It’s never been so easy to create a digital commerce website. Just jump onto Shopify and you’re up and running. You can have a website live and functional in a matter of hours. Simple, right? While Shopify has made getting the website up and running easy, here’s a few things you need to think about before starting off.

If I build it will they come?

No, you’re not Kevin
Costner and this isn’t Field
of Dreams. Unless you have an Inbound Digital Marketing plan for how you’re going to drive quality traffic to your website this venture isn’t going to go anywhere. Google and Facebook are your most obvious go-to options. But try to think like your customers and work out how to best get to them for free, before you go and spend lots of money with the tech giants. If all of this is foreign to you, jump online and do some research, or contact us for some advice.

What’s your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)?

Just having things for sale on a website isn’t enough to get people to buy. What niche in the market have you carved out for yourself? Are you selling something no one else is? Are you selling the same things but cheaper or with faster delivery? Is it customer service that sets you apart from the rest?

In the old days just having someone walk past your bricks and mortar store was good enough. If they liked what they saw there was a good chance they would buy from you. These days, there are over 1 billion websites to search for on the internet. If you’ve managed to get audiences onto your site and interested, they’ll most likely be also looking at all your competition websites to see who’s offering lower prices, faster or free deliver, coupon codes, loyalty points, gifts with purchase, or free returns. Having a USP or clear differentiator in will help your customers choose you instead of your competition.

How are you fulfilling orders?

Once you’ve got the above challenges out of the way and you’ve convinced someone to put their trust and hard earned dollars into an order what next? Customers want to know instantly that their order has been received, someone’s picked, packed it and it’s logged with a courier for delivery. They want to know when it will arrive and constant updates to any changes or delays. You need a reliable delivery service with SLAs you can trust and a system for keeping the customer updated via email and/or SMS.

What about returns?

The customer has received their package and it’s broken, or the wrong size or the size they ordered but it doesn’t fit or they just don’t want it anymore. What do you do then? What do they do? Have you got a well articulated returns, refunds and exchanges policy? Who pays for shipping? How do they pay?

Making returns easy and having a friendly and flexible policy will help you convert more shoppers into customers.

Can I speak to a human?

You can automate a lot of things and chat bots are great (sometimes) but sometimes something happens and the customer just needs to speak to a human. Who’s running your customer care department? What hours do they keep? Can customers get a hold of you via email, webform, SMS, phone, Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, live chat? If someone isn’t available right away how long will the customer need to wait?

It isn’t just after sales support, attentive and knowledgeable customer care reps can be powerful tools in the conversion process too.

What’s working and what’s not on your site?

Once you’re site is getting tonnes of traffic and the orders are rolling in regularly, the question moves to: where to from here? What do you change? What’s working well, what’s hurting your business? How do you tell?

The answer lies in the data and using it to form hypothesis’ which you then test. Ranging all of your products by size might make sense to you but is it the way your customers shop? Would they rather shop by colour or pattern? Only a well thought out and run test will uncover the truth.

Are you tracking data?

Before you start making lots of changes and decision about your webshop, make sure that you’ve got your analytics setup correctly for your specific business. Is Google Analytics configured and capturing the right data? What are you using to capture qualitative data? Are you looking at your inbound data? Are you looking at your customer service and sales data? Which software programs are you using or connecting together?

There are many free and paid analytics services out there. For many a good combination would be: Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, MailChimp Analytics, Shopify Analytics, and any CRM, POS, or ERP software you have internally to run your business.  

Need help with any of the above?

Digital Mavens has been helping clients solve their marketing and ebusiness challenges since 2008. We’ve worked with businesses large or small and across many different industries. Our Digital Commerce CoPilot Program has been specifically designed to help eBusiness teams and digital marketers work through their digital commerce journey and ensure they’re operating at peak performance – to deliver profitable results.

Seven simple questions to ask yourself before jumping in and replace Magento with Shopify as your online retail platform.

Why am I considering the move?

Or, in other terms, what problem are you trying to solve by migrating to Shopify? Are you looking to reduce overall costs? Do you want the ability to deploy new features more rapidly? Are you looking to become less reliant on your development partner and in-house more tasks?

By being really clear on what business problem you’re trying to solve you will be able to evaluate the potential benefits more clearly.

Should I even move to Shopify or stick with Magento?

At the moment Shopify is definitely the popular choice for Digital Commerce platforms. It’s market share, especially among small to medium businesses is streaks ahead of the competition. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right choice for every business, Shopify does have it’s limitations. If your business is far from the usual pure-play or bricks n’ clicks operation and you’ve developed a highly customised platform to meet your unique customer and business needs then Shopify mightn’t be the right fit, at least not right now.

Shopify is easy to get up and trading on but there’s virtually no customisation you can do on the checkout. So, before kicking off a migration project it’s important to do a detailed investigation of how you’ll meet all your ecommerce platform requirements working within the Shopify environment.

Which Shopify plan should I choose?

Shopify offer five plans, each with a (slightly) different set of features, monthly subscription fee and transaction charges. As the features don’t vary dramatically between the plans the best approach is to start low and upgrade as your business grows.

A good approach is to look at your current sales volumes then calculate which plan offers the best value when combining the flat monthly fee and transaction charges. As your business scales the more expensive monthly subscription fees will be offset by the cheaper transaction charges.

When is the right time to move?

Once you’re certain moving to Shopify is the right choice and have settled on a plan you need to decide when to cut across. If the benefits of moving are clear then the sooner you make the move the sooner you can realise those benefits. With that said, cutting over during the middle of a sale or peak season probably isn’t the right time. If something goes wrong you want to minimise the number of customers you inconvenience.

With that said you might be tempted to cut over in the wee hours of the morning, say 2am, when your site traffic is lowest. This is fine as long as you, your operations and customer service team are all willing to be up and on standby to monitor and address any problems as they arise. It’s no point waking up one poor soul to push the button if, should you need to rollback and contact customers, nothing can be fixed until 9am when people start rocking up to the office.

You should also give your customers a heads up about the move. Get them excited about the new improved experience they’ll soon be enjoying.

What resources do I need to complete the migration?

Re-platforming is more than throwing a few developers and maybe a designer at project and then sending whatever they produce live. If you’ve had your Magento site for a while and your business has seen some turnover on staff there’s likely logic and business rules built into the system that your development team aren’t aware of. It’s also possible that there’s processes in the current system that are causing headaches for parts of your business.

Re-platforming is a good time to look at your processes and see what needs to be kept and what can be improved. To do this you need input from all areas of your business. Finance might be struggling with the data Magento is sending their ERP, the warehouse might be actioning tasks manually that could be streamlined or automated. Marketing may be spending hours pulling together data and producing reports that could be setup on a dashboard.

The team migrating the site is less than half the picture, it’s a business-wide effort that’s needed to get the requirements right before handing off to the development team.

What other systems does my Digital Commerce platform need to integrate with?

Only you can answer this one. Start with what Magento currently integrates with, then see what else might need to be connected. Then check if all of need are needed. Are there any that can be removed or consolidated?

Another factor in integration is ensuring data is kept fresh enough. Taking orders all week for a product that sold out days ago is going to cause a lot of manual work for your team refunding and upset a number of customers.

How much will migration cost?

This is an important question but it should sit along two other, equally important questions:

1. How much will NOT migrating cost?
   This is both the actual cost of maintaining and developing on the Magento platform as well as the lost revenue from not being able to deploy new features and functionality as quickly as you could have on Shopify.
2. What are the ongoing costs on Shopify?
   Moving your site across to will vary according to the size and complexity of your site but once you launch the costs can be structured slightly differently to what you’re used to on Magento. While the monthly cost might seem low Shopify also takes a percentage of each transaction on your site. Also, a lot of features that you had custom build on Magento for a one-time development fee could now be subscription based and/or take a percentage as well.

If you're thinking about a move to Shopify and want to talk through some of the questions above get in touch today. Digital Mavens can help guide your business through your Digital Commerce migration.

If you need help getting started into digital commerce or need help optimising your existing ecosystem, please contact us. We are Shopify and BigCommerce partners and have extensive experience strategising, building, optimising and connecting digital commerce platforms to drive sales and improve customer lifetime value.