According to Constant Contact, email marketing offers an average ROI of $36 for every $1 spent, making it by far the most cost-effective digital marketing strategy that businesses have at their disposal. If you’re running an ecommerce store, email marketing can be an incredibly effective way to excite potential customers and re-engage current customers.

That said, sending out individual emails to everyone on your subscriber list is simply too time-consuming to be feasible. Instead, you can leverage automated email campaigns to deliver the right messages at the right time without the manual work. 

We’ll help you get started creating an effective email marketing strategy driven by the power of marketing automation. We'll take a look at everything you need to know about email automation for ecommerce stores, including eight examples of email automation series built to attract and retain more new customers. 

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What is email automation and how does it work?

Email automation is the process of building emails and setting them to automatically send to your email list based on the criteria you choose. It’s used for both transactional and promotional emails, as part of a broader email marketing strategy.

Automated emails can be sent at specific times and triggered by specific criteria. Triggers might include a recipient’s newsletter subscription, purchase history, clicks on links, time since their last purchase, and more. For transactional emails, a typical automation example is sending a user a shipping update or password reset email. 

While email automation is relatively straightforward to set up for businesses of all sizes — which is a big part of why email marketing can offer such a high ROI — there are a couple of things you’ll need to put in place before you can begin sending automated messages. 

First, you’ll need to use an email automation tool that will allow you to deliver one-off messages and multi-message campaigns to your subscribers. We’ll cover some of these below. Second, you’ll need to create email templates for your automated campaigns targeted to specific audience segments. 

With the right automation platform and high-quality message content, email automation is something that any ecommerce business can leverage for outstanding results. It can help boost your store's conversion rate, reduce cart abandonment rate, improve your customer experience, and beyond.

8 Email automation flows to get you started

To help you get up and running, we’ll walk through eight of the most important email automation series for reaching your revenue, customer satisfaction, and retention goals. As you build emails for each of these flows, make sure to read up on email marketing best practices for tips and inspiration.

1) Nudge shoppers with automated abandoned cart emails

Given that nearly 7 out of every 10 ecommerce carts are abandoned, salvaging even a small percentage of your store's abandoned carts can yield substantial returns. Turning those exits into sales could be as easy as setting up automated cart abandonment emails. According to Mailchimp, cart abandonment emails yield 34 times more orders per recipient than through standard marketing emails alone. 

Many times, simply reminding customers that they still have products in their shopping cart is all that it takes to convince them to complete their purchase. Many ecommerce stores also choose to offer discounts to encourage conversions.

Goals for abandoned cart emails

The main goal of abandoned cart emails is to reduce your cart abandonment rate, a metric that should be easy to track via the analytics features of the ecommerce platform you use. Conversion rate and click-through rate can also be used to gauge whether your abandoned cart emails are as compelling as they should be. 

Tips for setting up your abandoned cart emails

• Send an initial abandoned cart email 24 hours after a customer has abandoned their cart, reminding them that their item is still available and ready to buy.
• Send a second abandoned cart email 48 hours after a customer has abandoned their cart, addressing common objections that might be keeping them from checking out.
• Send a third abandoned cart email 72 hours after a customer has abandoned their cart offering a discount code or other perk. 

2) Send customers personalized product recommendations

Automated email marketing is a great way to present would-be and current customers with personalized recommendations that pique their interest. It pays off: According to Barilliance, average order value (AOV) increases by 369% when prospects engage with a single product recommendation. 

In addition to helping you form more robust customer relationships, product recommendation emails can help you upsell or cross-sell a new product to the customers most likely to buy them. 

Goals for product recommendation emails

The goal of product recommendation emails is twofold. One, product recommendation emails encourage repeat purchases from customers who have already given your online store the stamp of approval. Tracking clicks and conversions on each recommendation is an excellent way to evaluate these emails. 

Two, product recommendation emails let customers know that you’re paying attention to their interests and value their business. No one likes seeing suggestions for products they’d never consider buying. A customer survey could help you measure whether your customers feel your tips are on target. 

Tips for setting up your product recommendation emails

• Constantly tailor your product recommendation emails to the customer’s specific purchase data. You could suggest products that complement their purchase, products similar to their purchase, products other people purchased after viewing the original product, and so on.
• Experiment with when you send personalized product recommendation emails. You could start with a couple of days after a customer makes a purchase or even include recommendations in the order confirmation email. 

3) Automate discount emails based on customer behavior

Strategically sending discounts is one of the most popular ways to utilize automated email marketing. According to Adoric, 44% of consumers check branded emails for discounts and other valuable offers.

To really capitalize on the benefits of discount emails, though, your offers should be triggered based on customer behavior. If a customer has been browsing a specific product, for example, you could send them a discount code as a welcome. 

As we touched on above, you can also send discount codes to customers who have abandoned their cart or on their previous purchases. It’s also common to automate discount emails to send if a certain amount of time has elapsed since a customer’s last purchases, whether it’s two weeks or two months. There are endless possibilities when it comes to tailoring discounts. 

Goals for discount emails

The goal of a discount email is simple: to encourage conversions by offering customers savings on the products they’re most interested in. This makes tracking the success of your discount emails as simple as monitoring the conversion rate and click-through rate of the discount emails you send out. You can also look at average order value (AOV) and customer lifetime value (CLV) to see how discounts impact overall spending. 

Tips for setting up discount emails

• Discount emails that are triggered based on specific customer behaviors are much more effective than generic discount emails that are sent en masse to your entire email list.
• Sending discount emails to customers who have already purchased a product from your store is a great way to reward your loyal customers and encourage their repeat business.

4) Greet and excite new customers with an automated welcome series

Welcome emails that greet your new subscribers have an average open rate of 50%, making their open rate 86% higher than standard newsletters. Wordstream reports that are 320% more revenue is attributed to welcome emails compared to other promotional emails. 

Simply saying hello to new subscribers and providing product highlights is an excellent way to get them excited about what your store has to offer and let them know that you’re happy to have them in the fold. It’s also a prime opportunity to offer welcome discounts, planting the seeds for their first or next purchase.  

Goals for automated welcome emails

The ultimate goal of a welcome email series is to convert subscribers into loyal, paying customers. This makes conversion rate an important factor to consider when sending out these emails. 

Beyond this, welcome emails are also a great way to let your audience know the benefit of engaging with your messages (discounts, exclusive sales, first looks at products, etc.) and make them more likely to open subsequent emails. So, the open rate is an important metric to watch.

Tips for setting up automated welcome emails

• Welcome emails should be sent automatically and immediately anytime a new subscriber subscribes to your email list.
• Thanks to their high open rate, welcome emails also present a prime opportunity to promote high-value products. Depending on your email automation tool, you can tailor your featured products based on the customer’s web activity. 

5) Keep customers updated with confirmations, receipts, and shipping emails

One of the most significant benefits of email automation is streamlining and speeding up transactional email sending. Unlike marketing emails, your customers expect to receive lightning-fast order confirmations, receipts, status updates, and more. 

For example, email receipts that are sent out when a customer makes a purchase have an average open rate of 70.9%, making these emails more likely to be read than any other type of message. Even small delays may decrease confidence or lead to customer service tickets filling up your queue. Email automation lets you proactively inform customers of changes and get ahead of questions. 

Goals for update and confirmation emails

The most important objective of update and order confirmation emails is to provide detailed information and answer customers’ questions. You can track email metrics like open rate as well as customer service metrics like the number of tickets related to receipts, shipping status, and so on.

Tips for setting up update and confirmation emails

• An order confirmation email should be sent immediately after a customer makes a purchase and should include a detailed receipt.
• A shipping confirmation email should be sent whenever the customer's order has shipped and will ideally include a tracking number that customers can use to follow their package.
• While not the primary purpose of update and confirmation emails, these emails offer the chance to market additional products to customers who have already purchased from your store.

6) Engage your repeat customers with a targeted email series

According to data from a Stitch Labs report on customer loyalty, repeat customers make up almost 25% of a store's revenue despite only making up 11% of a store's customer base on average. 

This makes it especially important to engage your repeat customers and ensure that they continue coming back to your store. For this purpose, automated email campaigns that are targeted based on the behaviors and interests of your repeat customers can be highly beneficial. Your email series could include interesting blog reads, product ideas or inspiration videos, promo codes, featured customers, and more. 

Goals for repeat customer emails

The goal of repeat customer emails is to encourage repeat business from your store's most valuable segment of customers. Open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate are the most important metrics to track when sending out these emails.

Tips for setting up repeat customer emails

• Send a check-in email two days after a customer's order has arrived to make sure that they are satisfied with their purchase.
• Send a personalized product recommendation email four days after a customer's order has arrived to encourage a repeat purchase. Personalized product recommendation emails can also be sent out periodically to your entire segment of repeat customers.
• Include discount codes or special offers that are tailored to your repeat customers as a reward for their continued business.

7) Send customer feedback emails to gain valuable insights

Few things are more valuable or actionable for an online retailer than in-depth customer feedback. With automation, you can schedule email surveys that collect this all-important data on a regular basis, whether monthly, quarterly, or yearly. You can also schedule them to send after key interactions like purchases, returns, or customer service conversations. 

Customer feedback emails are also a good opportunity to request that customers leave a review on the products that they've purchased. Small discounts, gift cards, or prize drawings can be valuable incentives for customers to share their thoughts. 

Goals for customer feedback emails

While the goal of most ecommerce email marketing campaigns is to encourage conversions, this isn't the goal of customer feedback emails. Instead, the goal of these emails is to gather feedback from your customers in the form of either survey responses or online reviews. This makes open rate and click-through rate the most important metrics to track for these email campaigns.

Tips for setting up customer feedback emails

• The first email in a customer feedback email campaign should be sent out one week after a customer's order has arrived.
• Customer feedback emails can link to a survey form to collect feedback for your business. Consider linking to review sites to make it easy to leave feedback and steadily build social proof for your products.

8) Retain customers with a re-engagement email series

Eventually, some subscribers may start to ignore the emails you send if they don’t find them valuable. Often, segments of subscribers aren’t even receiving your emails because their contact information is outdated.

If you notice that your open rate is starting to suffer, re-engagement or "win back" email series can help. These emails are all about understanding what drives customers to engage with your emails, confirming contact details, and reigniting the interest of your subscribers. There are many different approaches. You can offer product recommendations and discounts, ask readers to verify their email addresses if they like your content, and more. 

Goals for re-engagement emails

The goal of re-engagement emails is to motivate inactive subscribers to take action, whether buying, browsing, or unsubscribing. Monitoring the open rate, click rate, and the number of unsubscribes for these series is crucial. You can also gauge the success of these campaigns by tracking conversions.

Tips for setting up re-engagement emails

• The first email in a re-engagement series that is sent out to subscribers who are no longer opening your messages should serve the purpose of reminding them what they’re missing out on.
• The second email in a re-engagement series should present subscribers with a fantastic offer that will encourage them to check subsequent emails for similar offers.
• The final email in a re-engagement email series should politely inform customers that you’re going to unsubscribe them if they aren’t interested in your emails.

Email automation tools worth integrating with your online store

Automation begins with great software. You’ll want to look for options that integrate seamlessly with your other ecommerce automation tools, such as your customer service or inventory management platforms. Today, the top email automation tools include the following:

• Klaviyo: Klaviyo is an email marketing platform that allows you to collect and analyze data from your customers then use that data to create highly-targeted email marketing and SMS campaigns. If you’re looking for an email marketing solution that will enable you to utilize your data to its full potential, then Klaviyo is an excellent option to consider.
• Omnisend: Omnisend is a marketing automation platform that empowers automated email marketing in addition to SMS messaging, WhatsApp messaging, social media messaging, and beyond. If you would like to use an all-in-one platform that will allow you to send automated messages across a wide variety of channels, then Omnisend could work well.
• Autopilot: Autopilot is a cloud-based email marketing automation platform that allows you to create automated emails series using simple drag-and-drop commands. Autopilot is easy to use considering its impressive range of features, making it a good option for those new to email marketing.
• Mailchimp: Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing solutions available today, in part because of its low cost and user-friendliness. The base version of Mailchimp is free to use, making it a great way to test the waters of ecommerce email marketing automation without investing any money. 
• Drip: Drip is an email automation platform that includes a visual email builder for creating attractive automated email templates. Drip allows you to automatically send emails based on detailed customer actions, making it one of the more capable email automation tools available today.
• Convertkit: Convertkit is a marketing platform aimed at content creators and artists that includes email marketing automation features. It allows you to easily migrate your existing list of subscribers to the Convertkit platform so you can start launching automated email series. 

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Benefits of email automation

Automation lets your business enjoy all the unique, worthwhile benefits of email marketing without demanding more human power or a more significant time investment. Here are the specific advantages of automating your email campaigns. 

1) Offers a high ROI

We mentioned earlier that email marketing is unrivaled when it comes to ROI, yielding an average of $36 for every $1 spent. This statistic alone is more than enough to convince most ecommerce businesses to invest their efforts in this channel.  

One reason why email marketing offers such a high ROI is that email marketing is an incredibly low-cost marketing avenue. Once you have a list of subscribers, the only real expense associated with email marketing is the cost of paying for a subscription to an email marketing automation platform. 

These platforms are available at a variety of price points, including free options with robust feature sets, and let you send to hundreds or thousands of customers every month. When the "I" in "ROI" is this low, there’s potential to achieve a substantial return on your investment.

2) Keeps customers satisfied and engaged 

Automated emails, transactional and promotional, are vital for creating a customer-centric brand. 

Fast transactional emails, such as responses to customer service requests, make your subscribers feel heard and valued. They're a great form of customer self-service. Nearly 50% of customers say they expect an email response from businesses in less than four hours. Automated messages speed up your customer service response times. 

Email automation is also effective at keeping customers interacting with your brand. For example, 45% of subscribers who receive “win back” (re-engagement emails) will go on to open subsequent emails, according to data from Return Path. By scheduling regular messages, you can retain customers who might have otherwise been lost.

3) Built for upselling and cross-selling customers

Automated email marketing also allows you to segment your list of subscribers based on factors like web activity, purchase history, and interests in order to create targeted cross-selling and upselling opportunities. Ecommerce platforms and CRMs offer plenty of data to inform triggered campaigns. 

Say you have a segment of customers who purchased a winter coat from your store. You can set up an automated, personalized campaign that recommends scarves and mittens to pair with their purchase. This is a great way to raise average order values among your existing customer base. 

4) Saves time for your sales and marketing teams

With the right tools, all of the above benefits of email marketing can be accomplished with minimal manual input from your company's sales, marketing, or customer service staff. 

Once you’ve created the necessary email templates and set up criteria to trigger email sends, automated email campaigns practically run themselves. This frees up your teams to focus on tasks that truly need a human touch (and larger projects like SEO for your store) while making them faster and more efficient at repetitive but essential tasks.

Offer top-notch customer support from a single platform with Gorgias

At Gorgias, we’re committed to helping businesses make the most of ecommerce automation and hands-free email marketing through our convenient central hub. Our helpdesk platform integrates with popular marketing automation platforms. It makes it easy to manage email communication, SMS communication, and social media messaging, allowing you to provide the kind of customer service that turns visitors and newcomers into loyal shoppers. 

Want to learn more about how Gorgias empowers your online store? Book a demo. 

Finding the best Shopify theme for your business may feel like a huge undertaking — and it is. You have to identify themes, test them, and determine criteria as you go. It can easily start to feel overwhelming. 

To make this process a little easier for you, we’ve analyzed 13,191 Shopify stores and hand-picked the 26 most popular themes to help get you started. But before diving in, it’s important to understand how to approach choosing the right Shopify theme for your business. 

The top ten Shopify themes we recommend are:

1. Mojave
2. Retina
3. Flow
4. Paper
5. Parallax
6. aiga
7. Testament
8. restige
9. Impulse
10. Motion

How to choose the right Shopify theme 

A free theme or a premium one? A template or a custom theme? Which one you should choose actually depends on many factors. 

If you’re looking for a Shopify theme for your store but don’t know where to start, answering the following questions might help:

• What is your product category? A clothing store’s design is different from a store selling online courses.
• How big is your product catalog? Are you running a one-product store or a store with multiple product categories?
• What features do you need? Do you want a slideshow on the homepage, an opt-in form, a mobile-friendly, intuitive design, or an embeddable video?
• What are your competitors doing? Knowing how your competitors’ stores look might give you an idea of your store’s appearance. Detect their themes to find out. 
• What’s your budget? Are you willing to invest in a custom Shopify theme?
• Can you manage the theme yourself? Do you need help with the technical side? Do you want immediate support whenever you have a question? 

There is no “one size fits all” strategy for choosing a theme because every business is unique, so take time to figure out the questions above to narrow down your options. 

Pro tip: Get inspired from established stores by using a Shopify theme detector to identify the theme they’re using. You’ll get a lot of ideas to build your own ecommerce store, for sure. 

26 best official Shopify themes for your ecommerce store

Shopify hosts a limited selection of themes on their website. These official Shopify themes go through intensive testing for quality and bugs. Usually, they sell at a premium pricepoint compared to non-approved themes — but offer merchants the most effortless and professional-looking stores. 

1) Mojave

Price: $350

Website: Mojave Shopify Theme

Mojave is a flexible, modern, premium Shopify theme designed by DigiFist. It’s built with fashion, health and beauty, apparel, and clothing brands in mind. Mojave’s modern design features a detailed product page with large images, clean lines, and minimalist fonts that will capture (and hold) your customer's attention. Mojave supports all the new Online Store 2.0 features, such as drag-and-drop sections and blocks to create custom pages in your store without special coding. Mojave comes with flexible, well-designed blocks for images, products, videos, quotes, and more.

Additional key features

• Unlimited free trial and lifetime free theme updates
• Compatible with Online Store 2.0
• Over 20+ conversion-increasing features

2) Retina

Price: $220

Website: Retina Shopify Theme

Developed by Out of the Sandbox, Retina is an ideal choice if you’re selling apparel or furniture and housewares. Retina offers four styles: Austin, Montreal, Melbourne, and Amsterdam, with different color palettes. 

Each style includes useful features like product recommendations, multiple home page videos, custom promotion tiles, product image zoom, and slide-out cart. You can also create a self-service FAQ page so customers can find answers to common questions themselves. 

If you choose Retina, you can be sure your ecommerce website is mobile-friendly and leveraging Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to reach more Shopify customers. 

Additional key features

• Modern boutique mobile-friendly design
• Simple setup and customization 
• Testimonial sections and featured product callouts options

3) Flow

Price: $350

Website: Flow Shopify Theme

Flow offers three sharp and minimalist designs (Queenstown, Byron, and Cannes) that help your products stand out. This theme is great if you’re selling high-end items or you want to direct customers to unique features of your products. 

Flow allows you to feature a YouTube or Vimeo video on the homepage, display your products in a masonry-style grid, and showcase information about a specific collection with a page sidebar. You can also add a slide-out cart so your customers can easily add products to their shopping cart without leaving the current page. There is a promotional banner where you can set up to promote your latest offers.

Keep in mind that you can contact the Flow developers team via email only. The phone and video call support aren’t available. 

Additional key features

• Ideal for high-volume stores, flash sales, and selling internationally
• Easily customizable by utilizing drag-and-drop sections and blocks to create custom pages without coding
• In-depth marketing and conversion features (back-in-stock alerts, blogs, promo pop-ups, promo tiles, etc.)

4) Paper

Price: $260

Website: Paper Shopify theme

‍Paper is an easy-to-use and modern Shopify theme designed by Brickspace Lab. Paper’s clean and thoughtful design features large imagery with in-depth branding customizations. You will be able to take advantage of new Online Store 2.0 features and build custom templates with expertly designed drag-and-drop sections.

Additional key features

• Unlimited free trial and lifetime free theme updates
• Conversion-boosting design
• Performance-optimized page speeds
• Features to help you sell more, such as in-cart upsells

5) Parallax

Price: $240 

Website: Parallax Shopify Theme

If you want to build a modern ecommerce site, think about Parallax. This theme offers a striking parallax scrolling effect, enhancing your brand’s style and making it more appealing to customers. 

Parallax offers four styles: Aspen, Madrid, Vienna, and Los Angeles. These styles share features like parallax effect, a multi-level menu, promotional banner, multiple homepage videos, and slide-out cart. 

Parallax is also developed by Out of the Sandbox, so you can be sure you’ll receive excellent customer support from the team.

Additional key features

• In-depth creative control (full-width images, slideshows, video, testimonials, featured promotions, and more)
• Slideout cart, quick shop, and promotional banners for ease of use for customers
• Distinctive scrolling style for long-format home page layouts 

6) Taiga

Price: $350

‍Website: Taiga Shopify theme

Taiga is a blazing-fast and mobile-first premium Shopify theme for D2C brands designed by award-winning Shopify Plus agency Woolman. It gives you outstanding visual freedom: over 10+ video-supporting sections with unparalleled access to define your design settings. Zero customized code to make your brand feel unique.

Taiga is developed for the needs of modern merchants. Quality code powers winning speed: two components you need as a fast-growing sustainable business.

‍Additional key features

• Outstanding design settings
• Lightning-fast speed and performance
• Modern sections like Banner grid with video, Quick view, Countdown timer, Cart upsell, and Visual menu

7) Testament

Price: $260

Website: Testament Shopify Theme

Testament offers four styles (Genesis, Exodus, Revelation, and Deliverance), aiming to help you create a seamless shopping experience for your customers. 

Testament supports quick view, multi-column menu, color swatches, collection page sidebar, and homepage video. The theme comes with the sticky navigation feature, allowing you to keep menus fixed to the top of your page as you scroll down.

Additional key features

• Designed for stores that process high amount of transactions in a specific time period
• Visual storytelling elements 
• Designed specifically for stores that do in-person selling

8) Prestige

Price: $350

Website: Prestige Shopify Theme

Prestige is a premium Shopify theme designed for high-end ecommerce businesses and is great for businesses in clothing and accessories, health and beauty, as well as business equipment and supplies. It supports three styles (Allure, Couture, and Vogue) and is great for editorial content, visual storytelling, and physical stores.

Additional key features

• Image hotspot linking: Drag hotspots to tag images, making it easier for customers to discover your products
• Built-in timeline tool: Use this feature to tell the story of your brand
• Optimized for larger images: Display high-resolution product images hassle-free
• Homepage menu lists: Display menu lists on store homepage

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9) Impulse

Price: $350

Website: Impulse Shopify Theme

Impulse is great if you often run promotion campaigns because it allows you to display custom promotions in different places in your store. 

Impulse allows you to display promotional content on collection pages and promote sales with custom promotion tiles. Its features also include homepage menu lists, collection sub-listing, custom collection sidebar filters, and pickup availability.

Additional key features

• Designed for high-volume stores
• In-depth marketing and merchandising features (promo features, customizable contact form, animation, product videos, and more)
• Product discovery features like MegaMenu and sticky headers

10) Motion

Price: $350

Website: Motion Shopify Theme

If you want to use animation and video in your store, consider the Motion theme. It’s a premium Shopify theme designed and supported by Archetype Themes.

Motion includes many interesting features that aim to bring your brand to life regardless of catalog size, including multiple text, image, and page animations as well as multiple auto-play YouTube and videos on homepage.

Additional key features

• Filter products by tag without reloading pages
• Support high-resolution images
• View product information in a pop-up
• Visual storytelling 

11) Symmetry

Price: $320

Website: Symmetry Shopify Theme

Symmetry is another great Shopify theme for stores selling different product categories. It supports four styles: Salt Yard, Beatnik, Chantilly, and Duke. 

One of Symmetry’s best features is reorderable homepage rows, allowing you to display products, blog posts, or promotions in any order with customizable rows. Besides, this theme provides slideshow, long-form design, quick buy view, and multi-column menu.

Additional key features

• Built specifically for OS 2.0
• Ability to customize page tabs, metafields, size and price catalog filters, and more
• Over 20 drag-and-drop sections to choose from

12) Envy

Price: $350

Website: Envy Shopify Theme

Envy offers an intuitive design with four styles: Oslo, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Gothenburg. It’s perfect for stores that focus on regular promotions and featured products. 

Envy features include display discounts, free gifts, and other promotional content with a pop-up or a banner as well as the ability to tag images using image hotspot linking. 

Additional key features

• Help customers easily navigate through the store with a multi-level menu
• Hover over a product image to zoom out
• Optimize for smaller devices and mobile commerce

13) Atlantic

Price: $280

Website: Atlantic Shopify Theme

Atlantic is great for high-volume stores. It’s designed to help you grow and scale your business faster. 

Atlantic supports four styles (Organic, Light, Modern, and Chic). Features include a multi-column menu, slideshow, quick buy, modular-style homepage, and pickup availability. This theme receives many five-star reviews on the Shopify theme store because of its excellent customer support.

Additional key features

• Perfect for product discovery with features like image zoom, live search, and multi-column menus
• Ability to handle medium to large catalogs; ideal for growth
• Uncluttered design 

14) Modular

Price: $300

Website: Modular Shopify Theme

Modular comes in three styles (Chelsa, Mayfair, and Hoxton) that are well-suited for a wide range of products. It also focuses on clean and minimalist design. 

Using Modular, you can give customers a better experience with scrolling between product pages, adding items to their carts without leaving pages (one tactic to help recover abandoned shopping carts), and quickly filtering products by brand, price, etc. You can also add customer testimonials to build trust with first-time shoppers. 

Additional key features

• Cart notes and stick cart
• Marketing features like back-in-stock alerts, blogs, FAQ page, press coverage, and more
• In-depth product discovery options like breadcrumbs, enhanced search, MegaMenu, and product filtering and sorting 

15) Empire

Price: $340

Website: Empire Shopify Theme

Designed and supported by Pixel Union, Empire allows you to create a store that offers customers the same shopping experience as Amazon. Empire comes with three styles (Graphic, Supply, and Industrial) optimized for stores with large catalogs. Empire offers features like homepage menu lists, pickup availability, live search, advanced product filtering, and quick add-to-cart functionality.

Additional key features

• User-friendly, responsive design made specifically for dropshippers 
• Many predefined color pallets and controls to create custom color schemes 
• Integration with Shopify product ratings and reviews app

16) Pipeline

Price: $320

Website: Pipeline Shopify Theme

Pipeline is another minimalist Shopify theme with parallax effect scrolling and three unique styles (Light, Bright, and Dark). This theme is best suited for stores with a large number of products. 

Like many other themes in this list, Pipeline offers a multi-column drop-down menu, a modular-style homepage, and advanced product filtering. The theme also supports large images, which means those images fit seamlessly into your pages.

Additional key features

• Optimized for mobile commerce
• Designed for stores that sell internationally as well as in physical stores
• Flexible, well-designed blocks for ease of customization 

17) District

Price: $220

Website: District Shopify Theme

No matter what you’re selling, the District Shopify Theme could be great for your shop if you have large catalogs and a desire to showcase featured products and collections. District features Shopify’s Online Store 2.0, which uses drag-and-drop sections to create custom pages without coding.

Additional key features

• Flexible, well-designed blocks to spotlight images, products, videos, and quotes and support digital storytelling
• Cart notes, quick buy, and in-store pick up options
• In-depth marketing, conversion, merchandising, and product discovery features

18) Icon

Price: $260

Website: Icon Shopify Theme

If you’re looking for a Shopify theme to highlight images and other content, Icon may be perfect for you — especially if you’re also in the fashion, health and beauty, or home and garden industries. Icon is also uniquely set up for stores with large catalogs and dropshippers. This theme also features numerous marketing and conversion features like promo banners, in-menu promos, cross-selling, blogs, back-in-stock alerts, quickview, FAQ page, and store locator.

Additional key features

• Visually striking design
• Quick and easy launch with minimal steps required
• Extensive merchandising and product discovery features like image galleries, image zoom, lookbooks, MegaMenu, product filtering, and infinite scroll

19) Responsive

Price: $240

Website: Responsive Shopify Theme

Looking for a focus on your products? You may want to check out the Responsive Shopify theme as it puts your products and brand at the forefront, utilizing full-width imagery. Responsive is ideal for fashion, beauty, and sports and recreation shops with large catalogs. Even better, the Responsive theme looks stunning on every screen across devices. 

Additional key features

• Wide-layout with features like image zoom, hero videos, and promo banners
• Highly customizable layouts, typography, and featured promotions
• Editorial content capabilities with longer-form text sections for storytelling

7 more non-official Shopify themes for your ecommerce store

Merchants can also find themes that aren’t in Shopify’s official theme library. These themes are often high-quality (especially those with a many reviews and high ratings, like the ones below) and usually a bit less expensive. But they aren’t vetted by Shopify, and therefore may be a little rougher around the edges. 

1) Vendy

Price: $77

Website: Vendy Shopify Theme

Vendy is a premium multipurpose Shopify theme for fashion. It’s developed for comfortable use and flawless online store creation. Even if you are not tech-savvy at all, with Vendy you can launch a store of any complexity. Plus, this theme is perfect for dropshipping

What’s more? Vendy is a synonym for “responsive clean design.” Also, Vendy allows flexible editing in the Shopify Visual Builder and the number of pre-made layouts. Without a doubt, you will like varied page templates, catchy web forms, product wish lists and lists, and other perks. As well, this Shopify theme for fashion is packed with unique lookbook and blog templates. Just try it and customize it as you prefer!

Additional key features

• MegaMosaic section
• Dynamic filtering system
• Header and footer customization

2) Ella

Price: $89

Website: Ella Shopify Theme

Ella offers +17 homepage layouts, +16 child themes, +7 category pages, +10 product pages, multiple headers and footers, and more. It’s an all-in-one Shopify theme, ideal for any stylish fashion and clothing stores. 

Ella allows you to design your store using features like quick shop, quick edit cart, quick update car, multiple languages, multiple currencies, product recommendation, upsell bundle, etc. This theme also includes smart search and suggestion features, enhancing the shopping experience.

Additional key features

• Over 22 homepage layouts and skins, including child themes
• Frequently bought together feature and upsell bundle with discount options
• Before-you-leave pop-up capability 

3) Shella

Price: $79

Website: Shella Shopify Theme

When it comes to Shopify themes for fashion, Shella can be considered one of the best. This theme is developed with fashion in mind, meaning everything on it is optimized to help you get your fashion stores noticed. 

Here is what makes Shella worth checking out:

• More than 89 pre-designed pages for layouts, collection pages, product pages, blog, gallery, and other pages
• Strong integration with dropshipping apps like Printiful, Privy, Dropshipper, Shopzie
• Conversion optimization features like countdown timers, number left in stock, free shipping progress bar
• Vertical MegaMenu, four levels for navigation menu, blocks for homepage, product filter options (title, description, price, vendor, type, and tags), and more

Additional key features

• Great for dropshipping
• MegaMenu
• Price and stock countdown

4) Basel

Price: $99

Website: Basel Shopify Theme

With plenty of design options, Basel allows you to design your store in many different ways. For example, Basel supports the drag-and-drop page builder, making it easy for you to add/remove/replace elements on pages. It also comes with several header variations, colors, and backgrounds. 

Additional key features

• AJAX search, color swatches, product quick view, and 360-degree view
• 30 ready-to-use layouts, four blog styles, seven portfolio styles, four product hover effects
• Instagram widget, Twitter widget, testimonial slide, styled banners shortcode 
• Developed with SCSS

5) Porto

Price: $99

Website: Porto Shopify Theme

Porto is a popular Shopify theme used by more than 45,000 ecommerce merchants. It’s built with amazing UI and UX experience and is continuously being updated. 

Porto’s highlight features:

• +20 modern and classic demo concepts
• Optimized for speed performance 
• Bunch of collections and product detail page variations
• MegaMenu and vertical MegaMenu

Additional key features

• Fully responsive with any mobile device 
• Powerful admin panel
• Unlimited colors and skins 
• RTL support, testimonial slide, AJAX loading, Google Fonts integration

6) Wokiee

Price: $89

Website: Wokiee Shopify Theme

As a Premium Shopify theme, Wokiee is not your basic theme; it can act as a powerful design tool to help your business grow. Even with its in-depth premium features, it is still easy to create fast, responsive, and mobile-friendly websites to provide a top-notch user experience. 

Additional key features

• Full control through your own content management system, which allows for customization of navigation, site content, images, products, and more
• Over 80 predefined skins and layouts
• MegaMenu, instagram shop, wishlist, related products, and more

7) Roxxe

Price: $59

Website: Roxxe Shopify Theme

The Roxxe Shopify theme is a versatile choice for a shop that wants options but also desires a robust yet modern look. Roxxe has over 70 pre-built homepages, as well as 50 pre-designed layouts with sections you can rearrange and combine as you see fit. Needless to say, Roxxe is a fairly simple theme to use that also comes with plenty of easy-to-follow instructions. 

Additional key features

• Fully responsive and option for retina-ready pages 
• MegaMenu and customization in footer area to make newsletter subscription simple
• Quick-view option for customers to review product details in a lightbox pop-up without leaving the page they’re on

Take your Shopify Store to the next level with Gorgias

There you have it! We hope this list of the best Shopify themes made it easier to find what you need to get your online shop up and running. And check out our guide on Shopify vs. Shopify Plus if you're interested in additional ways to customize your site beyond these themes. As you continue building your brand and updating your website based on the needs of your customers, you’ll also want to review your customer service process. 

Luckily, you can tap into a Shopify helpdesk app like Gorgias to level up. 

Gorgias’ customer service platform is uniquely positioned to help Shopify owners with all of their customer service needs, from automating your most common tasks to using machine learning to better help customers. 

Learn more about Gorgias for Shopify stores.

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A Baymard Institute study finds that the average shopping cart abandonment rate for ecommerce stores is about 70%. Yup: 70% of shoppers who visit your store add products to their carts but don’t place an order. What does that mean in terms of revenue?

• Reducing cart abandonment by 33% is equivalent to growing your customer base by 23% 
• Completely eliminating cart abandonment (while not feasible) would in theory triple most online stores’ revenue

Reducing cart abandonment may not be easy, but it’s a whole lot easier (and less expensive) than acquiring tons of new customers. Fortunately, most ecommerce websites aren’t yet optimized to keep cart abandonment rates as low as possible. After reviewing the most common reasons why customers choose to abandon their cart, we'll explore 12 such proven strategies that you can use to reduce cart abandonment and increase your store's conversion rate.

What is ecommerce shopping cart abandonment?

Shopping cart abandonment occurs when a customer places an item from an online store into their cart, but navigates away from the website before completing its checkout flow. It's a phenomenon that costs online retailers a lot of potential customers, given that the average cart abandonment rate is 70%. The metric varies across industries, with the automotive industry reporting the highest shopping cart abandonment rate (89.11%), according to Statista.

12 ways to reduce cart abandonment for your ecommerce store

1. Provide the final cost upfront, including taxes and shipping
2. Include a status tracker for enhanced UI during checkout
3. Use a thumbnail image of the product throughout the checkout process
4. Make navigation between the main website and shopping cart seamless
5. Offer as many payment options as possible
6. Invest in a customer support platform with live chat
7. Create an enticing checkout button or call to action
8. Include a guest checkout option
9. Optimize website page speed and UI elements
10. Incorporate a generous refund/return policy
11. Consider marketing efforts such as retargeting
12. Display exit-intent pop-ups

Reducing online shopping cart abandonment is one of the most effective ways for ecommerce sites to increase their revenue, and there are plenty of ways to achieve this goal. If you would like to boost your store's conversion rate and start bringing more customers across the finish line, then here are 12 effective strategies to consider:

1) Provide the final cost upfront, including taxes and shipping

Considering that unexpectedly high shipping costs are the number one reason online shoppers abandon their cart, it's essential to let customers know upfront exactly how much they will have to pay. Of course, this is somewhat complicated because you usually can't calculate shipping costs and taxes until after a customer enters their address. However, setting up your checkout process in a way that calculates final shipping charges as early as possible is key to preventing customers from being discouraged by extra charges.

How to do this

One option for providing customers with a final cost upfront is to charge a flat rate for shipping and taxes regardless of where the customer is located. This allows you to display final costs on your product pages rather than making your customers wait until checkout to see what shipping fees and taxes will be. While this might have a higher upfront cost, reducing cart abandonment could more than make up for the investment.

Another option is to design your cart page or checkout page so that customers can input their address immediately, allowing your system to calculate shipping costs and taxes right away.

2) Include a status tracker for enhanced UI during checkout

Even if you create a quick and easy checkout process, your customers won't know it's quick and easy until they are finished with it. One way around this is to use a status tracker that displays how far along a customer is in your checkout process. Installing a status tracker on your checkout page reassures customers that your checkout experience is fast and simple by showing them exactly how many steps they have left.

How to do this

A checkout app that includes a status tracker is the simplest way to keep customers updated on their checkout progress. Depending on the ecommerce platform that you use and your coding skills, you may also be able to create a checkout page status tracker yourself.

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3) Use a thumbnail image of the product throughout the checkout process

There is a certain degree of disconnect between online shoppers and the products they purchase that doesn't go away until the product arrives at their door. However, displaying a thumbnail image of the product that a customer is purchasing serves to remind them of why they added the product to their cart in the first place. This encourages them to see the process through to completion, helping reduce the chance of cart abandonment.

How to do this

Once again, optimizing your checkout page in this manner is done most simply by using a checkout app that allows you to add product thumbnails to your checkout page. Or, if you can't find an app that works for you, a little coding will do the trick as well.

Gorgias customer, Glamnetic, includes product image thumbnails in the cart and checkout page. Plus, they include a countdown to encourage customers to purchase in the next 10 minutes to further incentivize completed purchases.

‎Read more: 3 tips to improve your product photography

4) Make navigation between the main website and shopping cart seamless

Once customers have added a product to their cart, navigating to their cart from the main website should be as easy as possible. The last thing you want is for customers to have to go searching for your checkout page, so be sure to design your checkout process so that navigation between the main website and shopping cart is seamless.

How to do this

Creating popups that direct customers to the checkout screen once they add a product to their cart is one effective way to make it easy for them to find your checkout page. Another option is to utilize "buy now" buttons that automatically take customers to the checkout page once they select a product.

5) Offer as many payment options as possible

Offering your customers plenty of payment methods to choose from can help reduce cart abandonment in two key ways. For one, it ensures that customers can find a payment method that works for them. For example, if you only accept credit cards and a customer is used to paying online with their PayPal account, they are likely to abandon their cart. In other cases, a customer may not feel comfortable entering their credit card information on your site and will only complete their purchase if alternative payment options are available. By offering numerous payment methods, you can ensure that you accommodate your customers' preferences no matter what those preferences happen to be.

How to do this

Choosing a payment processing solution that can accept various payment methods is the simplest way to offer your customers this level of flexibility. For example, with PayPal, ecommerce stores can accept credit card payments, debit card payments, payments via a PayPal account, and payments via PayPal credit cards.

‎6) Invest in a customer support platform with live chat

Ecommerce customer service that can catch customers at critical moments is key to reducing online shopping cart abandonment. Suppose a customer has a question about your product that needs an answer before they feel comfortable completing their purchase. In this case, it's vital to answer their question quickly — before they navigate away from your website. 

With a customer support platform such as Gorgias, you can install live chat widgets on your website that enable customers to instantly connect with a support agent, ensuring that they receive the timely support needed to nudge them toward completing their purchase.

Having live chat support ready is especially important when high average order value (AOV) customers are on the fence. Check out our customer story on CROSSNET, a Gorgias customer that once secured a whopping $450,000 through a live chat conversation:

How to do this

Gorgias makes it easy to offer live chat support, letting you provide pre-purchase support directly from your website. To see for yourself how Gorgias can help you reduce cart abandonment via pre-purchase live chat support, sign up for a demo of Gorgias today!

7) Create an enticing checkout button or call to action

Once customers add a product to their cart, you want to make the checkout button noticeable and enticing. Creating attractive checkout buttons complete with compelling CTAs will help encourage customers to take the next step once they've added a product to their cart. You may also wish to add a "buy now" button to allow customers to navigate straight to the checkout page after selecting a product.

How to do this

There are several great apps available that help with checkout button optimization. One Click Checkout is a Shopify app that allows you to create "buy now" buttons and popups that encourage customers to visit the checkout page after adding products to their cart.

8) Include a guest checkout option

We've said it before, and we'll say it again: Requiring customers to create an account before they can complete their purchase will make your checkout process too much of a hassle in the eyes of many customers. Instead, offer a guest checkout option. This allows customers to complete their checkout without creating an account, making your checkout process simpler for those in a rush. At the same time, customers that do wish to create an account still have the option to do so.

How to do this

Most ecommerce platforms and checkout apps will give you the option to offer guest checkout, making this a relatively straightforward strategy to execute.

9) Optimize website page speed and UI elements

Most customers aren't likely to have much patience if your checkout page is too slow to load or does not load correctly, making it essential to optimize your site's page speed and the UI elements of your checkout process.

How to do this

There are a lot of tools that allow you to optimize page load speeds, including a great tool created by Google called PageSpeed Insights. Ensuring that you are using an ecommerce platform or checkout solution that offers an optimized UI and fast loading times is also crucial.

10) Incorporate a generous refund/return policy

Customers are much more likely to feel good about purchasing a product from an online store when they are confident that they'll be able to return the product if it doesn't meet their expectations. While offering a generous refund/return policy may be a little difficult to stomach, the resulting increase in conversions is almost sure to be more than worth the expense!

How to do this

Start by writing a refund/return policy that customers will find reassuring, then be sure to display this policy prominently on your product pages, checkout page, or both.

Parachute includes a clear label to show off their free and carbon-neutral shipping and returns:

‎Also, to make returns and exchanges even easier for your customers and agents, consider a dedicated app. Our favorites are Loop, Returnly, and ReturnLogic: they’re some of the most comprehensive and affordable apps on the market, plus they integrate with Gorgias for a more centralized returns process. 

Related: Return policy template generator

11) Consider marketing efforts such as retargeting

Retargeting customers who abandon their cart via cart abandonment emails is one proven way to reduce cart abandonment. Sometimes customers just forget about their order, and all it takes to get them back to your checkout page is a simple reminder. Best of all, many email marketing solutions enable you to create automated abandoned cart campaigns, enabling you to retarget customers with little to no manual effort.

How to do this

Many email marketing tools like Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign make it easy to create automated abandoned cart recovery campaigns. Utilizing one of these solutions is by far the easiest way to get started retargeting customers who abandon their cart.

As far as the copy, check out the cheeky email our friends and Braxley Bands send to customers who leave items in their cart: 

‎They also follow this email up with a text message that offers a 15% off discount.

12) Display exit-intent pop-ups

Our analysis of 300 Shopify store owners showed 50% of online stores use website pop-ups to engage visitors. This isn’t surprising since pop-ups can yield a conversion rate of between 3% and 11%, compared to standard rates around 2%.

An exit intent pop-up captures customers with items in their shopping cart, usually to offer more information or a coupon code to convince them to place the order. As long as you respect the user experience (and don’t create an obnoxious, hard-to-escape pop-up), you will likely see lower cart abandonment rates with a pop-up.

How to do this

Your ecommerce platform will have pop-up tools like SmartPopup or Pixelpop available for integration. If you use Shopify, check out our list of Shopify pop-ups for a complete rundown of the best tools.

Why does shopping cart abandonment happen?

There are a variety of reasons why online shoppers choose to abandon their carts. The most common offenders are as follows:

‎Complicated checkout process

The "Law of Least Effort" is an important part of the customer experience for online businesses, especially when it comes to the checkout process. The more complicated something is, the less likely it is that people will do it. If your checkout process is overly lengthy and complex to the point that it's much easier to just abandon the cart and shop on Amazon, then that's probably what most of your customers will do.

Surprising added shipping costs

According to research from the Baymard Institute, extra, unexpected costs (such as shipping costs or taxes) is the number one reason why customers choose to abandon their cart. This demonstrates how critical it is to keep these costs as low as possible and display them at the very start of the checkout process.

Want to reduce shipping costs? Read our guide on how to offer free shipping.

Requiring customers to create an account before purchasing

Requiring customers to create an account before they can complete their purchase falls under the category of making your checkout process too complex. While it's certainly beneficial to offer customers the option to create an account at checkout, it's also a good idea to offer guest checkout for those who don't want to take the extra steps to set up an account.

Customers don't feel safe with payment options

Even today, when online shopping is a normal part of almost everyone's life, most customers are still rightfully wary about where they enter their credit card information. It's important to build trust with your customers by offering payment methods they already know and trust, such as PayPal and Apple Pay. This is especially true if your website lacks trust seals (like Norton secured) and social proof (like reviews and testimonials) to prove your legitimacy.

Competitor has products that are cheaper or ship faster

Many customers continue to do product research even after adding a product to their cart. Naturally, if they can find the same product cheaper somewhere else or find an online store that offers faster shipping, the chances that they'll return to your store are slim.

Confusing or insufficient refund/return policies

Customers like the peace of mind that comes with knowing that they can easily return or exchange their product if it doesn't meet their expectations upon arrival. Without this assurance, they are much more likely to abandon their cart. Because 30% of all products ordered from online retailers are returned, an easy-to-understand and customer-friendly return policy is key to helping an online store build trust with its potential customers.

No discount codes or promo codes offering deals

Some customers add products to their cart with the expectation that they will be offered a promo code or deal at some point in the checkout process. When they don't receive any such deal, they abandon their shopping cart.

Ecomm website has performance issues

If your checkout page freezes, is slow to load, or suffers from other performance issues, customers are more likely to navigate away from the malfunctioning page and never return. These may sound like minor inconveniences to you, but may be costing you customers in the long run.

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Provide world-class customer service to help reduce cart abandonment with Gorgias

Along with offering a wealth of other business-boosting benefits, great customer service is key to optimizing an online store's conversion rate and preventing abandoned carts. With Gorgias, you can get started with live chat to provide your customers with pre-purchase support that will generate more conversions. 

Check out our case study of three stores that increased sales with live chat for more examples of the revenue-boosting power of a great customer experience. 

Or, to try our customer service platform free for seven days, sign up for Gorgias today!

Your job doesn’t end once a customer makes a purchase.

Of course, the marketing work you do pre-purchase plays an important role in establishing a well-rounded shopping experience, but there's a world of tactics to employ after your customer hits the “buy” button that can help you entice first time shoppers to make a second purchase.

Remember that without designing an inclusive experience that encourages customer retention, you may struggle to create a solid growth path for your business. If you want to keep new customers coming, reengage past shoppers, and reduce returns, here are six tips for delivering an outstanding post-checkout experience. 

6 Ways to create a better post-checkout experience for your customers

1. Offer amazing customer support
2. Make the most out of your confirmation email
3. Make delivery dates and next steps clear 
4. Stay in touch later with remarketing
5. Enhance the “unboxing” experience
6. Ask for reviews and follow up after the item arrives

1) Offer amazing customer support

First and foremost, let’s make sure you’re offering great customer support before we explore other options for improving your post-checkout experience. While you might already be doing everything you reasonably can to ensure your customers don’t experience disruptions or problems after a purchase, sometimes hiccups happen. It’s not so much about avoiding problems entirely but rather how you deal with them when they occur. 

Sometimes your shoppers will reach out to you after a purchase with questions about their item’s delivery or how to return something. (This is much easier with the right returns management and order management software.) And they may be frustrated or impatient. Make it easier for them (and ultimately better for you) by offering ways to contact you on the channels they prefer. Also, offer proactive customer service in the form of FAQ pages and clear return policies to confusion (and save your agents time).

For instance, if your analytics tell you that your audience is most active on Facebook, make sure your page makes it clear how to reach your support team. You can do this by including the relevant links in the About section and of course, be turning on a chatbot function. 

Caption: Dollar Shave Club offers multiple options for contacting their support team in their page’s About section

But even so, customers may make contact simply by posting on your page or commenting on your posts. Employ a catch all approach by integrating your Facebook page to your Gorgias helpdesk and you’ll be able to automatically publish personalized answers in the comment threads.

And if you don’t have one, get live chat on your site! Gorgias can also help with that by allowing you to seamlessly integrate a live chat into your website, with also a list of customizable rules. The live chat button will show consistently on all pages of your site, both on mobile and desktop. 

Your customers don’t need to hunt down a special contact page or dig up an email address. They always know exactly where to go when they need help. Also, using live chat is useful to create a personalized, human-centric, accessible, and fast shopping experience, which the value of can’t be discounted!

2) Make the most out of your confirmation email

While the confirmation email should always include basic information (think an order summary and delivery timeline), you can add a few extras to empower your customer to make the most out of their experience with your brand. 

If you’re working with a recommendation engine and already produce editorial content, this would be a great opportunity to attach one or two relevant blog articles to the lower third of your confirmation email. Not only serving as a helpful encouragement to spend more time on your site, but sending relevant content helps to reinforce the idea that you are an expert in your field. 

Caption: The order confirmation email from Warby Parker includes tips on how to be sure you’ve picked the perfect frames for you 

You may also wish to consider including a promo code as a thank you for ordering - it can be a small expense that ensures a customer returns. 

3) Make delivery dates and next steps clear 

Once your customer purchases an item from your site, you would benefit from having a system in place that allows them to review their item’s delivery status. This could be as simple as a “vanity” order confirmation page that appears once the purchase is confirmed. Show a simple timeline that displays where they are at in the delivery timeline starting with an origin destination and ending with their home address.

Even if they didn’t register on your site and never return to this page, showing them such an order tracking timeline leaves a good impression on your customer by reinforcing the concept that what they’ve purchased really exists and is on its way. 

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4) Stay in touch later with remarketing 

You may have been under the misconception that setting up remarketing ads was reserved exclusively for your bounced traffic. While that’s certainly an effective way to recapture lost traffic, you can also use them to remind previous customers about your products when it makes sense to do so for you. 

For example, let’s say you’re a cosmetic company and you’ve just launched a new moisturizer. By setting up a remarketing ad that targets those customers who purchased a similar product from you three months ago, you’re finding them again just as they may be in need of restocking. This helps place customers who may have otherwise forgotten about your brand back into your marketing funnel with the goal of getting them to buy from you again.

5) Enhance the “unboxing” experience

Let’s embrace the fact that we’re living in the age of social media by applying it to your shipping experience. Make your orders feel like the gift that they are by packing your product in a customized box and filling the empty space inside with fun, yet recyclable fillers like crinkle paper or business cards, personalized notes with instructions on how to leave a review or something simple but enjoyable like brand stickers. When relevant, you may also want to consider including a sample of an upcoming item into your box, or a flyer advertising its existence. 

When you create an “unboxing experience” you’ll not only trigger those loyalty-building positive emotions in your customer’s brain but you’re also encouraging them to post about your brand on their social feeds - free advertisement to a similar audience of future customers!

6) Ask for reviews and follow up after the item arrives

Reviews are one of the most effective ways to increase sales and encourage new customers to shop with you. You need them to grow your business. But not everyone, even happy shoppers, are hardwired to follow up a purchase with a review. In this instance we like to follow the simple manta: ask and you shall receive. 

Asking for reviews doesn't have to seem desperate (even though we all desperately want them). Start by building a review request into your post-checkout email workflow that automatically delivers a request to review the purchased product after delivery occurs. Play around with the sound of your email and don’t be afraid to employ a curious but humble tone that expresses your genuine desire to know that they enjoyed what they bought or how they like to see it improved in the future.

We hope you find these six tips useful when it comes to making the most out of your post-checkout experience. As always be patient and in time, you’ll reap the rewards of a job well done. Keep an eye on your retention rate to measure your post-checkout success.

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You may know Zendesk as the first (and the biggest) customer service software. It’s usually evaluated against Freshdesk, Gorgias, Help Scout, and other ticketing systems (also called helpdesks). 

But, is it the right customer service tool for you? The answer depends largely on your type and size of business: 

• Zendesk makes software for everything from sales to customer relationship management and employee experience
• Zendesk markets to businesses of all sizes, from small and medium businesses to huge enterprise businesses
• Zendesk makes tools for every industry, from healthcare to government

For some customers, the sheer size and scale of Zendesk could be hugely appealing. For others, it may indicate a lack of focus and specialization. 

As you choose a customer service platform for your business, take a closer look at Zendesk, its features and functions, and whether it will create the best customer experience for your business (at the best price).

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What is Zendesk and what does Zendesk do?

Zendesk is one of the oldest cloud-based customer service platforms sold on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. It offers an enormous array of tools, including a helpdesk, email marketing, live chat, sales, employee engagement, and customer engagement software. 

Zendesk's key features

Zendesk recently streamlined its product offerings, combining them into three separate tiers, each with its own pricing structure. You can choose three Zendesk Support plans, three Zendesk Sell plans, and five Zendesk Suite plans — a total of eleven pricing tiers and packages. Each of the pricing tiers and packages has its own collection of products and services, which can get confusing. 

Below, we highlight some of the main customer service features Zendesk offers. Certain features are only available for Suite customers and Professional or Enterprise level customers, so double check before you sign a contract.

Helpdesk (Zendesk Support)

Some people call Zendesk “the godfather of helpdesk tools” because they have been around for a long time. In that time, they have built tons of features onto their ticketing system:

• Convert phone, chat, email, and social media requests into tickets
• Centralize tickets from disconnected channels into one place
• Manage and work on support tickets
• Create personal ticket views
• Support conditional and custom ticket fields
• View the activity log and the name of the agent handling it
• Support reporting and dashboards

Let’s zoom in on a few features for your customer support needs.

Live chat

Zendesk has two types of live chat: Zendesk Live Chat (legacy) and Zendesk Messaging.

Zendesk Messaging is a larger app that, on top of live chat on your website, lets you have conversations on messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. The tool centralizes all of these conversations so the agent can quickly switch channels. However, centralized chat is only available through their Messaging app, a separate tool that connects to Zendesk’s Agent Workspace, which involves some additional billing to set up. 

Zendesk Live Chat, on the other hand, is a legacy product that only lets you have conversations on the website. In other words, it doesn’t centralize messages from Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or other messaging apps.

Once you have figured out which solution is right for you (and navigated some nickel-and-diming), Zendesk allows you to add chat to your website and talk with customers across messaging apps in real-time:

• Reach out to a customer with a chat to guide them to the checkout process (if you pay extra for Sunshine Conversations)
• Collect contact information with pre-chat forms
• Use chatbots to reroute customer conversations (which can lead to a dodgy customer experience)
• Create dashboards for to monitor the team’s performance on live chat

Knowledge base

Like many other helpdesk solutions, Zendesk offers you features to build a scalable support system, primarily through FAQs and community forums. 

With the basic plan, you can create, organize, and share help center articles in one language. You can also embed support articles, which they call embeddables, as web widgets.

More advanced customer self-service features and support for over 40 languages are only available for customers of higher pricing tiers. And the community forums feature is only available for the Pro and Enterprise customers.

Ticketing system

A support and helpdesk solution needs to have a way to collect support tickets, and Zendesk's support ticket system takes a pretty traditional approach to ticketing. In general, their ticketing aims to:

• Collect helpdesk requests from email, social media messaging, chat, and other locations into one spot
• Easily track conversations in one central inbox to streamline your support workflow
• Respond to customer issues quickly

Some helpdesks group tickets into broader conversations; for example, we at Gorgias consider each customer interaction over three days in one channel as a single “billable ticket,” which we believe better reflects the nature of customer service in ecommerce. 

However, some businesses may prefer using a tool that sticks to the old-school method.

Reporting and analytics

Zendesk offers Zendesk Explore, which is an arm of their product that gives you a base for collecting, measuring, and analyzing data about your customers and their customer experience:

• Get pre-built reports about performance (updated daily)
• Enjoy automation of analytics and reporting
• Use analytics to improve the customer experience
• Customize your dashboards (for Pro and Enterprise customers)

Community forums

Zendesk Gather, which is available for Suite Professional, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus plans, is Zendesk’s community forum solution. You can build online communities that relate to your company or your products, which can help with your branding and give you additional feedback:

• Create spaces where your customers can talk to each other
• Gather honest feedback from customers
• Allow customer interactions with each other to troubleshoot each other's issues to reduce helpdesk workload

Sales CRM (Zendesk Sell)

Zendesk Sell is the tool's CRM system. It helps improve your sales team's productivity and visibility by storing the full customer account, in context, in one central location:

• Reduce the steps needed to pull up customer information
• Improve customer communication with the sales team
• Increase overall productivity of your sales team

Zendesk pros and cons

Like most apps, Zendesk has both pros and cons. As you decide if it's the right tool for you, you’ll need to weigh both to make an informed decision. Below, we’ll cover some of the most significant pros and cons of using Zendesk.

Pros of Zendesk

• An all-in-one lead generation and customer service platform
• Chat, phone, email, and social media all in one place
• Provides a lot of customization options
• Extensive, powerful reporting and analytics
• Robust integration with third-party applications and systems
• Supports multiple languages
• Can track customer history across different mediums or departments
• Easy to set up teams on the platform

Cons of Zendesk

• Potentially high price tag with complicated pricing plans
• Doesn’t provide robust integration with ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, or BigCommerce
• Best support features are only available at higher pricing tiers
• Not the right ticket management system for ecommerce and small businesses
• Requires a significant amount of time and effort to get familiar with the software
• User interface is not intuitive or customizable

When is Zendesk right for your business?

Zendesk currently has over 170,000 paid customers, operates in 160 countries around the world, and has a 4.3 out of 5 stars rating on G2, which helps businesses find helpdesk software choices. It clearly works well for many companies.

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Zendesk may be right for your business if you have:

1) Complex product offerings and a very large team

Zendesk is a behemoth, which is right for behemoth companies. Specifically, companies with 500+ employees and complex product offerings.

One of the biggest benefits of Zendesk for such large teams is that it comes bundled with so many features and backed by so much staff. When Zendesk leverages its entire toolset and consulting, it can service companies that wouldn’t get adequate support from a smaller, more dedicated helpdesk. Think airlines, hospitals, and other enterprises. 

If you are large enough to have seven-figure budgets for customer support and expect to work with Zendesk consultants to migrate onto the system, Zendesk may be the right choice for you.

2) A desire for customizable reporting (for Professional and Enterprise customers)

At its core, Zendesk is an enterprise product designed for enterprise organizations that require detailed, advanced reporting and analytics. With the Zendesk Explore add-on, you can have a dedicated product solely for reporting and analytics.

And if you want to pay for more insight, Zendesk consultants will work with your developers and reporting team to streamline insights, build customer configurations, and push analytics to enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools like Oracle and Salesforce.

3) Your business requires enterprise integrations

Zendesk has over 1,000 integrations. It integrates with enterprise-level programs like Oracle, Microsoft Teams, and Salesforce. Most tools helpdesk provide integrations suited for customer service teams at online stores and small businesses, but few connect to the kinds of mammoth software needed for banks, airlines, and other businesses with high regulation.

Is Zendesk a suitable helpdesk for ecommerce stores?

As mentioned earlier, Zendesk scores very well on Capterra, which indicates many customers are very happy with the service. But many of those customers are not ecommerce businesses. Based on reviews on other platforms, Zendesk may be too much for some ecommerce businesses.

Shopify is one ecommerce platform that is integrated with Zendesk. There are many Shopify helpdesk apps that help ecommerce businesses manage the communication they receive from customers, including Zendesk.

If you take a look at the reviews for Zendesk on the Shopify App Store, you'll find that ecommerce store owners rate the app as 3.6 out of 5 stars, on average. Of the 134 reviews, 39 were rated 1 star.

Some of the reasons for low ratings included:

• Difficulty understanding and changing billing options
• Poor customer satisfaction from the support team
• Not user-friendly
• Difficulty setting up a new storefront with an existing account
• Bugs that affect the ability to install with Shopify
• Have to integrate Zendesk Support in the Shopify store and install Shopify into Zendesk, which is complex 
• Must already have a Zendesk account set up to use the app in Shopify, which that causes many to look for Zendesk alternatives
• Inability to disable the chat widget

Zendesk pricing options

One of the concerns many users have about Zendesk’s customer support software is its complex pricing tiers. And while complex plans could indicate a host of options to best suit your needs, they could also make it difficult to understand what each plan includes (leading to a surprising lack of features down the line.)

It’s difficult to sum up Zendesk’s pricing since there are so many plans and packages, but you can see the cost (billed monthly) for the eight support-related plans below, plus the price of main add-ons below that:

If you can't see the pricing on images above, check out the information below:

Plan options listed below with pricing:

• Zendesk Support Team: $25/agent per month
• Zendesk Support Team: $25/agent per month
• Zendesk Support Professional: $59/agent per month
• Zendesk Support Enterprise: $125/agent per month
• Zendesk Suite Team: $59/agent per month
• Zendesk Suite Growth: $99/agent per month
• Zendesk Suite Professional: $125/agent per month
• Zendesk Suite Enterprise: $199/agent per month
• Zendesk Suite Enterprise (Custom): $215+/agent per month 

Add-on features listed below (listed for each pricing plan) with pricing:

• Zendesk Chat (Team): $19/month
• Zendesk Chat (Professional): $35/month
• Zendesk Chat (Enterprise): $70/month
• Zendesk Talk (voice support, available for all plans): $2/month per number, plus additional fees per minute, voicemail, transcription, and recording
• Zendesk Guide (Professional): $19/month
• Zendesk Guide (Enterprise): $34/month

Foundational support plans (ticket systems)

Zendesk Foundational Support plans include just the helpdesk software and ticket systems. It has three pricing tiers:

• Zendesk Support Team: For $25 a month per agent, you can get an integrated ticketing system, business roles, and customer interaction history
• Zendesk Support Professional: For $59 a month per agent you get all of the features of the Foundational plan, as well as the option to add business hours, customer satisfaction surveys, multilingual support, service level agreement management, and automatic redaction
• Zendesk Support Enterprise: This $125 per agent a month plan adds conversation routing, custom team roles and permissions, customizable agent workspaces, sandbox test environment, and third-party data storage

Zendesk Suite plans (including features offered)

If you want all of the products Zendesk offers, you'll want a Zendesk Suite plan. Here are the pricing tiers:

• Zendesk Suite Team: For $59 a month per agent, you will receive most of Zendesk's products
• Zendesk Suite Growth: For $99 a month per agent you will add customized ticket layouts, AI-powered knowledge management, a self-service customer portal, SLA management, and multilingual support
• Zendesk Suite Professional: For $125 a month per agent, you get access to more self-service capabilities (like community forums), additional customization features, and more storage bandwidth
• Zendesk Suite Enterprise: For $199+ a month per agent, you get every base product Zendesk offers, plus HIPAA compliance, and events connector for Amazon Web Services, and several other advanced features 

Zendesk for sales plans

We didn’t go into much detail for Zendesk Sell, since we’re evaluating Zendesk’s features as a customer service platform. But if you're looking for a product to manage just your sales team, here's how much you’ll pay for Zendesk for Sales:

• Zendesk Sell Team: For $25 a month per user, you get one custom sales pipeline of up to three paid users, and a fully-featured mobile CRM platform with prebuilt apps and integrations
• Zendesk Sell Professional: For $59 a month per user, you get the features of the bottom tier along with the option for custom apps and interactions, unlimited paid users, email tools, analytics, and custom field building
• Zendesk Sell Enterprise: For $125 per user, you'll receive all of Zendesk's sales tools and the option to add two sales pipelines, more analytics, task automation, and customized notifications

What ex-Zendesk customers say about Gorgias

"What has been really great (and different from Zendesk) is that Gorgias has allowed us to grow tremendously. It allows as many seats as needed. That is really great to be able to flex up the roles of agents as needed.

Cody Szymanski, CX Manager, Shinesty

Zendesk’s designs focus on the needs of enterprise clients of all industries, rather than ecommerce businesses. This means many should-be core features for online stores come at an extra cost. If you're running an ecommerce business, you might find yourself resonating with what some ex-Zendesk customers have to say about Gorgias, an ideal alternative to Zendesk.

• Jonathan Kennedy says, "Zendesk is overkill for 95% of Shopify merchants. I think Gorgias has come in and set a high standard."
• Primewines says, "This is it! Have used Zendesk and tried others, but we really need a system that is simple, robust, and integrates well with Shopify. Nothing comes close to Gorgias."
• Ryan Jones says, "Big fan of Gorgias after shifting from Zendesk. We felt like Zendesk was a bit of overkill for us — being such a large, enterprise solution — we weren't using enough of it to really warrant it."

Take a look at a handful of reviews that mention Zendesk and Gorgias:

Princess Polly saw a 40% increase in agent productivity after switching away from Zendesk

Princess Polly is one of the fastest-growing online women's fashion brands in the US and Australia. They used to use Zendesk until they switched to Gorgias: "After migrating to Gorgias, we saw a 40% increase in agent productivity,” says Alexandria Collis, Director of Operations at Princess Polly. “It's an amazing tooI. I was able to see an opportunity, grab it by the reins and take control of our ticketing system without working through some of those silos which we experienced with our old helpdesk."

The switch to Gorgias wasn’t just great for agents; the tool helped Princess Polly improve the customer experience they offered. “Gorgias knows the best ways to address customer issues and build the right tool to help meet those needs,” Alexandra says. “I'd recommend Gorgias to anyone that is highly focused on the overall customer experience. Really the experience from the start to finish, and then beyond."

Read Princess Polly’s customer story to learn more about their swap from Zendesk to Gorgias.

Learn more about Gorgias: The #1 Alternative to Zendesk

Like we said, Zendesk is a powerful product that offers certain enterprise-level features and integrations no other tool in the category can match. But for many ecommerce brands that want dedicated support for their exact type of business, it can be overwhelming and pricey.

Want to see our focus on ecommerce in action? Check out our public feature roadmap. You can see that we’re always improving Gorgias (based on feedback from ecommerce customers). We spend our time making Gorgias the best tool for online stores — that’s it.

‍Learn why Gorgias is an excellent alternative to Zendesk for ecommerce businesses, including a side-by-side feature breakdown between Zendesk and Gorgias.

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Anyone who recognizes that ecommerce customers have high expectations these days also recognizes that fast shipping is part of what keeps those customers happy. We’ve seen non-essential items on Amazon be delayed because of COVID-19, and that’s cause quite a bit of grumbling from both customers and ecommerce businesses. While guaranteeing fast shipping to your customers is definitely a good thing--16% of people have abandoned a shopping cart if the estimated delivery time is too slow--it’s a double-edged sword. Your customers will love getting their order in one or two business days, but it can also be cripplingly expensive. 

The solution is complicated. If shipping faster costs more, do you pass the cost along to your customers? Do you let it eat into your profit margin? Believe it or not, there are other options. Is it possible to  have your cake and eat it too? Yes, but you’ll need a crash course in logistics if you’re going to find affordable ecommerce shipping. Let’s dive in! 

1. Implement zone skipping 

If you’ve ever had to ship your inventory cross-country and had the accompanying jaw-drop when you discovered how expensive that was going to be, you’ve encountered shipping zones before. The further you ship your products, the more it’s going to cost -- obviously -- so how do you get around it?

The answer is zone skipping. To skip zones, you need to store your inventory strategically so that you can choose which location to ship from (and pick the closest one). For example, if you get an order from a customer in Los Angeles and you have inventory stored in Miami and Las Vegas, you’ll want to send them that product from Vegas to save a bunch of money on shipping (and ensure that the order gets to them speedily).

Whether you store and manage your own inventory or rely on a national fulfillment network of warehouses, zone skipping is a smart money saving solution. For example, you’ll probably keep some inventory in a warehouse in Miami, have a location in Pennsylvania to hit the northeast, maybe one in St. Louis for the midwest, and one in Las Vegas to cover the west coast. 

2. Consider dimensional weight

Shipping carriers don’t just measure the weight of your packages in pounds and ounces anymore - if this is news to you, this could be a major opportunity to decrease your costs. When a carrier determines the cost of shipping, they charge you the greater of the two weights - dimensional and actual. Actual weight is just what it sounds like, but dimensional weight measures the size of your package. The bigger it is, the more it costs to ship, even if it’s as light as a feather. It makes affordable ecommerce shipping tough for businesses with large or bulky packages, because they always get charged the dimensional weight.

The good news is if your dimensional weight is greater than your actual weight, you can decrease the size of the package to save money. The more you can minimize the volume of your package the more you can save. Think about how to streamline your packaging experience, whether it’s removing unnecessary infill, using boxes that are more specifically fit for your inventory, or getting rid of any bulky extras that you’re throwing in. Making any one of those changes, even if it seems small, can add up to be huge over time.

3. Determine whether to ship flat-rate or not 

For something that claims to simplify the costs of shipping, it is a lot more complicated than it seems at first glance. However, offering flat rate shipping has the potential to save you money, so let’s go over what kinds of businesses can save big with flat rates.

Each carrier has its own flat rate shipping system, so it’s well worth your time to check out a full explainer of flat rate shipping. However, it boils down to a few specific instances in which flat shipping could help you save big. 

The first is if your products are small, but heavy - this means you’re getting hefty shipping charges due to the actual weight of the product, and shipping in a flat rate box that doesn’t charge by weight could save you a lot. The second is if you ship from coast to coast frequently - for example, if you have a warehouse on the east coast but a lot of your orders come from the west coast. When you ship with UPS or USPS, the flat rate shipping charge doesn’t change depending on distance, so you’d likely save big there. It could also be a good choice if you need to charge your customers a flat rate, or if you fulfill your orders yourself (and then you could take advantage of the convenience).

If you don’t fall into the above categories, though, stay away from flat shipping. It will likely cost you more in the end.

4. Offer bulk rate shipping discounts 

Buy more, pay less. That’s the dream, right? It is when you can manage to get a bulk rate discount from your shipping carrier. If you’re selling a high volume of products and you haven’t looked into getting a bulk discount, you need to get on that ASAP. However, it can be kind of confusing to figure out how to get that discount, as it’s not exactly something that the shipping carriers freely advertise.

There are a few ways you can try to get discounts for more affordable ecommerce shipping from carriers. If you’re a small business and you’re fulfilling everything yourself, you’re most likely to get bulk rates by using a platform like ShipStation or Shippo. They’ll let you compare prices and figure out the cheapest way to ship your items as quickly as possible, and they’re able to take advantage of bulk rate discounts by negotiating with carriers on behalf of all of their clients. Shopify offers a very similar service through their own platform, called Shopify Shipping.

However, unless you’re an enterprise-scale company, the chances are good that the best rates are going to come if you partner with a 3PL fulfillment company. They typically ship a huge volume of packages and are thus able to negotiate a discounted rate - without you having to do as much work.

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5. Beef up your last mile options

The last mile - metaphorically speaking, anyway - is the last step between the warehouse and the customer. This last step can sometimes take the longest. If you’ve ever tracked a package on its way to your house, you may have noticed the significant gap of time between it being out for delivery and actually being delivered. That’s because this step is complicated and relies on a lot of different cogs spinning together as one machine. It can depend on the third party you work with, how busy they are, where their facility is located, what courier they use, and many other factors that are completely out of your control.

As you can imagine, cutting down on the time and cost spent in the last mile is critical. But how can you do it?

First, don’t be afraid to A/B test different courier services to see which one does better. Something like a drone delivery service, while very cool, is probably way too expensive. But trying different companies can help you find that sweet spot between costly and quick. While Fedex and UPS frequently outsource to USPS for the last mile because of their coverage, other options have popped up in the last few years. Just like Uber Eats or Lyft, drivers contract with companies and use their car to complete deliveries - in this case, getting your package to the customer’s door.

You can also consider a pick-up option, which cuts out that last mile entirely. Make the customer come to you! If you have brick-and-mortar stores, setting up in-store pickup is an easy choice. If not, you may even want to consider participating in something like the UPS Access Point program.

6. Encourage larger average order sizes

In general, the more items you can ship in the same box, the more you can save on shipping. And when you’re saving on shipping, you can give some of those savings back by offering upgraded fast shipping or free shipping. But how?

A common way to encourage larger order sizes is to offer free shipping once they hit a certain minimum (like $50). However, you can try a new take on that, which is to offer upgraded shipping once they hit the minimum, which will reward them for ordering more by getting it to them faster. To set your minimum, look at your average order amount and set it a bit higher than that, which should bring your overall average order amount up over time. To do a trial run, try doing a customer appreciation campaign with upgraded shipping at your new minimum to gauge the popularity.

Another option is to sell in kits or in bulk when you can. By packaging best-selling or complementary products together you can easily increase the size of the order (and it’s an easy upsell for your customer as well). Ultimately, the more items you can fit in one shipment, the cheaper it will be to get it there quickly. This is a great way to balance affordable ecommerce shipping with fast shipping speeds.

7. Minimize the weight of your product and/or packaging

Hot take: no one cares about your inserts. Not-so-hot take: the unboxing experience is a crucial part of the impression you make on your customer. Both are true; how?

It’s true that unboxing is a big part of your image, and it takes on a life of its own on social media. The problem is that when companies think of unboxing, they think the more the better - and that’s not necessarily true. Practically, those materials take up valuable space and weight in the box, leading to marginal increases in shipping cost that become significant at scale. They also take longer to assemble, and all of the inserts you throw in will be tossed in the recycling bin (or the garbage) eventually, even if they do bring in an extra lead or two. It’s not worth it.

What is worth it is designing smart. Your unboxing experience doesn’t have to be over the top and filled to the brim with extras - a smart, thoughtful experience is just as meaningful for your customers, and packaging trends are moving that way as well. Consider talking to a package design company to see how you can really wow with design and ditch the inserts, or think about how using less can actually be more effective (like moving towards a more environmentally-friendly image). 

8. Restrict where you offer fast shipping

Lastly, fast shipping does not have to be an all-or-nothing game. With the U.S. being the size that it is, at a certain point, you’re going to have to make some exceptions to where you can get to quickly. Just ask anyone in Alaska or Hawaii-- they’ll be the first to tell you that it takes ages for shipments to arrive. Finding fast and affordable ecommerce shipping for the entire U.S. is going to be pretty difficult, especially if you’re not working for a 3PL, so you’re going to have to make some sacrifices. Sorry Alaska and Hawaii.

To make conditional fast shipping work for you, you can set parameters that will allow you to offer fast shipping where it is reasonable and affordable to you. This could be within major urban zones, or areas within a certain radius of the warehouse(s) that store your inventory. You can consider shipping to more remote areas, or places a certain distance outside of your core shipping radius, to be like shipping outside the lower 48. Even if you can’t offer fast shipping to all of your customers, you can at least increase your conversion rate where you do offer it without breaking the bank.

Related: Our list of the 12 best shipping softwares for ecommerce.

Final thoughts

Fast shipping and low costs are a balancing act. With customers expecting everything faster than ever (and freer than ever) it can feel overwhelming to try to make everyone happy. In reality, you’re going to be best served by cutting your own shipping costs as much as you can, and taking advantage of any deals you can get by using special services. Hope that cake tastes good!

And if you want to learn more about ecommerce shipping, check out our list of essential best practices.

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To make a profit, helping people find you easily is a top priority. That’s where SEO comes into play. 

This in-depth guide will help you:

• Find out how eCommerce SEO functions
• Learn why the SERP position is so important to a website
• Understand which steps you need to take to improve rankings
  

What is ecommerce SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a marketing method for getting more organic traffic from search engines such as Google. 

Although paid ads will attract more people as well, SEO will cost you a lot less. Moreover, it can help you yield better results in the long run. Paid ads are hindered by things like ad blockers and ad blindness -- and they only work when you’re investing money into them. 

In ecommerce, SEO requires you to optimize meta- and product descriptions, headlines, website speed, and design, and many other things. 

Why does your SERP position matter?

Every day, Google processes roughly 3.5 billion searches. That amounts to around 40,000 searches every second. 

A good number of these searches are product-related. That means there are plenty of opportunities to grab shoppers’ attention. 

But most people are aware of this fact. 

As a result, there are literally millions of stores around the Internet. The competition is fierce. Failing to rank on the first page of Google will result in total failure for one simple reason. 

When looking for a web store, most people only look at the first few results. That’s not a hunch -- it’s backed up by the latest research. A recent study conducted by Chitika revealed that the first organic result on Google usually gets 95% of traffic. 

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Although thousands of ecommerce store owners invest huge amounts of money into optimization annually, it doesn’t mean they’re doing it right. 

That’s why you need to ensure that you’re concentrating on important aspects of your website to avoid spending needless amounts of money.

If you want people to find your products easily, follow these 10 steps… 

1. Take care of your structure

The way your site is organized plays a major role in your optimization efforts. Two basic elements every ecommerce website needs to have::

Breadcrumb navigation

This type of navigation allows customers to know what page they’re on, without constantly looking at the URL bar above. If you want to see good use of breadcrumb navigation, then visit Dormify’s official site. 

Clean URLs

You also need to have clear and clean URLs. That means your URL address needs to be easy to read. Let’s say you’re selling suits online and that your domain name is www.suitshopping.com. You don’t want URLs to be made up out of random characters.

You want to have them clean for two reasons: a) to make sure Google indexes the site quickly b) help visitors navigate the website easily. Here’s how URLs should/shouldn’t look:

• Messy URL: https://www.suitshopping.com/index.php?page=blog  
• Clean URL: https://www.suitshopping.com/blog 

With clear navigation, you’ll ensure that Google indexes your website properly and that visitors can find their way around the site seamlessly. 

2. Research and target long-tail keywords 

When it comes to keywords, instead of going for one-word-long, general keywords, targeting long-tail ones should be your priority. 

If you’re just starting out, you can’t expect to compete with the big dogs for general keywords -- no matter your market or niche.

That’s the only way you’ll see results. 

Just take Sportsman’s Warehouse for example. If you’re into camping or fishing, you’ve probably heard about their website. Five years ago, they were competing for major, hard-to-rank-for keywords like “finishing equipment” and “camping gear.” 

Then, in 2015, they started focusing on more specific, long-tail keywords. After 12 months, they tripled their ROI. Compared to the year before, they saw a 31% increase in organic search and a 25% rise in organic revenue. 

3. Optimize your product pages properly 

As an online merchant, your objective is to sell as many products as you can, right? Naturally, one of your biggest concerns needs to be making sure that product pages not only look great but that they’re optimized with Google algorithm in mind. 

Product descriptions need to contain the correct keywords and all of the images have to be tagged properly. You also can’t forget to optimize your:

• H1/H2/H3 Tags - On-page text used by Google to interpret website content 
• Meta Titles - Bits of HTML code that tell Google the title of the page
• Meta Descriptions - Piece of code that says Google what the page is about

You also can’t forget about product page design. 

Take the case of Lightproof, for instance. It shows how a small change can mean a lot to your bottom line. By simply making a change to their CTA button, the electronic accessory company managed to increase its monthly revenue by 16%. 

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4. Ensure that your site is friendly for mobile

Whether you’re aware of it or not, a large portion of visitors will visit your store via smartphone. 

The number of mobile shoppers is surprisingly high. 

Consider this: last year on Black Friday, a third of people only shopped on their mobile devices. So while a mobile-first approach will help you rank better - mobile optimization is now officially a ranking factor - but it will also increase sales. 

Here’s what to do:

• Make website/store design is responsive
• Keep the page loading time on mobile low
• Create a simple checkout for mobile shoppers
  

Also, read about the Google mobile penalty. That way, you’ll know if you’re doing anything wrong. 

5. Add sitemap to Google Search Console

Most popular platforms - including Shopify and WooCommerce - generate a sitemap automatically, you should still take things a bit further. By that, we mean that you should go ahead and add your own sitemap to Google Search Console. 

‍Why is this so important? 

You want Google to index every page you’ve created correctly. From basic to product pages, ensuring that Google has found all of the pages will validate your efforts. 

If you’ve never submitted anything to GSC, here’s a quick guide on how to submit your sitemap.

6. Optimize your page loading time

Letting your website become too slow is a huge mistake. They don’t say that we live in an age of instant gratification for nothing. Here’s the catch: the slower the site is, the less popular it is. 

Slow loading speeds can hinder your entire sales funnel. 52% of shoppers (on mobile) will leave your site if it doesn't load right away. So if you don’t want to start losing customers quickly, do everything in your power to keep things fast.

When it comes to loading speeds, every millisecond counts. Having your website a second slower than it was initially can cost you a lot. 

A one-second delay in loading time can reduce your conversion rate by 7%. If your website is bringing in $10,000 monthly, it will cost you $700. On a yearly level, that amounts to $8,400, which is not a small sum by any stretch of the imagination. 

7. Invest more in content creation

No matter how many times we hear it and how cliché it sounds at this point, content will always be king. After all, it appeals both to people and Google.

As HubSpot explains, people who prioritize content creation are 13X more likely to see a positive return on their investment. Content creation may be hard work, but it’s more than worth it. 

Your blog needs to be updated on a regular basis. Whether you want to invest in article, audio, or video creation, it doesn’t really matter. How much content you need to create and at what frequency you should post it is all up to you. 

Consider using social media and email marketing to distribute your content for wider reach.

8. Create content that’s easy to digest

Let’s stay on the topic of content creation for a bit. Most people will not read every single word you write. Research shows that less than 2 in 10 people will read an entire web page before leaving it. 

People want to find the thing they’re looking for quickly. 

They don’t want to spend an hour going through material only to read a few sentences they wanted. That’s why you need to keep your paragraphs short, easy to digest, and scan. 

Readability apps that can assist you here are WebFX’s Readability Test Tool and Datayze’s Readability Analyzer. 

9. Work out a link building strategy

We’ve been talking about ranking so much thus far, but we still haven’t discussed the most effective technique for improving your SERP rank: link building.

If you haven’t heard about link building, here’s an explanation: this is a practice of building one-way hyperlinks to improve visibility on Google. Some of the more widely-used strategies include outreach, guest posting, and broken link building. 

The more people link back to your site, the more valuable your store is in the eyes of Google. The problem with ecommerce link building is that many websites don’t want to link to someone selling something. That’s why you need to get creative:

• Affiliate Marketing: You can always offer discount codes and landing pages to affiliate websites in your industry to give them the initiative to help you with a backlink. 
• Resource Sections: Create guides and educational content for your blog and reach out to blogs in your niche to get featured in their “resources” section. 
• Bloggers + Giveaways: Run giveaways with influencers and bloggers in your industry to score backlinks, brand exposure, and social reach. 

10. Don’t forget about internal linking 

Let’s face it: not all pages are created equal. Some are more Google-friendly than others. This can be used to your advantage. Use popular pages on the site to refer consumers to product pages to create link equality.

By placing links to products on these high-ranking pages, you’ll drive more visitors to the shopping section of your website. 

Interlinking also contributes to organic visits. Just take a look at Ninja Outreach and their effort. By ensuring that their pages are strategically interlinked, they managed to increase their organic traffic by a staggering 40%.  

Start investing in SEO ASAP

Getting organic traffic has never been easy for any niche, nor will it ever be. In ecommerce, it can be especially challenging. Unlike PPC, it can take several months to see results from an SEO campaign. 

Does this mean that SEO is not worth it? Of course, it is. Standing out in Google is important for every store. (If you have a Shopify, check out our guide to Shopify SEO.)

Before launching your very first campaign, here’s what you need to remember:

• Without optimization, your business as a whole will definitely suffer
• The higher you rank, the more visitors will you be able to attract
• If you want to do SEO correctly, take it one step at a time and be patient

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Almost 50% of consumers depend on ecommerce influencers to guide their purchasing decisions.

Partnering up with an influencer your target audience resonates with can help you attract new customers, cultivate your community, and grow your sales.

We've discussed the benefits of social media for customer service, but in this blog we'll discuss using social media influencers to expand your brand's reach. Here’s what you’ll learn in this guide:

• What influencer partnerships are all about and how can you use them
• Why companies similar to yours choose influencer marketing
• How to find the right influencers and get started on your first campaign

What is influencer marketing for ecommerce?

Influencer marketing is the process of working with social media influencers to advertise your ecommerce products on their social channels to their followers. Usually, you'll work with influencers whose followers are within your target audience.

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How to leverage influencer marketing

You know how it works, how to use it, but you’re still not sure how to create an influencer marketing campaign. Don’t worry, it’s not that complicated. 

Here’s what you need to know about launching an influencer campaign.

1. Create a marketing persona

You can’t pick a partner if you don’t know who you want to attract. That’s why creating a “marketing persona” needs to be the first thing you do. Determining what age, gender, and interests of your average customer can help you a lot. 

Let’s say you’re selling women's clothing. You do your homework and find out that most of your visitors are ladies in their 40s from North America and Canada. This knowledge narrows your search down. You need an English-speaking influencer that appeals to middle-aged women. 

That can get things going. 

2. Select social platforms

Once you get to know your audience, you’ll easily find out what are some of their social media platforms on the Internet. Consider platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.

If you’re looking for a universal solution, then you should reach out to Instagram influencers, since the platform has one of the most diverse user-bases. According to Social Media Today, Instagram is the most active influencer platform. 

3. Look for the right influencer for your store

You of course want a partner with a good reach. Contacting a person with less than 1,000 followers doesn’t make any sense, correct? That person can’t be even called an influencer. But you shouldn’t get stuck on every metric.

Engagement is what you’re looking for.

Sometimes, smaller is better. You might be surprised to know that micro-influencers are far more effective than big ones. In fact, an average micro-influencer gets 7X more engagement than a far-reaching one.

4. Reach out to multiple influencers

As soon as you nail what type of audience you’re targeting and what kind of person would suit your store best, you need to start getting in contact with influencers. However, you can’t just reach out to one and hope you get a response right away.

You need to contact a few social media personalities at the same time. Using a platform such as FameBit, or #Paid you’ll be able to contact several influencers, sort them by followers, age, and other metrics that can be helpful for your marketing campaign. 

5. Evaluate your potential partners

As we keep saying, you need to find someone that your buyers will find relatable. Relatability is twice as important as popularity if you want to attract the right kind of people. 

Talk to the influencers, see what their values are, do they align with your values, and see whether or not they’d shop at your store if you didn’t reach out to them. 

6. Set the objectives for your partnership

Like any other form of marketing, your influencer strategy can and has to be measured. You can’t expect to have a successful strategy without some tweaks along the way. And you can’t really make any corrections to your strategy if you don't know how it’s performing in the first place. 

According to research from the Digital Marketing Institute, these are the biggest KPIs for measuring your effectiveness:

• Reach and Awareness
• Audience Growth
• Referral Traffic
• Conversion Rate
• User Engagement

Your KPI choice depends on your needs and ambitions. Sit down with the rest of your team, discuss in which direction you want to take things, and only then select important KPIs. 

7. Select a platform to measure your campaign

For three-quarters of business owners, measuring ROI is the biggest challenge of an influencer marketing campaign. Nonetheless, measuring success should be one of the most important parts of your campaign. 

You need to have the right tools if you want to get the job done right. NeoRech can help you track referrals and monitor the effectiveness of every single influencer you have, while TapInfluence can help you measure your ROI more effectively. 

8. Launch your first influencer campaign

Once you have your influencers in place, your KPIs all set, and all of the measuring tools in place, you can give your partners permission to start the campaign. 

For the first couple of days, the surge of visitors might not be huge. However, after a month or so, you can expect to see some serious results from the campaign. 

9. Ask for testimonials 

This is a perfect opportunity to get some content for your website. You can always ask for a couple of testimonials from the people you’re working with and place the quote alongside their pictures on your website. 

Now your visitors can see who works with you.

Every person that visits your website will know that the influencer vouches for your store, products, and organization. That testimonial will allow you to build your brand, establish credibility, and boost trust among your consumer base.

10. Make the partnership mutually beneficial

Last but not least, try to make the partnership mutually beneficial for both parties. By that we mean, consider offering the influencer some discount codes or some of your products. 

The influencer can and will send a good number of users your way. That shouldn’t be a one-and-done deal. More than a third of influencers like to work with brands long-term. If the first campaign turns out as planned, why not do it a few more times? 

Why businesses rely on influencer marketing

A business can’t rely only on influencers to increase sales. You should look at this as an enhancement tool for your current marketing strategy.

It’s a great, cost-effective way of improving marketing efforts. Nearly 90% of marketers feel that influencer marketing has a better ROI than other, more traditional marketing channels. 

Let’s look at a few more ways influencer marketing can help your store…

They have real sway with their followers

While a niche influencer may not be able to reach millions of people, they can still have a lot of influence over a small group of users. Niche influencers attract are comprised out of users who share the same interests, buy the same products, and visit the same stores. 

Therefore, by working with an influential person, you’ll be able to reach that small amount of people and turn them into regular customers. You just need to find a person that caters to your target audience. For example, if you go into a random gym in your area, you’ll probably find someone wearing Gymshark clothing. The company is huge. At the moment, it’s valued at about $200 million.

And how did the company manage to find the right influencers? By knowing their target audience. 

Their gym clothing was aimed at millennials. As soon as Gymshark launched a line of women’s clothing, they sought out young fitness influencers like Nikki Blackketter to team up with them. Soon after, their “Flex Leggings” became a huge hit among millennials. 

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They're really relatable 

As we established, while celebrities may be influencers, they’re usually seen as spokespeople for certain brands and companies. Why is that? That’s because celebrities live completely different lives than 99% of us. 

Simply put, the average person can’t relate to most celebrities. Relatability is everything if you want your campaign to generate real results. Almost 90% of Gen Z-ers and Millennials follow influencers because they’re relatable. 

They can help niche or taboo businesses 

If you’re selling niche products that aren’t considered mainstream, you may have trouble finding success with mainstream advertising. For instance, anything that Google deems “dangerous advertising” is heavily prohibited. 

Everything CBD and marijuana-related products to martial arts equipment and hunting gear all fall into that category. Stores that sell similar products can get a healthy amount of visitors and brand exposure from influencers. 

Partner up to get your profits up

If you want to partner up with an ecommerce influencer to grow your online store, you should start by thinking about how that partnership can help your store increase sales and help your brand become more known. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Influencer marketing works perfectly on people who dislike traditional marketing
• Social platforms allow influencers to make the most out of their connection with users
• Continuously investing in influencer marketing can be beneficial for both parties 

And remember: even though influencer marketing is still new and always adapting, it’s just a regular marketing strategy that needs to be monitored and measured. For that, you need the best tools. Speaking of which, check out our post on the best social media integrations for Shopify.

If you are starting out with an influencer campaign, especially on Instagram you may see a spike in engagement on your Instagram feed. If those users are commenting on your posts - especially your products, don’t just ignore them, welcome them to your community.

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