Introduction
Modern-day consumers have constantly honed their tastes and demands. In such a context, finding the right eCommerce platform is the pinnacle of a thriving and sustainably successful eCommerce business. However, as a matter of fact, each eCommerce solution comes with its own set of challenges and constraints.
If you have been around the bend with Shopify problems and wonder what to do when Shopify issues an alert, you are landing in the right place. In this article, I’ll tour you through 6 Shopify issues and some actionable tips to get the roadblocks out of the way.
Let’s delve a little more deeply into it!
Read more: Understand the Shopify Reporting & Data
Outline
I. Why Shopify is The Best Ecommerce Platform?
Shopify
Founded in 2004, Shopify is the most popular hosted eCommerce solution in the market. Powering more than 3.500.000 million live websites as of September 2021, this subscription-based software provides you with an out-of-the-box package to get off the ground quickly without breaking a sweat.
This platform also comes with a Shopify Plus version to support big brands and enterprises. Therefore, Shopify can be a go-to solution for any store owner, regardless of their business sizes and types.
At first glance, Shopify, like other hosted platforms, is renowned for its simplicity and ease of use. With a straightforward and user-friendly dashboard and interface, creating a Shopify store in minutes is as easy as an apple pie. You only need to go through some simple steps, including filling in an email address, password, your store name, and some further configurations.
Create a Shopify store
However, unlike open-source platforms like PrestaShop, you don’t have to trade ease-of-use for customization and control. You can choose your own adventure as Shopify allows customizing some aspects of your online store and shopping experience using custom code and beyond with Shopify Liquid. Besides, Shopify also arms you with an impressive range of built-in features and an astonishing amount of add-ons and integrated functions.
With a bunch of eCommerce tools and sale features, Shopify also offers great sales potential. There is a stack of core functions to run an online business included in Shopify, such as Shopify inventory management, Shopify app store, Shopify reporting and analytics, superb functions in spheres of multi-channel & omnichannel, dropshipping, payment & shipping, and a decent range of marketing features.
Having said that, Shopify is used by many big brands, such as Tesla, Nestle, PepsiCo, Red Bull, NetFlix, BCC, and The Economist.
The Economist
Above all, reading customer’s reviews is presumably the best way to give you the most accurate insight about Shopify. For some inspiration, let’s take a look at two notable Shopify users experiences!
“They provide a product that enables online businesses to thrive. Anyways, they've been fantastic to work with, and without their products, I'd never have been able to get my online business off the ground without committing dozens of more hours to it every month.” - Thomas Costa.
“Shopify changed our business. We switched from Magento to Shopify in 2014. The money we used to spend on developers, hosting and payment gateways could now be spent on marketing and new hires. Our business became profitable shortly after switching to Shopify and we can do most of the UX and site design in-house. It's affordable and their customer service is incredible. Very helpful and hands-on. I recommend Shopify to anyone starting or growing their eCommerce business.” - Chrissy Crawford.
In a nutshell, Shopify is one of the top-notch eCommerce platforms on the market. However, as the market continues to grow, it also entails challenges for its users.
In the part below, I’ll identify 6 typical Shopify issues that users might have to deal with when running their online store on this platform. Stay tuned!
II. 6 Shopify Issues and How to Fix them effectively
01. Poor Site Performance
Site performance, succinctly put, is all about your site speed. Without a doubt, it is one of the most important factors that will decide the success of your Shopify store.
A lightning-fast page load time brings the customers a superb user experience (UX), thus, directly affects the conversion rate, the bounce rate of your site, and your sales revenue.
Besides, site speed is also an important SEO ranking factor of Google. A blistering fast site will satisfy not only the users but also Google. Therefore, every second does count! These numbers speak for themselves:
- A one-second faster page speed can result in a 7% increase in sales.
- 57 % of visitors will leave a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
- A two-second delay in page load time can lead to abandonment rates of up to 87%.
Therefore, check to remove any bugs or needlessly long and tedious tasks and processes. If you don’t want to lose your edge due to a slow-loading time, here are some useful recommendations to respond quickly when your Shopify store has downtime.
- Disable pop-ups
- Use a content delivery network
- Prioritize mobile optimization
- Optimize images: Decrease thumbnail, images in size and number
- Minify your codes
- Reduce redirects and broken links
Save your time by purchasing the all-in-one SEO apps on Shopify such as SEOAnt, Avada SEO Suite, TinyIMG, etc.
02. Problem with getting products on store
Getting products on store is also a headache for first-time Shopify users. Actually, you can easily list your products for sale on Shopify by importing your items using CSV files. However, the conundrum really is that this process can be failed if there arise any errors.
As a result, it can be grueling at times to bulk uploads or transfers on Shopify that can lead to stagnation down the road. That being the case, it’s of great importance to backup data to avoid any data loss to gain momentum. Fortunately, you can easily backup your Shopify store manually by choosing the information you want to backup and clicking on “Export”.
Backup data on Shopify
Besides, bear in mind that Shopify only allows users to involve up to 3 product options with 100 variants of a product. If you want to extend the limits, you have to lean on other paid apps.
03. Shopify security issues
One of the biggest nightmares of eCommerce owners is a data breach that leads to the loss of confidential data such as credit card details.
A data breach can lead to financial loss, reputational damage, operational downtime, and some legal consequences. In number, the cost of the data breach was $4.24 trillion in 2021. Therefore, if you are running an online store, security should be a bare necessity.
Threats from hackers and fraudsters
As you may know, Shopify is a privileged eCommerce platform certified with Level 1 PCI DSS compliant. The rise in cybercrime and cyber threats, however, comes as no surprise. Therefore, multi-layered authentication, SSN verification, and identity checks are crucial to staying ahead of fraudsters.
Along with regular data backups, it’s also smart to invest in security plugins and safety components as well as update your eCommerce platform. Or else, your Shopify is bound to be vulnerable to hackers and fraudsters.
The general rule of thumb is that you should always look out for signs of suspicious activity, identify current threats and you can’t go wrong with the frequency of updating your platform with official patches, plugins developed by its creators.
04. Shopify themes editor issues
- Page is redirecting to an unsupported URL
A redirect code could exist in your Shopify theme or appear when you install an app on your Shopify store. It might cause unexpected redirects to URLs that aren’t connected to your Shopify store.
To disable the redirects, make sure to replace “window.location.href =” with “window.parent.location.href =” in the JavaScript code of your theme. Or else, you can use a reference to the window.Shopify.designMode variable in JavaScript.
- Page failed to load due to an error
Page errors
Your Shopify site can be unable to load due to network connection issues or invalid Liquid code in your Shopify theme, especially during peak traffic periods.
Once you found the problems, you should navigate to the “Preview Theme” section in the “Theme Actions” of the theme editor to easily look for the errors and fix them, or contact Shopify support for help with your storefront.
- HTML error found
If your theme code includes a syntax error, you might see an “HTML error found” warning message in the editor.
HTML error found
Fortunately, you can easily solve the issue by examining the code in the Liquid file that is referenced in the error message. For instance, if there appears a message: “Broken HTML has been detected in your theme’s the.liquid file.
Check that there are no missing or extra HTML tags present”, you should press on the “the.liquid” that links directly to the incorrect file and you can fix it right off the bat.
05. Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is one of the most common Shopify issues. As Shopify sorts your products by tags, a single item could have multiple indexable URLs. To get the problem solved, you can de-index your pages so that the tag pages won’t be crawled by Google. For more specific, you should add the following code before closing the head tag </head>.
{% if template contains ‘collection’ and current_tags %}
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex” />
<link rel=”canonical” href=”{{ shop.url }}{{ collection.url }}” />
{% else %}
<link rel=”canonical” href=”{{ canonical_url }}” />
{% endif %}
Or else, you can create tags collections in order to customize page titles, meta descriptions, URLs, content, and more.
Related article:
How to Fix Duplicate Content Issues in Shopify?
06. Multi-channel selling management
In a world with desktop and mobile devices, customers are shopping in more locations than ever. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, multi-channel selling will shape the future of eCommerce.
This said and put to one side, the benefits of multi-channel selling are just the tip of the iceberg. The actual management of multiples selling channels can be so stressful and tricky. Therefore, moving toward an omnichannel retailing strategy is essential so as not to lag behind your competitors.
Simply put, omnichannel and multichannel are two different things although they both involve selling across multiple channels. The key difference is that while omnichannel integrates all selling channels into a unified system, multichannel does all the communication channels separately.
Multi-selling tool
To overcome obstacles and consistently win, you should identify key channels to focus on. Along with Shopify, you can consider integrating your Shopify with marketplaces, such as Amazon, Etsy. Besides, be consistent, maintain context, and keep track.
In addition, you should centralize all your orders, inventory, and customer data into one system to easily manage every aspect of your Shopify store consistently. Moreover, all of your touchpoints need to be unified, such as brand messages and pricing. Or else, you will bury your business.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, technical issues, perhaps, are the most tough-to-crack Shopify challenges. To thrive and succeed, you can follow a check-and-fix approach or seek help from Shopify experts.
Hope that this article is helpful to you. Thank you for reading and good luck with your business!
Author bio: Camellia
Camellia has always wanted to pursue writing as a career and she has been a content executive at LitExtension - The #1 Shopping Cart Migration Expert for years! She is an award winning author whose works include marketing and eCommerce.
