It’s foolish to not leverage Amazon as a channel for your business as it is the top US ecommerce retailer and is responsible for 49% of all orders placed online. But what about the other 51% of online purchases? Are you reaching those shoppers?
If you’re only selling on Amazon, the answer is no.
There will come a time when you need to expand your business globally beyond just Amazon.
This can sometimes be a daunting, overwhelming task for even the most experienced entrepreneurs.
You need to scale your processes, collaborate with your team, and plan your projects responsibly so you have the bandwidth to effectively acquire customers and fulfill orders as they happen.
In this article, we’ll outline three tips for expanding your Amazon Store to Shopify to grow your business in a smart way.
Before we do, it’s important to understand why it’s worth the effort to expand and open a Shopify store.
Benefits of Having a Shopify Store
Opening a Shopify Store is much different than running an Amazon Store.
You will experience new challenges, benefits, and flexibility that Amazon doesn’t provide.
Some of the most common benefits of opening a Shopify store include:
- Flexible, Custom Design: You can choose from thousands of theme templates when using their website builder to create your store; or alternatively, you can build the site entirely from scratch. You aren’t limited to the standard Amazon listing template; you can add any content you wish.
- More Branding Opportunities: For example, look at the difference between the Zoma Mattress Amazon listing and the Zoma Shopify site. The Shopify site brings the Zoma brand to life, while the Amazon listing is focused on the product and not the brand story:
- Customer Acquisition: You can publish engaging owned content on your site to drive users to sign up for your newsletter or provide their email in exchange for a gated asset. By acquiring their email, you can send them additional content to convert them later. For more details on this, check out this post from SmartrMail on the best email marketing practices for ecommerce stores.
- Retargeting Capabilities: Since your Shopify store has the capability to track users with their consent, you can launch a digital ad retargeting campaign on leading social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google. With holiday campaign features, running Black Friday sales campaigns is incredibly easy, too.
Now that you know the benefits, it’s time to review a handful of tips and best practices to deploy as you expand your store to Shopify.
Tips for Expanding from Amazon to Shopify
With so many new customizations available on your Shopify store, it can be daunting to know where to begin.
As you expand to Shopify, you should install the Shopify/Amazon integration, ramp up your SEO efforts, and leverage customer data to increase sales.
1. Integrate Your Shopify and Your Amazon Store
It’s not easy running two storefronts.
You might have price discrepancies, messaging inconsistencies, issues with your order fulfillment provider, or other problems shared between multiple platforms.
That’s why you need to deploy the Shopify/Amazon integration to connect them.
Shopify has an integration with Amazon, so you can connect your storefronts and leverage the retail giant as a channel. With the integration, you can:
- Link products between channels for automatic updates
- Sync inventory to ensure accurate product quantities are reflected
- Process orders that occur on Amazon in your Shopify dashboard
- Create reports that include both Shopify and Amazon revenue numbers
The integration helps bring your business under one roof.
One of the challenges with Amazon, though, is staying competitive.
Prices on Amazon change frequently, and you’ll need to stay on top of them in order to win over price-sensitive shoppers.
With 50% of Americans living on the week’s paycheck, price plays a significant role in consumers’ purchasing decisions.
That’s why entrepreneurs use Amazon repricers to set and adjust pricing automatically.
Some of the best Amazon repricers can help businesses win over customers and beat competitors in the pricing game without the need for manual adjustments.
2. Ramp Up Your SEO Efforts
On Amazon, there are millions of customers browsing the site. When you launch your Shopify store, you don’t have that same luxury.
You need to make it simple for customers to find your Shopify store. One way to do this is through search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO is the process of creating and publishing relevant content on your Shopify site that users are actively seeking.
As search engines crawl your site, they’ll rank your page based on a variety of factors, including site speed, keywords, relevancy, domain authority, and more.
Adam, an expert on SEO at Loganix, says this when it comes to Shopify SEO:
“SEO is critical when expanding to Shopify from Amazon. But, it’s drastically different from Amazon SEO. Why? Amazon SEO is about optimizing your product and company page. Shopify SEO requires a more well-rounded approach. Simply optimizing your product descriptions won’t bring in traffic. You’ll need content marketing, link building, and direct amplification campaigns, too.”
While SEO deserves an entire blog post of its own, there are a few necessary steps to take to improve your SEO on your new Shopify site:
- Start with keyword research -Run queries on keywords related to your business using Google Keyword Planner and assess search volumes and competition levels. This will help you see where you can stand out.
- Plan your SEO roadmap – Once you have your keywords, plot out how you’re going to create content that features them and lives on your Shopify site. There are plenty of SEO roadmap templates that can help you plan your entire content calendar.
- Launch a Shopify blog – A blog on your Shopify store is a great place to publish SEO content that enriches your store’s digital experience and complements your product offering.
However, writing blog posts and publishing content can be time-consuming.
For these tasks, consider outsourcing them to skilled freelancers on who can complete these tasks efficiently and cost-effectively.
3. Leverage Customer Data
Once you start publishing content, it’s important to add lead-generation forms and newsletter sign-up widgets to capture prospect data.
These can appear across your site and can be embedded natively in each piece of content.
This data can help you understand who is browsing your site and if you are reaching the right demographic.
In addition, there are a variety of free sales tools that can enrich the data you collect to unlock demographic, psychographic, and geographic similarities between segments.
With that data, you can retarget those shoppers with targeted email campaigns that re-engage the prospects and teach them more about your brand.
Customers might not be ready to buy the moment they reach your Shopify site. But if you capture their information, you can reach out to them when the time is right.
Successful Shopify Expansion
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket!
Expanding from Amazon to Shopify can expose your business to a whole new segment of previously unreached customers.
When launching your Shopify store, you should use integrations, ramp up SEO, and leverage customer data to convert more sales.
By doing so, you’ll grow your business and engage more customers than ever before!
Related: Amazon FBA vs Shopify
