Shoe String Budget: E-commerce Guides & Tutorials

This series covers several basic elements to get your e-commerce business on the right track with respect to website user-experience and search engine optimization (SEO). Small businesses often have goals that they’d like to achieve but don’t have the budget for. These goals tend to improving SEO and/or the user experience. Goals are great! But what do you do when you don’t have the expertise on your team or the budget to achieve a goal?

Do you simply give-up and not make any progress towards achieving these goals? No – these are qualitative and quantitative data problems embedded with a business and software domain that sometimes have accessible solutions. At Residual Insights, we believe that there are always low-hanging, accessible solutions that can be tackled without obtaining expertise and/or breaking the bank.

The internet is full of resources that can help most people get started. We want to be part of that solution. In this series we focus on several elements related to the basics of website SEO and user-experience. We focus on Shopify, but some of these principles can be translated to other e-commerce platforms. Several author e-commerce platforms you may be familiar with are Magento by Adobe Commerce, BigCommerece, WooCommerce, Wix, SquareSpace and others.

Why Shopify?

Shopify is a platform that simplifies business for e-commerce businesses. It accelerated in growth in 2020 during the start of COVID-19, when e-commerce. In 2024, the global e-commerce market is estimated to be worth $6.3 Trillion (That is more than the entirety of Germany’s economy!)

Safe to say, e-commerce will continue expanding. To stay competitive, businesses may need to expand their online presence through platforms such as Shopify.

Shopify simplifies selling, shipping, billing, maintaining and deploying online stores for small (Bruvi) and large companies (Ford Motors and Netflix). It offers a simple dashboard to help manage orders, products, customer and analytics.

Why Users & SEO?

There are numerous facets that drive success as an e-commerce business. Some are more fundamental to the market research of products and others to the deployment to maximize the e-commerce web page success. Market analyses can be achieved through different assessments such as SWOT, VRIO and other analyses to help inform the business-to-business or business-to-consumer strategy. There are also steps that ensure that your online presence maximizes the customer experience and what search engine algorithms prioritize (i.e., SEO). Frankly, if your customers have a bad web experience, they may not come back. Moreover, if your SEO is insufficient, search engine crawlers (algorithms that scrape information off of your webpage to build a blueprint of what it is) may not prioritize your content and you will lose the competitive edge across search engines.

Conclusion

This e-commerce Shopify series will start with the basic principles involved in transferring, maintaining, updating, and maximizing the footprint and visual appearance of your e-commerce business. The series will cover some basic but essential steps:

1. What to ask when transitioning stores from a non-Shopify platform to Shopify. Check it out now!
2. Creating, Maintaining and Enhancing content and search engine optimization (SEO) via AI Agent workflows. Check it out now!

The above steps still require the use of qualitative and quantitative decisions to specify stopping points and pivots in strategy. Which we will try to touch on within each page. As a follow up to these topics, we will plan to provide examples on how to use Shopify data to empower your e-commerce business.