• Analysts predict online retail revenue will hit a total of $8.1 trillion by the end of 2024.
  • Availability is an emerging trend – 46% of consumers say they will move to suppliers who always have the products they want in stock.
  • Self-service, automated and customized experiences are what both retail consumers, and B2B businesses expect.
This is the second part of a two part series, read the first part here!

Fast and Modern Checkout Process

💡 One-click checkout can lift your conversion rate by as much as 50% when compared to a guest checkout option.

Using a one-click checkout is the best way to streamline and reduce cart abandonment, it reduces the scope for distractions, and ensures customers can strike while the irons hot!

It’s perfect for impulse buys and splurges, although not for all items such as high ticket or custom items, so make sure it fits your product line and customer base.

© Shopify.com
Here’s the payment gateways that support One-click
  1. Shop Pay
  2. CartPop
  3. Instant Checkout
  4. Link with Stripe
  5. PayPal One Touch
  6. Meta Pay (formerly Facebook Pay)
👉 Key focus: We all know that ‘time is money’, and it certainly would be an oddity if this was your customer’s first rodeo. The reality is customers know exactly what to do, and what to expect. They just want to get it done without thinking.
  • Customers really don’t want to have to enter information, the process can feel arduous, and one-click takes the hassle out of it.
  • It’s super easy to enable:
    • Shopify Admin via the Settings > Payments > Manage section – simply enable Shop Pay or a compatible option from the list above and you’ll be ready to go.
    • You don’t need to do any code modifications.

High-quality Images and Product Video

📷 Did you know – 22% of returns are due to the product looking different in person! Products with high-quality images had a 94% higher conversion rate than low-quality and receive 95% more organic traffic – Source

A prime example of product details done right! Everything comes together here to create an optimal experience for the consumer.

A picture is worth a thousand words, and in many cases, millions more in revenue! Get creative and find your passion for your product.

This is time to delight your customers and put your product on center stage.
  • Good pictures will make or break a dating profile, and products are not different in anyway, if anything it’s even more intense!
  • Humans are highly intelligent, evolved hunters, we search and we find. This is all a visual process that happens rapidly, and often entirely at the subconscious or subliminal level.
  • There are hardware limitations and technical constraints, with all the above considered – it always has to work fast on Mobile.
💡 Hire a professional photographer on instagram to do your product photos, your photographer can be located anywhere in the world if your product is shippable, you can ship it to them and they can take the shots for you.

I recommend using someone who’s experienced and offers this as a service, aiming to continue to work with them and build a working relationship, so that artistic ideas can be fostered, it takes time and repetition to create wonderful results.

This isn’t a fast task to blast through. Done right, it will be set in stone for many years.

For mass edits of dozens to hundreds of products, upload your raw product photos to a service provider that offers background replacement such as https://removal.ai or https://www.cutout.pro/remove-background/upload

Product Recommendation Strategy

📷 Product placement and planograms are a huge part of the retail industry, they are a part of our everyday lives and the same applies to the online marketplace.



Nothing is there by chance when you visit a store

Recently viewed, frequently bought together and bundle upsell deals are key to getting the most out of your store.

Many professional themes offer these features natively as a theme section for OS 2.0 – and third-party options also exist.

The premise is extremely simple, a deal is offered that is too good to refuse, or at a seemingly ‘perfect timing’ to the customer, and the cart amount naturally increases.

The execution is where so many fail. Because speed is so important, and often overlooked, it’s common to find stores trying to accomplish this with the use of numerous plugins and code customizations.

Achieving a workable execution doesn’t mean it needs to be overly complicated, in-fact quite the opposite!

You just need to provide a recommendation, a coupon or upsell to the user at the cart and product levels pre-checkout so it’s all added and ready to go for a one-click checkout.

👉 Product recommendations are built into Shopify, here is the API – https://shopify.dev/docs/api/ajax/reference/product-recommendations

An ideal way to implement this into your theme is via either a theme section, or by having it coded natively by a Shopify expert, because there is no on-going overhead or membership, and there is also no real discernible performance overhead in comparison with going with an App.



When going down the app route, the defacto app that I have seen perform well on countless stores is this one – https://apps.shopify.com/frequently-bought-together

There is very little overhead, and a free plan exists. You can also trial it for 30 days, so it’s well worth evaluating first.

Email Marketing Never Dies



©FinancesOnline.com

Email should be your first port of call once your store is setup with great images, and when it’s combined with a fast loading store, with a one click checkout, it’s a rigid and secure framework that can be scaled to gigantic proportions.

With email the sky is truly the limit, you can scale your business to bigger then your wildest dreams. But it won’t happen overnight, and it will have costs involved.

The first step is collecting emails (which Shopify does automatically) – then from there is engaging with them and building a routine to regularly email promotions out. To achieve this I highly recommend using Klaviyo.

Klaviyo has many features for developing your email flow (the order in which automatic emails are sent to customers) and for managing your newsletters.

⚠️ An important caveat when using Klaviyo is that you must not enable the full forms functionality and just collect emails in the default vanilla way with Shopify instead – because if you enable these forms it will detriment your pagespeed, especially on Mobile.

This is a known issue – https://help.klaviyo.com/hc/en-us/articles/1260805704029

How to Effectively Use Live chat and AI Chatbots

Being able to ask questions, get support or just talk to someone at the store has a wealth of advantages for your business. Good customer service starts with availability. and having a live chat is the perfect match!

💡 Really consider using Instagram or X’s inbox for your primary chat, instead of a third-party app – if your business size can support this, as you will grow your followers, whilst being in direct contact with your consumer for no additional cost.

For larger companies, and where there is capacity for multiple customer support roles, using a app makes sense. The official Shopify Inbox app has good performance, although it is somewhat limited, check it out here: https://www.shopify.com/inbox

For premium apps that tie into a customer support ticketing system such as Zendesk – you’ll need a more advanced chat app such as Gorgias or Tidio. These offer more feature reach chat such as AI, ticketing and automated responses.

Be aware there are some cons when using these more advanced apps, finding the balance of pagespeed performance and app configuration can be a challenge, and adding a chat app will often by too much of a burden to load fast on mobile, so that’s why I opt for a more KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid) approach by just utilizing the existing social media as the chat platform.



In my field studies, the best platform for this was Instagram, as the users tend to be more affluent and responsive and desire the product, so simply they just want to convert, especially on weekends.

It can really be like shooting fish in a barrel when it’s all optimized and running together!

Get connected with your followers and watch your notifications blow up organically!

Looking For The Next Steps?

It’s never too late to get started optimizing your online business and improving the customer experience, don’t know where to start? Give us the word and consider it done!

We’ve optimized countless stores, improving the ROI for our clients and ensuring consumers get a better online experience, don’t put it off – start boosting your store today and reap the fruits of your labor come Black Friday / Cyber Monday 2025

If you are under-performing, get a head start on the year and get your store performing now 👉 Contact Us here!