Setting up a Shopify store is easy. You don’t know how? Take a look at our 2 previous guides here:
- How to set up Shopify store without tech? – Episode 1
- How to set up Shopify store without tech? – Episode 2
But building a Shopify store that converts well isn’t. So how to create a Shopify store rock? What are the elements and components you can add to your store to boost the conversion up? Let’s discover our instructions on Shopify step by step!
What’s the secret of a high-converting Shopify store? It lies on 2 pages:
Product page and Check-out page. Why?
URGENCY!
These 2 pages are powerful in creating a sense of urgency. It pushes people to take action quickly and immediately. So, if your product page and check-out page have an urgent spirit, your store would be loaded with thousands of orders!
How to add a sense of urgency to your store?
Before going straight, let’s point out some main ideas on what we’ll do when setting up a Shopify store:
- Add social proof
- Add trust badges
- Recruit a countdown timer
- Deploy excellent product photos and descriptions
- Add a “magical” section for trust
Are you ready to start? Time to dive in!
Table of Contents
1. Product page: Create urgency is the main spirit
As mentioned above, creating urgency for your store is important. People act fast when they worry about limited opportunities. So you need to create this sense of urgency on your product page.
To do that, you add the following elements:
- Social proof
- Trusted badges
- Photos
1.1. Social proof: reviews – how many people viewing and bought products
These are elements of recent sales that show up in your store.
- The first thing they do is creating customer confidence in your store.
- The second thing: they build trust and credibility by letting customers know what other shoppers are doing.
- Three, they create a sense of a busy store and boost sales.
There are free apps to do that. It’s called: Sales Pop up – Social proof. It allows you to show your online shoppers your recent orders. Especially, if you’ve just started your store, visitors might be hesitant to buy from you as they don’t know your brand yet. Cart abandonment is easy to happen. This app not only helps you build trust, but it also pushes visitors to buy from you more. Sales Pop up features with various sales notification layouts and styles to fit your needs and grab customers’ attention.
So, showing your viewers how many people are viewing a product at the same moment. Social proof can be notifications of recent sales.
Not sure which app to choose?
Let us help you!
1.2. Put your product on sale to create urgency
Why put your product on sale? Again, to create urgency.
In this way, you’re working on 2 points:
- First, telling visitors that the offer is limited on time.
- Second, telling your viewers that this offer is limited in quantity.
Now, let’s discover:
Ways to put your products in URGENCY
1.2.1. Countdown timer
The countdown timer is a good idea to push customers placing an order. It creates a sense of scarcity. However, it really depends on the products you’re selling. If your brand has a minimal clean look, you might not want to add a circus looking element to your clean page. It doesn’t fit your brand and your audience. Timers do create a sense of urgency, but if you’re not honest about how you use them, you would kiss your repeat customers goodbye.
The best case to use this element?
An announcement about limited inventory or on a specific day/week. You can run monthly flash sales to utilising its features.
For the countdown timer, we highly recommend Countdown Sales Timer – a countdown timer app on the Shopify app store. You can choose another one if you want. The most important thing to select an app is it gives you the job done.
Countdown Sales Timers helps you add a real-time countdown bar to create urgency and increase sales. The special thing about this app: it’s made by Pixel Union, the Shopify’s #1 design team. So you have no worry if its features fit your theme or not. If other apps might require you to a little code changes, Countdown Sales Timer takes you only seconds.
1.2.2. Live chat
To trigger the number of orders, you might need a live chat tool. Give your visitors some time to walk through your site (or on your product pages). They should actually look at the product photos before initiating an offer to help. The ideal amount of waiting time is around 10-20 seconds. After 10-20 seconds, you can offer help through a live chat widget. Live chat doesn’t only help your brand build trust, which eliminates any price sensitivities, but it also gathers real feedback for you. Tidio is our suggestion for this. Of course, you can do more research to find out the most suitable app for your needs.
1.2.3. Limited inventory notices
Limited inventory is a powerful tool to persuade your customers to place an order. Displaying low inventory alerts on products and leverage scarcity invoke the people’s fear of missing. This method is based on scarcity. It has an effect on human psychology. When we believe a product is hard to come by, we want it more. No one wants to miss out on a hot item or a great deal. You can get more deals for your store by utilising the intensity of scarcity. We like While Supplies last. This app makes your products more attractive by showing your customers when their favourite item is limited.
There’re tons of apps out there
We know which works best for you
1.3. Trust badges
Actually, there are 3 different ways to add trust badges to your store. But first, we’re gonna go with the simplest method which is adding an app to your Shopify store.
Using an app!
Let’s go to the Shopify app store, search for trust badges apps.
As you can see, there’s a variety of apps that you can use. We’re going to use the Free Trust Badge app. We just want to use the simplest things that don’t require you to pay any extra money to your store, unless you absolutely have to. Using a free app for that or maybe edit the code yourself is okay. We’re gonna show you later.
And now:
This is how the app looks like when you’ve just installed:
Make sure you switch on the app. If not, you can’t see the badges display on your store. Click onto the +Add badge button to add a badge. You can play around with their location. If it’s not something that you want to display in your store, remove it. You are free to edit some of the design elements. Just play with it to decide what you want. If you want to add your own CSS, just go with it, but we’re not gonna do it. We’re gonna just Save. Now let’s see what our product page looks like:
As you can see, right below the Buy it now button, we have the edited trust badges. The good thing about this app is that it’s very simple and no technical skills. The not-so-good thing? You don’t have lots of flexibility. It’s always below the Buy it now/Add to cart button. And there is a limit to the types of badges. It’s a good option but there is another more flexible way, but would be a little more complicated.
So, the second way we can use is actually to add in Shopify’s building trust pages in the footer. If you look down to the store footer, there is nothing. But, Shopify allows us to add payment methods here, and even trust badges.
Let’s see how we do that!
Editing the code
Go to the Online Store > Themes > Customize. Under Section, you need to choose Footer. What we have to do is click the checkbox of Show payment icons.
In the live product page, you’ll see the payment method at the footer. The good thing to put badges in the footer is that it’s constantly with you throughout the website, not just in your single product page. Also, it doesn’t weigh down with too many elements on the product description section. You do need to think about it if you’re adding all sorts of apps and converting widgets like time counters. Don’t put too many things on your product description section. It’s good to have a full descriptive product page but it shouldn’t be too busy that the customer is kind of wondering what he needs to click now.
So how to add some more payment methods? Shopify gives us a pretty good solution for that.
In this way, you’ll manually arrange the payment icons that you want to display. Please note that you can only see the icons once you enabled the payment gateways in the payment settings of your admin.
To edit the code for your payment icons:
- Go to Online Store > Themes > Action > Edit code.
- Then, navigate to the Sections directory > footer.liquid
- Find the following code:
{% for type in shop.enabled_payment_types %}
- And, replace it with:
{% assign enabled_payment_types = ‘visa,master,american_express,paypal’ | remove: ‘ ‘ | split: ‘,’ %}
{% for type in enabled_payment_types %}
- In the pasted code, you will see a list of payment providers: ‘visa,master,american_express,paypal’
The payment providers in this list will display icons on your Shopify store. It means: you can edit this payment list to suit your needs!
Below are the values you can use to edit:
Still find it hard to do yourself?
Don’t worry, we’re here to help. Just drop us a message, we’ll get back to you very soon!
1.4. Product photos and description
These two elements seem to be the most overlooked conversion factor. You’ll want to make sure you’re using high-resolution product images, and they are all the same size and shape. This guide will tell you more about the recommended size when setting up a Shopify store. If you have a photographer friend, ask him to give a hand. Or at least, you might want to use service from POW (Product on White) to create professional product images. If you check out these image instructions, you will see how to deal with this element.
The product description is another easy, important but overlooked when setting up a Shopify store. While most online shoppers make their purchase decision on the product photos, the well-written product descriptions help them decide whether or not the product fits their needs. By giving your customers the key benefits, unique value and solution to their problems, your product description can help you get more sales, reduce refund rates and build customer trust. There is no app for this, but there is a process, and it takes time. So, don’t hesitate to invest in your product descriptions.
2. Check-out page
To optimise your check-out page, you’’ know how to:
- Upload store logo
- Put a Countdown Timer
- Add Card badges
- Add “Why choose us” section
We’ve seen many Shopify merchants put lots of money and effort into designing their store but leaving their check-out page behind. Most of the check-out pages look like:
The above checkout page looks bland without a logo and brand colour. This checkout page isn’t trustworthy enough. If you’re a shopper, we bet you don’t want to purchase and this and just leave for another site that is more credible. So how can we fix this to better and help conversion?
2.1 Upload your logo to the checkout page
Shopify doesn’t allow you lots of customisation options on the checkout page. However, you’re able to upload your logo and match colours to your brand. In doing this, you will make your checkout page looks different good, like this example:
If you’re unsure how to do this, watch the video below:
2.2 Put a Countdown Timer
Having a Timer on the checkout page can really help create urgency for your visitors to push them to finish their purchase right away and not have them leave the checkout process. We suggest Fera, it’s not free but it’s useful for your store. What we like about this app is the changeable message. It allows you to change the wording of the countdown to suit your store. For example:
Check out NOW to avoid losing your order!
Or
We notice a product in your card is going fast, check out now to secure it!
There are countless ways you could change this to fit your needs.
2.3 Add Card Badges
Showing visitors the credit card types and other payment methods will help generate trust for potential customers. If you take different cards and payment methods, you’re telling your customers that you have legitimate payment gateway set up. Also, it lets customers know whether or not they’re able to pay with the method they hope. In this way, you help improve your page’s look and provide extra knowledge to your customers to help them decide.
2.4. Add “Why choose us” section
So far lots of mentioned optimisations are on the left side of the checkout page. While there’s still lots of blank space we could leverage on the right side. And, we found this is perfect for the “Why choose us” section. For this optimisation, you could add whatever you want, but we find making a badge for satisfaction and shipping work great (as below).
You are free to customise the image and change the wording any way you like. By adding these types of badges, you are increasing your store’s trustworthiness and make customers notice things they haven’t been aware of. Hence, your store’s conversion rate increases and loads of orders come to your store! We find Fera is very useful in optimising your product page and checkout page. This app also has other cool capacities. This isn’t a free app, it’s 9$/month but worth a try.
Setting up a Shopify store is no longer difficult
Look much better, right? With these optimisations, we bet your store will absolutely convert higher a lot! There are lots of things to play around with your product pages and checkout page. Do some research to make decisions on apps that fit your needs. Make sure you pin this simple tip in your head: Create urgency and scarcity when setting up a Shopify store!
Still need help? Drop us a message, we’ll get back to you!
