How Shopify became a giant e-commerce platform

Shopify occupies more than 325,000 shops for individual sellers and internet behemoths like Google and Tesla.

Introduction to Shopify

In barely three years since its inception as a tiny firm, the commerce platform Shopify has grown tremendously. Its gross merchandise volume has surpassed $7 billion, and it now has over 150,000 store owners.

Tobias Lutke, one of Shopify’s e-commerce platform founders, was unhappy with previous e-commerce platform alternatives. He built the storefront site with co-founders Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake.

Today, Shopify occupies more than 325,000 shops for individual sellers and internet behemoths like Google and Tesla. Every month, the company generates sales revenue of over 20 million dollars.

Unlike many other businesses, Shopify was rewarded for selling their product to clients and assisting them in becoming more successful on the platform. Shopify made more money the more money consumers made. This prompted Shopify to focus on helping their users become better merchants, which is the primary cause for their current success.

Shopify has made possible for hundred of thousands of stores to generate revenues through the platform, which ultimately benefit their employees with different solutions.

There are a lot of tactics that Shopify strictly follows in order to be a dominating e-commerce platform. In this blog, we will be discussing few of those ‘rules’ that they obey.

Customer First

Because they appreciated their clients and placed them first by having an excellent support crew, Shopify grew so much as an eCommerce company in just three years. They understood the importance of customers in their eCommerce business’s long-term success.

What’s suitable for your customers isn’t always good for your business. Your clients are king, according to Marketo, and they deserve to be treated as such.

RyanAir had less than one complaint about every 1,000 passengers in January 2012. In addition, the corporation responded to 99 percent of complaints within seven business days.

Shopify’s development team created solutions to assist e-commerce business owners, and it turned out to be a clever technique for them to boost your organic traffic considerably. They saved brand awareness for keyword search words at the top of the funnel.

One of these solutions are PIM software (product information management) tools, that allows these store owners (Shopify customers) to store, organize, manage and syndicate their products to Shopify in one click. That’s right. Just a click away.

Moreover, Shopify has investigated and supplied content and tools to answer many of the questions that someone could have when beginning or setting up an e-commerce company. They developed entire subdomains that dominated the first page of Google by targeting relatively high-volume keyword search terms.

Furthermore, Shopify allows its customers to create multiple stores on the platform, or even a single store in multiple language.

Problem-Solving Content Strategy

Shopify’s website contains a wealth of helpful information that does not require an email opt-in to access. This screenshot shows that they have low bounce rates, average visit duration, and a high page per visit.

Firstly, they have a curated blog that receives submissions from members and their marketing team, and they update it once a day with high-quality content (it got 27,000,000 page views last year).

Secondly, they have in-depth ebook guides that provide insights to their clients and establish them as an eCommerce publishing authority.

Shopify’s encyclopedia pages have been optimized so successfully that they presently rank #3 on Google for the short tail keyword “retail,” which receives 40,500 monthly searches.

Is any of this simple to accomplish at this level? As you might expect, writing, developing, and managing this content takes a significant amount of time and resources for Shopify. Why would a corporation bother with this in the first place, you might wonder? Shopify, like our Vab Media Digital Marketing team, believes in the value of content marketing.

Yes, seeing a return on investment from your content marketing attempts can take a long time, upto 6 to 12 months or more), which is why many businesses prefer to invest in paid search or influencer marketing instead to get immediate gratification.

The bottom line is that Shopify, Gary Vee, Hubspot, Google, and First Round Capital would not bother putting together so much information and resources unless they knew the effort would pay off handsomely in the long term.

They’ve put together one of the most thorough content marketing plans I’ve ever seen.

Their content strategy also relies on producing content around their audience’s most often searched keywords or most frequently asked topics to assist individuals in their buyer journey better.

Target Disparate Audiences

As marketers, we’re frequently told that you should target a specific niche and tailor your marketing messaging to appeal to a small, highly targeted group of potential clients who are most likely to buy.

Shopify, on the other hand, is doing precisely the opposite. They work with various business owners, each of which has a varied amount of knowledge, background, and eCommerce experience; thus, niche marketing isn’t appropriate for their platform.

This implies Shopify will have to come up with a new strategy to reach out to various people, from those who are dreaming of their first eCommerce website to those who are well-established businesses.

Landing Page Optimization by Shopify

As discussed in Section 2, Shopify receives 27 million blog page visits and has a solid SEO strategy, aided by all of its content marketing efforts. Here is another approach they do to increase traffic.

Customers can connect Shopify’s platform with many apps, plugins, and integrations (1,400+ in total). Many of these are well-known, highly successful businesses that individuals look up on their own.

So, how can Shopify use this to their advantage?

By designing unique, keyword-rich landing pages for each app they collaborate with. Many of these landing pages then appear in Google search results on the first few pages.

To drive traffic and get you to download the app, Shopify works with integration partners like Zendesk. They also use the landing page to entice you to sign up for a free Shopify trial, which is displayed as the green button in the upper right corner.

Shopify has built a SaaS business based on subscription fees and transaction volume growth. They’ve also succeeded because of their ability to predict what the market wants and respond fast with valuable products.

Shopify is straight-up pushing innovations, marketing, creating a community, and soaring growth.

Now that I’ve dug a bit into some of their approaches and shown you how to implement them, it’s time for you to try out a few of them on your startup.