Why is Shopify not making me any money?

Take responsibility: You can’t blame Shopify if your store doesn’t perform well. Shopify is just a platform. It is your responsibility to make your store work. Find your own way: You can’t rely on what online courses teach you. Their business model is selling to beginners, and they usually old techniques that no longer work. The ecom market is very dynamic, so stay up-to-date and be innovative. Competitive edge: In any kind of business, you should have some sort of advantage over the competition. It doesn’t have to be huge. It can be something simple that your customers appreciate, a particular way to reach customers, a social cause that your brand represents, etc. Be unique: There are tens of thousands of online stores that look pretty much the same. You can’t expect people to buy from you if you don’t offer any unique value, be it special products, pricing, design, or whatever. You also don’t buy products unless they provide something unique for you. Build a brand: This is important primarily if you sell online and compete against so many vendors. A brand helps customers relate to you faster, makes you memorable and trustworthy. Be clear: Make sure your messaging is short, catchy, and clear. If it’s not, you’ll lose customers for sure. Find your niche: Don’t sell random products and don’t go for a whole category of products, especially at the start. Find a specific niche of product that attracts a specific group of people. Be very focused. Learn to target customers: Learn how to attract relevant customers. Marketing is not measured by the cost of bringing customers to your landing page instead of by the cost of making a sale. So, learn how to target customers who actually buy your products. Retarget: It’s not over when customers leave your store because you can retarget them. Retargeting ads are beneficial and inexpensive. Retain your customers: Bringing customers to your store is just half of the marketing work. You need to keep your customers engaged, even when they’re not in your store. Email marketing is usually the way to go, but don’t send annoying emails, it won’t work unless you provide value. Last but not least: Measure, test, and improve: Don’t expect to be successful from day one. Your store’s current performance is neither good nor bad. It’s merely the baseline that you need to work on and improve. It requires time and effort, but if you’re methodical you’ll succeed

Don’t believe the guys who sell courses, and their business model is to get rich at your expense. Probably around 0.01% get rich fast, the rest have to work hard to get there. Looking for a winning product is not a good strategy in the beginning because you need a sound marketing system to test products. In the beginning, you don’t have a system. Take it one step at a time, find a niche, find your customers, crystalize a unique selling point, and run many ab tests to improve your numbers. If you stick to this method and don’t look for a miracle, you will find excellent opportunities.

Shopify won’t sell products for you, just like your phone’s camera won’t take photos for you. Shopify is simply a platform for you to build your store; you can’t blame it. You have to really know your product and market. Trying to sell products that other people sell won’t work. Find a niche, build a brand, and learn to promote it. You can always find help for the fields that you don’t feel so confident about. There are many experts out there looking for work.

One of the problems, in the beginning, is that you may not have enough products to support the costs of a website. What I mean is that you spend money on marketing to bring people to your store, but there’s no variety, so if they don’t like one or two products, they have no alternative. Search for products that are in demand but not products that already sell on Amazon because it’d be impossible for you to compete with them. Don’t spend too much money on ads before you get a positive return. Look at it as an experiment until you sell more than you spend. Then you can increase your budget.

Shopify is the platform, and there’s no magic about it. You need to design the store, take care of inventory, and do the marketing. It is up to you to make your business work. You have to understand the advantages and not expect the impossible. Shopify allows you to have a business, both on and offline. It provides all the infrastructure that you need to run the business.

Shopify will never make you money. That’s your job, and Shopify is a tool that helps you do that. Even if you understand products, marketing, and how to operate Shopify all you want, you still have to understand the consumer. If you’re just looking for that super product and don’t follow your passion or try to create value for your customer, then I think you’ll fail.