An Overview of the Solution

As a traditional eCommerce store, there was no real need to bespoke this website, which was budget sensitive from the get-go. We opted for a standard Shopify setup using a high-quality theme as a starting point for customisation. We needed advanced shipping rules because of the variation in service level that is possible across the collections. A little-known tip here is just to pay a year's subscription in advance (it's cheaper that way anyway), and Shopify will switch on the function on request, without having to move up a pricing tier.

The scope:

• Create a development store - this allows us to spend more time in development before Shopify fees kick in - if you're using a developer to help you, and they're a partner, let them set up on your behalf.
  
  
• Add & test themes to ensure the theme can meet conversion rate best practices - Every theme is different, with varying degrees of customisation and adaptability. None are perfect; each has its strengths and weaknesses, so it is important to map the requirements before getting too far down the line with working on the theme itself.
  
  
• Add sample products and collections - This allows you to visualise the key page types with some context - a few products and a handful of test collections are enough to let you visualise a home page, product page and collection page, which for most stores will be the three key landing pages.
  
  
• Customise the theme - remembering that much of the traffic will land via collection pages (most often organic traffic) and product pages (organic, social and paid), so attention should be paid not just to the page content but also delivering brand and trust points.
  
  
• Bulk import products and automatically map to relevant collections - the quickest and easiest way to get your store populated if you're working with a large inventory.
  
  
• Add and integrate 3rd party AI for product personalisation, search, recommendations and audience segmentation - these can all be managed manually via Shopify and a variety of third-party plug-ins using a combination of your knowledge and machine learning; however, AI is more agile and granular and will improve conversion rates.
  
  
• Integrate 3rd party customisable Google Merchant / Shopping feed - Shopify's native feed works fine, but it doesn't have the granular control of the better third-party feeds. For scalability, we start as we mean to go on.
  
  
• Integrate 3rd party automated email marketing tool and set up email templates - Shopify's internal system is perfectly adequate for low-volume stores and start-ups. For high-volume stores, systems like Klayvio have better fine-grain control, though this, of course, comes with a payload!
  
  
• Leverage AI to check copy for SEO best practices and conversion metrics - Shopify has integrated AI to help you with copywriting - ChatGPT and several "boxed" products do the job a little better.
  
  
• Set up advanced analytics and custom reporting - Google Analytics 4 is great out of the box, but customising reports can save days in Excel every reporting period.
  
  
• Go live.
  
  
• Define split tests - best practices get you a long way, but every audience and every store is different. There will always be experiments with visual imagery, tone of voice and page setups. Each audience will feature different demographics and hence different responses to stimuli.
  
  
• Set up automated Google advertising via performance max - we used to do a lot of hard work on shopping and text ad campaigns - Performance Max for this store does it better as Google knows both the products and the make-up of its traffic better than we ever will.
  
  
• Automate reporting and set up relevant KPIs for tracking - again, who wants to spend days trawling raw data in Excel?
  
  
• Let it fly, and review and improve it regularly.