HOW TO USE SHOPIFY INVENTORY MANAGEMENT TO HANDLE YOUR BUSINESS

OPERATIONS

Managing Your Inventory With Shopify

Setting Up and Organizing Your Products

- Shopify lets you group products by category, type, season, sale and more - organize these groupings
through collections.
- Start to automate the organization process when you use smart collections to sort products according
to price, vendor and inventory level.

Assigning Barcodes to Your Products

- Whether you have existing barcodes to be assigned to specific products, or you need to create brand
new barcodes for fresh inventory you plan to stock, Shopify lets you do both.
- Use barcodes to keep track of every product you sell, and get Shopify’s wireless barcode scanner to
ring in customer orders instantly on the spot anywhere if you're selling in-person.

Tracking Inventory Levels

- Shopify, you can seamlessly track stock level, set up automated reminders to place orders with your
supplier, or to manufacture more product when the count hits a certain number, and update inventory
numbers when you receive a new shipment.
- If you want to continue to sell an item even when it’s out of stock, you can indicate longer shipping
times on the product page.

Gaining Insight into Your Inventory and Sales

- If our store is on the Professional Plan or higher, we are able to see a full report of sales by
product with reports too.

Shopify app - Back in Stock.

- If a product sells out and the product page is still getting traffic, visitors can sign up to be instantly
notified when the product is back in stock!
- Installation takes less than 30 seconds. Simply hit Get App and a button saying ‘email me when
available’ will immediately appear on all relevant product pages.

Other top inventory management apps in the Shopify App Store.

HOW BLOGGER OUTREACH CAN HELP YOU GROW YOUR ECOMMERCE BUSINESS

Guest Post on Other Blogs

Free traffic—as opposed to paid traffic that comes from things like purchased—ads is often hard to come by
for new websites. You can start blogging to drive traffic, but it takes time before you start to see results. While
you grow your own audience, guest posting gives you a way to get in front of someone else’s. Not only does
this drive traffic back to your website, but the links back to your website will help with search engine
optimization.

Use blogger outreach to find and connect with bloggers who have the type of audience you want to reach.
Offer to write a guest post that their audience will love. Make sure the topic you write about is also related to
your business or it won't drive any traffic.

Do an Expert Roundup

While blogging is a great way to drive traffic back to your store, it can be a lot of work. This is especially true if
you don’t feel very knowledgeable on a topic you need to write about, or you're not generally comfortable
writing. One way around this is to solicit contributions from other bloggers or experts.

Seek out experts on a topic and ask them to contribute an idea, such as a tip, recipe, or story to your blog post.
Then, publish a list of all the responses you got back. You’ll be providing your audience with great content
from relevant experts, plus the contributors will want to share the article with their own readers, increasing
your own reach.

Solicit Product Reviews

Getting your product reviewed can be a great way to spread awareness and drive sales. Instead of waiting
around for someone to review your product, use a blogger outreach campaign to get the ball rolling.

Contact bloggers with relevant, engaged audiences and offer to send them your product for free in exchange
for an honest review. If you have a great product, they’ll love it and tell everyone.

Find Affiliates to Promote Your Business

If you want to take product reviews a step further and solicit even more people to promote your product,
consider starting an affiliate program. Affiliate programs work by incentivizing other people to drive traffic to
your business by offering a commission on every sale.

Finding your first affiliates can be tough if you don’t have wide brand recognition. Use a blogger outreach
campaign to find and recruit your first few affiliates and get the ball rolling. Look for bloggers who have an
engaged audience and are already writing about your industry.
Get Included in Gift Guides

Gift guides are a list of recommended products or gift ideas, typically centered around a holiday (like
Christmas) or a person (like your dad). If you’re ever Googled for gift ideas you’ve likely come across several
gift guides.

Getting your product in the right gift guides can increase sales and traffic to your website. However, inclusion
in these guides does not happen randomly and requires some effort. In many cases, business owners lobby to
get their products included. Use blogger outreach to contact gift guide publishers and ask to have your
product included.

Ask Instagram Influencers to Promote Your Product

Sometimes you don’t need to write a guest post or ask other people to review your product. When you find
the right match for your brand, a simple mention on Instagram can go a long way. This is especially true for
apparel products, where the right mention or stylish photo can drive tons of sales.

Use an outreach campaign to connect with Instagram influencers—whether they have a blog or not—and
arrange sponsored posts. Look for Instagrammers with audiences that would like your product and ask them
to feature your product in a photo. Make sure you have your own Instagram account set up so they can tag
you.

Hack the Press

Instead of hiring a PR company, take control of your own publicity. If you have a great story or an interesting
product that people will want to write about, put it out there! Get in touch with bloggers and journalists who
cover businesses like yours and tell them what you’re up to.

While it’s true that most writers are inundated with requests, they are still always on the lookout for a good
story. Make sure you target the right publications (ie. don't ask a tech writer to cover about your clothing line),
and offer them a compelling story to improve your success rate.

These are just a few types of blogger outreach. Don't be afraid to give other ideas a shot!

THE BASICS OF SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION FOR YOUR SHOPIFY STORE

“websites ranked number one received an average click-through rate (CTR) of 36.4 percent"

Here are a few of many different things you can tweak on your store:

Title tags

You can edit the title tag of your online store in addition to setting the title tag for each product, collection, or
page in Shopify. Simply scroll down to the Search engines section on these pages in Shopify to make any
necessary adjustments.

Meta descriptions

Another great trick, is to modify the meta descriptions. Shopify will automatically pull text from your page, but
you can customize the meta description manually to fit your marketing goals. The meta description can be set
for your homepage as well as other pages, collections, and blog posts using the Shopify admin.

Page headers (h1)

It is important that you include your main keywords in the names of your store's products, collections, pages,
or blog posts. For example, if you are selling a red t-shirt with your store brand on it, you'll want to set the
product's name to something like "McFadden's T-Shirt - Red". This will make your web page more likely show
up when people search for words like "McFadden's", "t-shirt", and "red t-shirt".

Content is king

The more content you write in your product description, collection text, or blog post, the better chance your
page will be found on Google and other search engines. Try to write a few paragraphs of text with some of
your main keywords included.

Try an app

There are plenty of different apps available in the Shopify App Store that can help make your life easier when
it comes to all of the intricacies of search engine optimization. Be sure to play around with some of the apps to
see which one suits your business needs.

While I suggest playing around with all of these features yourself to get a better understanding of how search
engine optimization works, there's no harm in getting expert help. If you are looking to hire someone to give
you a hand, be sure to take a look at our Shopify Marketing Experts.
 IMPROVING SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)

Basic steps

To optimize your online store for search engines, you can follow a few basic steps:

1. Find keywords that are relevant to your products and your brand. What search terms will customers use to
find your store?
2. Add the keywords into your content, including page titles, descriptions, and image alt text.
3. Make sure that your URLs and filenames match the content.
4. Add your sitemap.xml to Google Search Console, so that your online store website can be easily crawled and
indexed.
Note

Google indexes your site automatically within 48 to 72 hours after you add or update information. You can't
force Google to re-index your site, but you can prompt them to do so by using Google Search Console. Google
doesn't index all of the pages on a site. Learn more about what to expect when your site is indexed from
the Google Search Console Help.

1. Create content that's relevant to your products and encourage other websites to link back to your online
store.
You can find more information about each of these steps in the other articles within this section.

Built-in SEO features in Shopify

Shopify online stores have SEO built in and features to help you optimize your content. Some SEO is taken care
of automatically: auto-generated canonical tags are added to pages to prevent duplicate content from
appearing in search results, your website’s sitemap.xml and robots.txt files are automatically generated, and
themes automatically generate title tags that include your store name. Also, themes are required to have
social media linking and sharing options to make it easier for you to market your store.
You can optimize your content using features built in to Shopify:

 You can edit the title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs for blog posts, webpages, products, and collections.
 You can edit the alt text for images.
THESE 8 INVENTORY MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUES
THE ESSENTIAL SHOPIFY STORE LAUNCH CHECKLIST

1. Add Any Available Sales Channels

Want to reach customers beyond just your website? Start by adding any available sales channels to your
store.

All sales channels connect with the core of your Shopify business, so you can easily keep track of your orders,
products, and customers across all platforms from within your Shopify admin.

2. Add a Custom Domain

This is usually the first thing I do when I’m opening a store, but depending on how you work, it might be the
last thing on your mind.

Add a custom domain name to your store, or purchase one directly through your Shopify admin.

3. Double Check Your Payment Gateway Settings

Before you start driving any traffic to your store, you had better be sure people can actually completely a
checkout on your store! I recommend placing an order on your store with a live payment gateway just to make
sure everything works.

You can refund your order immediately afterwards.

4. Have Your Standard Pages Ready

It’s important to have some static pages available for visitors to click through and read when you launch your
Shopify store.

At the very least have a contact, about, shipping, and frequently asked questions page at launch.

If you need help putting together a strong about page, be sure to read how to use your about page to increase
your sales.

Bring your store to life with free stock photos!

Burst is a free stock photo site powered by Shopify. Browse 1000s of product and lifestyle images to use across
your store and marketing campaigns.
5. Review Your Email Notification Settings

You might want to customize a customer’s experience by offering them some sort of discount for future
orders. The best way to do that is through editing your email templates.

6. Do a Content Audit for Spelling and Grammar Mistakes

Sometimes you’ll be so close to your work, you won’t notice any spelling and grammar mistakes in your
website copy. It’s important to have a friend, family member, or business partner take a look at your copy to
ensure there aren’t any obvious issues.

You can also use an app like Grammarly to check for you!

7. Optimize All Images on Your Website

There’s nothing worse than having images load slowly, especially if you’re running something like a flash sale
for your store at your initial launch. It’s important to make sure all your images are optimized for web to
ensure fast loading times.

You can try using a tool like ImageOptim to help with this too.

8. Install an Analytics Tool

Analytics are important to set up from day one. Analytics will give you valuable insight into your visitors and
customers. In a physical store, you see your customer and you can easily chat with them. However, online,
you’re essentially blind without analytics.

For detailed, step-by-step instructions on each of the above steps, check out this guide on setting up Google
Analytics for your store.

9. Have a Prelaunch Marketing Plan

So besides making sure all the buttons are pressed properly, you’ll still need to make sure you have a
marketing plan set up. Otherwise, you’ll be launching your store to the sound of crickets.

10. Adjust Your Tax and Shipping Settings

You’ll want to check that your tax settings, and shipping rates are appropriate for the product(s) you’re selling.
Double check your tax and shipping settingsbefore launching your store.

11. Make it Easy for Potential Customers to Contact You

Make contact information clear on each page. Try including your business address, phone number, and even
live chat on your website if you can. This has been shown to reduce buyers concerns.
12. Install Only Essential Apps

It can be hard to not get excited about the Shopify App Store and all the incredible apps you can add to your
store – but when getting ready for your initial launch, be sure to only install the absolute essentials.

If it were me launching a store, I'd get set up with an email marketing app like Picreel and Mailchimp.

13. Set up Your Billing Information

If you’re coming to the end of your 14 day free trial and are preparing for launch, be sure to set up your store's
billing information to ensure there aren’t any hiccups when your store is finally live.

16 TOP-RATED CUSTOMER SERVICE APPS FOR SHOPIFY STORES

Customer Service Apps

1. Zendesk

Zendesk is a leader in customer service, used by some of the biggest companies in the world. Their integration
with Shopify allows merchants to embed powerful Zendesk functionality—Help Center, Chat, or Tickets—
directly into their stores. The app has the ability to scale with your growing business.

Cost: From $19/month

2. Customer.guru

Gauge customer happiness with Customer.guru, a polling tool that allows your customers to rate their
satisfaction with your service. Embed your ratings on your site and use the data to help you improve the
customer experience.

Cost: Free up to 100 surveys/month (tiered pricing plans)

Chat Apps

3. Facebook Chat by Beeketing

Most of your customers are likely already communicating via Facebook regularly—allow them to use the social
network to chat with you directly on your store. Because your customers are using their Facebook profiles, the
experience is personal, and you can learn more about the people who shop with you. The conversation is then
saved in a Facebook chat, allowing customers to easily revisit it.

Cost: Free
See it in action: Out of the Hutch, powered by Shopify

4. Tidio Live Chat

Let your customers know when you are online, and chat with them live using Tidio. Other features include:
automated prompt messages (“Hi, how can I help you?”), translation into the customer’s language, and an
offline contact form when you are not able to chat live.

Cost: Free – $12/month

See it in action: Pure Living Space, powered by Shopify

Form and Survey Apps

5. Easy Contact Form

This free tool allows you to create a simple and customized contact form to your Shopify store with no coding
necessary. Opt to embed the form on your contact page or use a pop up linked from a tab on your website.

Cost: Free (premium paid options available)

See it in action: Cool Material and Canadian National Fabric (below), powered by Shopify

6. Survey

What are your customers thinking? Do they like you? What products would they like to see in your store? How
happy were they with your unboxing experience? You’ll never know unless you ask. Use POWr.io’s free Survey
app to poll to collect feedback and help you improve your business. A premium paid option allows additional
fields.

Cost: Free

7. Return Magic

Enable an easy returns flow, allowing your customers to submit return requests right on your website. Return
Magic’s portal can be custom branded, the design integrating with your Shopify store theme seamlessly.

Cost: Free 14-day trial, tiered pricing plans

8. Exchange It

Integrate exchange processing into your regular workflow, and manage exchange orders directly from Shopify.
This is an ideal app for apparel stores with a higher volume of exchange requests due to fit and size issues.
Cost: $9.99/month

FAQ Apps

9. HelpCenter

Build a professional FAQ page with HelpCenter. Publish articles, sections, and categories that are all easy to
find with the included search bar. Customers can also submit new questions directly on the FAQ page.

Cost: Free

See it in action: Lucky Premium Meats, powered by Shopify

10. FAQ

This easy FAQ page tool requires no coding, and fonts, colors, and backgrounds can be customized to match
your theme. Opt to list questions accordion style (click to expand), to keep the page clean and help customers
navigate to their question.

Cost: Free (premium upgrades available)

See it in action: Deliciously Matcha, powered by Shopify

Loyalty Apps

11. Loyalty Points by Bold

Easily create a loyalty program for your customers with Bold’s Loyalty Points app. Customers earn points when
they shop with you, and use them towards future purchases with no coupon code required. Offer bonus
points for featured products and fully customize the look of your loyalty program to match your branding.

Cost: Free 30-day trial, tiered pricing plans from $9.99/month

See it in action: Jack Wagon Coffee, powered by Shopify

12. Rewards and Referrals by Swell

Swell’s Rewards and Referrals app is a flexible program that allows you to reward your customers for multiple
actions, like referring a friend, following on social, or making purchases. The app integrates with Yotpo,
making it easy to reward customers for writing a review.

Cost: Free up to 100 orders/month (optional tiered pricing plans from $29/month to enterprise)
See it in action: Salty Girl, powered by Shopify

Little Extras

13. Touchcard

Stand out from the crowded inbox, and send your customers a thank you or a reward offer care of the good
old fashioned postal system. Touchcard automates the printing and mailing of personalized postcards with
unique coupon codes.

Cost: From $0.99/month

14. Wishlist Plus

Your window-shopping customers can save their favorite products, and return for future purchase. Wishlist+
does not require a login, and lists can be saved across devices and shared with family and friends. Wishlist+
integrates with other apps allowing you to use customer activity data to send targeted marketing campaigns.

Cost: Free – $79.99/month

15. Karibu Store Locator

If you operate one or many physical stores in tandem with your ecommerce store, help your customers find
you IRL with Karibou. The app can also be used to help your customers locate your products sold at brick and
mortar resellers in their area. Features include search filters, driving directions, and customizable text.

Cost: From $0.99/month

16. Appointment Booking

Service based businesses can offer customers an easier way to book appointments directly from your site.
Automatic emails are sent to you and your customer to confirm bookings, making the entire process hands-
off. You can also sync and manage bookings with Google Calendar.

Cost: From $0.99/month

See it in action: Beautiful Balance Skin Center, powered by Shopify

WATCH 4 FAMOUS ENTREPRENEURS GIVE CRUCIAL ADVICE TO NEW BUSINESS
OWNERS
Daymond John: The Decision Is Yours
Working hard on somebody else’s dream? Hear what Daymond John has to say about it.

Posted by Shopify on Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Marie Forleo: Doing What It Takes

Marie Forleo on doing what it takes: "I used all of my side jobs to fund my business..."

Posted by Shopify on Monday, August 22, 2016

Tim Ferriss

"Push things to the extreme to the point where things break, that's where you see most clearly."

Posted by Shopify on Thursday, August 25, 2016

Troy Carter

"When you're closest to your goal, that's when you're really going to be challenged."

Posted by Shopify on Tuesday, August 23, 2016

HOW TO USE PINTEREST IN SELLING OUR PRODUCTS + SERVICES

Tip #1: Tailor your content for the audience

92% of all pins are made by women and the Big Three categories on Pinterest -- Food & Drink, DIY & Crafts,
and Home Décor

We are classified under the Home Décor

Tip #2: Follow the pinning pattern

Little pinning happens at night, steady pinning throughout the day, and a spike in the evening. 32% of all
pinning happens during the core part of the work day, from 10am - 4pm. 18% of pinning happens in the
evening, 9pm - midnight