Ecommerce Marketing Blog

Your store launches only once. You want to use the launch as a chance to get as much traffic and attention as you can.

Before you become a seasoned marketer with big sales, there are a number of things that you can do to get traffic to take advantage of a grand opening.

This post is all about getting traffic your new store by targeting influencers and getting attention to your new online store. We offer some actionable tactics and provide six templates you can copy and paste to use for your campaigns. And at the end we share the most important things you should do as an established business to keep the momentum going.

Now let’s start getting you some traffic.

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Coming up with a product idea is just the beginning of a long but exciting road to building your online business. The next step is to figure out how you’re going to acquire the products you want to sell. There are several options when it comes to acquiring your new products, and each option has its advantages, disadvantages, as well as unique challenges.

The four most common methods of acquiring your products and inventory are:

• Make
• Manufacture
• Wholesale
• Dropship

It’s important to understand each of these methods in order to make the right choice for your business. There are pros and cons to each of the methods, and depending on you product, market, and niche, one may be more suitable for you and your business than the others.

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Today we crossed a major milestone: 100,000 businesses now use Shopify to power their stores.

The first Shopify store was actually my own. Almost a decade ago, I wanted to sell snowboards online. The options for shopping carts were either extremely expensive, or painfully complicated. Eventually this frustration was channeled into creating Shopify. We set out on a mission: to make ecommerce easier and more affordable, so that anyone could start their own online store.

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If you thought you had all your social commerce bases covered, you might be in for a surprise.

Launched in 2007, Polyvore has gradually emerged as one of the most effective social platforms for ecommerce sites to drive high-value traffic and sales from.

Focusing on fashion and home décor, the community powered social network allows you to create collections and collages called “sets”. These sets can be made up of products from online stores around the web – including your own.

Polyvore is home to over 80 million shoppable products, with users creating 4 million new sets every month. 

In other words, it's an engaged community of curators and shoppers and source of traffic and sales you can no longer afford to ignore. 

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How do you get more sales and repeat customers for your ecommerce business?

That’s the number one question most online store owners want answered. Most of the time, it comes down to making small improvements and optimizations to your site over time.

But where do you start? 

To give you some ideas and inspiration, we decided to take a look at Harry's, a 12-month old ecommerce business powered by $122.5M in venture capital funding. Harry's sells razors and grooming products for men and was founded by Jeffrey Raider and Andy Katz-Mayfield. Raider was one of the cofounders behind Warby Parker, the popular ecommerce service for eyeglasses founded in 2010 and currently rumored to be valued at around $500 million.

Surely with all that money and experience they must be doing something right.

Let's find out :) 

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When it comes to building a highly profitable ecommerce business, choosing the right product is without a doubt the most important piece of the puzzle.

A critical first step in making sure you’ve picked a winner is evaluating the market demand, competition and viability of the product itself.

Get this step wrong and you run the risk of wasting your time and energy, or worse, sinking a bunch of money into inventory you can’t move.

Get it right and you set yourself up for sales and success.

To help you determine if you’ve got a viable and profitable product idea on your hands, we’ve put together this comprehensive guide that shows you exactly how to take a look “under the hood” of your market and your product to make sure you’re building your business on a strong foundation.

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Chris Dammacco bought his first video game console, the Nintendo Entertainment System, at the age of 6. His grandmother gave him $100 as a birthday present and told him to go buy an NES.

From that moment on he was a gamer.

That passion has never faded. Last year Chris started Windy Gaming, a business around vintage, or retro, video games as a side-project while working full-time. Today the childhood passion and side-project has turned into a full-time ecommerce business that yields him about $1,000 per week. What’s even more amazing is that he’s managed to accomplish all this with a basic website, a modest following on social media, and a very DIY approach to product photography.

We document that journey and draw out the lessons you might apply to turn your own passions into a successful (and profitable) full-time business.

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Michael Packer, owner of Packer Shoes, knows a thing or two about sneakers. His family has been in the business for three generations. The original Packer Shoes store was started by his grandfather and great-uncle in Yonkers, New York in 1907. 

A lot of things have changed since then, like the store's relocation to Teaneck, New Jersey, and the company's foray into ecommerce, not to mention its budding clientele from around the world. But what hasn't changed is Packer Shoe's commitment to their community which now consists of "sneaker heads" – people who are so passionate about shoes they don't mind camping out overnight to get their hands on the latest and greatest pair.

With 107 years of history behind them, Packer Shoes continues to blend the old with the new, maintaining its heritage, while embracing the modern. Their non-traditional approach to offline and online marketing has allowed the company to adapt and thrive to this day.

In this success story, I catch up with Mike to get to know more about how he runs his retail business and successfully sells both online and offline.  

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Good product photography is important. It increases the perceived value of your products and makes your website appear more trustworthy.

But taking your products to a professional photographer can be expensive if you're just starting out. That’s why we put together the ultimate DIY guide to beautiful product photography, so that you too can shoot some gorgeous pictures that sell.

As a follow-up, we’ve compiled 40 tools and resources to help you take your own product photos.

Here they are.

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Earlier this week, a security flaw known as Heartbleed was published that affects approximately two-thirds of all websites that use SSL encryption. This issue greatly impacts ecommerce websites because every online store that accepts credit cards must use SSL encryption.

Since its disclosure, there have been many news reports about Heartbleed and how it’s affecting websites, software and services across the internet. We want to provide more details on Heartbleed and how it affects ecommerce merchants. Most importantly, we want to stress that merchants and their customers using Shopify are safe from Heartbleed. 

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