Top Reasons Shopify Stores Fail:

Shopify stores (and small businesses in general) are notorious for how fast they rise and fall. As a result, many people find themselves wondering why theirs does not work. In general, the number one reason that a Shopify store fails is that the items being sold are too general. The phrase generally used to narrow down the items sold to a target demographic would be ‘niche down’. The whole idea behind niche-ing down your store is to identify a target demographic, such as yoga moms in urban areas, and find an item that would fit suit to them. When everyone has the same idea of selling general merchandise on Shopify, it saturates the Shopify market. Some important questions to ask yourself when setting up your site might be: “Why would someone buy an item off of my site instead of Amazon?”. Or another great question could be: “Why would someone want to tell their friends about my product?”. This all ties into the concept of building a brand. Building a brand is a huge part of having a successful company; you want your potential customers to associate value with your brand and have it mean something to them. An example for this might be kayaks. You can go purchase a kayak on Amazon easily, what would make a potential customer want to purchase a kayak from you instead of Amazon? The answer put simply is brand recognition. Brand recognition is really the only reason small businesses are able to get by anymore since Walmart or Amazon has 99% of the market covered. If you put out content related to kayaking consistently and present your company with the outdoorsy-adventurous aesthetic that a kayak customer would look for, they might be more drawn to purchase from you instead of a larger retailer. To reiterate the earlier point, if you set up a Shopify store selling a bunch of random items that might appeal to one person here or there, it would be very difficult to build a brand that a common group of people can be enthusiastic about. The only real businesses that can survive with the ‘sell everything’ tactic are brands like Walmart and Amazon. Usually, you don’t see people screaming from the rooftops about how incredible Walmart and Amazon are, they simply buy from them out of convenience. Unless you have a trillion dollar brand like Amazon, good luck selling general items like they do. Shopify stores fail because their items are too general and not directed to a specific demographic. The best way to fix this problem is to think of a target group of people you’d like to sell to and think of an item that best fits them. If you can establish a core group of people who are enthusiastic about your product, people will talk about your brand and it will spread from there. Ask yourself why people would buy from you instead of Amazon. What makes you stand out?