo and using structured data to show reviews in your listings is key!

Email Marketing & SMS: Email marketing should be one of if not your highest ROI of any channel. I would include SMS in this. It’s important to build a strong email and SMS aggregation strategy via platforms like Privy and other tools. Your objectives should be two fold. Build massive lists for email and SMS. Build segmented triggers to send targeted emails to different segments of the lists that maximize ROI, not just blast the whole list.

Promotions: There is an art to scaling promotions. If you do too many you become a discount brand. If you don’t do any its hard to scale. There is a balance you have to figure out how to achieve to maximize profit.

Increasing Catalog Size: Over time you will most likely need a larger and larger catalog to scale. At a certain point it becomes very difficult to grow with one or two skus etc. You don’t need thousands of sku’s to become a big company but its very hard to do it with just one or two, so balancing the growth and quality of Skus is critical.

Scaling Number of Apps: Over time Shopify becomes more and more difficult to scale via a large number of apps conflicting or potentially breaking down your store because there is so much room for them to have problems with your theme at scale. You have to be smart about how you handle Dev Ops and mitigating app risk as you scale or maybe move to a headless site to reduce risk.

Internationalization: It might be difficult to grow sales just in the United States and you may need to expand to other markets. One of the challenges here is that Shopify is not inherently multi site. You can use an app like Zonos or built different sites on Shopify that maybe share some commonalities but the Dev Ops process of this can be a bit of a nightmare. Shopify Plus allows you to build different sites for different countries without extra cost.

Headless Commerce: Building a headless Shopify site on React or Vue.Js etc could help you scale your theme capabilities, usage of many different apps, expand internationally and much more. Why? It allows you complete freedom on the frontend and decouples your dependance of fronted theming away from the Shopify platform itself and Shopify can become more of a back office tool.

B2B Transactions: B2B transactions may be necessary to scale. This can be accomplished via Shopify’s wholesale channel or via many other customizations and apps. Shopify is not very effective for complex B2b use cases since it was not built for B2b and they have a lot of catching up to do in that regard but there are many creative ways to accomplish some of what you might need.