With the pandemic forcing many offline businesses to close down and let go of staff, both work-for-hire specialists and entrepreneurs are looking for new ways to earn money without having to leave their homes or depend on anyone else. Establishing an online brand is a valid option met by today’s public demand. The diversity of product types that could appeal to audiences on a local and global scale is what makes digital marketplaces such an attractive business model. You could start selling literally anything, from clothing and accessories to groceries, art, gadgets, toys, etc.
Maintaining an online store has its challenges, though, and requires a lot of effort to get the process in motion. E-commerce platforms like Shopify provide an invaluable basis for newcomers that need supporting software, tools, and tutorials. Seasoned professionals will also find the service useful, with all the management instruments consolidated in a single space. Since the industry is so big, there are alternative approaches to make money with Shopify, like joining their affiliate program, creating a dropshipping platform, or even offering services to existing stores as a freelancer.
The success of an online store does not solely depend on product quality: the presentation and processing speed, the ease of checkout and payment procedures, and the support from customer service have a huge influence over the user experience. Marketing also plays a crucial role in the resulting revenue and popularity. In this guide, we will cover the monetization strategies that could apply to Shopify stores, as well as tips on best-performing traffic sources and Shopify store management advice.
Shopify is an all-in-one service geared specifically towards creating online retail stores. It can help you save time, money, and effort on starting a new e-commerce business as it offers a website builder with an array of supporting instruments: a system for processing online transactions and a POS (point-of-sale) application for in-person transactions, advertising tools, order tracking, and more. Shopify has a free 14-day trial and three payment plans: $29, $79, and $299 a month, with advanced features included in the more expensive packages, and has a powerful help center with lots of written instructions, tutorials, and how-to videos. There are also Lite and Plus pricing plans for startups and enterprise businesses.
When you sign up for Shopify, you get access to a storefront where you can sell products, add web pages, and upload blog posts. It comes with a payment processor to capture money for the orders and a secure checkout optimized for speed, conversion, and customer experience. Shopify will also provide you with a shipping platform to customize shipping rates and run pickup and delivery. You can leverage their marketing tools like the blog and SEO management kit.
What’s great about Shopify is that you can use it in many different ways: anything from the traditional approach of selling your own products to starting a dropshipping store, becoming their affiliate partner, or monetizing your social media profiles. They take away the pains of managing many different contractors: one for shipping, one for analytics, one for marketing, etc., and provide you with all the necessary tools to do that in a single system. In turn, aside from the monthly service fee, they will also take a cut of your sales (the exact percentage depends on the chosen pricing plan).
Why should you use Shopify for earning money?
Here’s what makes Shopify stand out against other similar platforms and self-hosted solutions:
- Ease of use. Shopify is very intuitive, and setting up your store is almost like creating a social media account. The service will provide complete transparency with built-in performance analytics, so you will be able to keep a close eye on revenue dynamics.
- Tools to aid marketing. SEO features, integration with Google Ads, email marketing, and content marketing via the blog can help with gaining more organic and paid traffic. Otherwise, you would have to use different services or third-party extensions.
- Updates and new features. While you can’t achieve the same level of customization with Shopify as with a self-managed platform, you can be sure that the team behind the service will follow the latest industry trends and standards to stand out against their competitors. All upgrades will be delivered to your account after being tested and fine-tuned, with tutorials and tips on how to use them. They will also provide full technical support.
- Lower upfront costs. Shopify has a free trial and competitive monthly pricing plans that allow you to set up the store and start testing it out in a matter of days. Self-hosted software needs to be developed, tested, and continuously maintained, which makes for high initial investments.
- Multiple sales channels supported. Besides the store website itself, which you can host on your own domain, you can set up and manage a Facebook tab, a Buy button on any other website or blog, shoppable Instagram posts, and a wholesale storefront for B2B products.
- POS system. If an offline branch is something you want to pursue now or in the future, Shopify allows you to sell products in physical locations.
- A good choice for dropshipping. Shopify’s policies for dropshipping are more lenient than with other services, and they even have a dedicated section in their help center with an overview of shipping strategies and guides on how to find suppliers.
- Global coverage. Shopify is in the top three for most popular e-commerce solutions, and they have over a million users. If you are a freelancer looking for work and have related skills to help store owners with marketing, content, or design, you will surely find partnership opportunities in a variety of languages and countries.
How to make money on Shopify
Before you sign up for Shopify, you should already have a clear vision of the product you are going to sell, the source where you will get it from, and a pricing strategy that will allow you to start seeing a profit. You can either sell something tangible or digital that you created or work with suppliers, be a middleman between the customer and the manufacturer or handle everything on your end — all options can bring in money, given the right approach to marketing and pricing.
Build your own e-commerce store
Since Shopify is a platform that allows you to quickly put together a store with templates and pre-made modules, the most obvious approach is to use it in the traditional way. If you already have a brick-n-mortar brand, taking it online would require linking it to a POS system and preparing content for the website. You can distribute the products through local pickup or partner up with a delivery service.
Velasca sells handcrafted leather shoes online while maintaining more than a dozen retail stores throughout Europe.
Company type: Product-based
Effort: Medium
Leverage: Medium
Initial costs: 2/5
Earning potential: 4/5
Maintain a dropshipping business
The dropshipping model (‘buy low, sell high’) has a few unbeatable advantages: you don’t need to worry about product storage, creation, or shipping since all of that is handled by the supplier of goods you advertise. The only thing you have to do is attract clients, so most of your budget will be spent on marketing. Since you only place an order for the product once the client pays for it, the wholesale price from the supplier won’t be included in the costs.
The biggest challenge with dropshipping is to keep shipping times down and customer experience up. If you work with platforms like AliExpress, the long wait can frustrate clients, even though they would be willing to wait for products that are unique enough. You can turn to eBay or similar services to look for suppliers in your locale. As for quality control, you should definitely buy a few sample products and have them shipped to your place. Study the packaging and tracking, make sure the description is accurate for the actual product.
A Spotify-based dropshipping store that sells dog stockings.
Company type: Product-based
Effort: Medium
Leverage: High
Initial costs: 3/5
Earning potential: 4/5
Join Shopify’s affiliate program
Shopify affiliates are influencers, bloggers, or website owners with an established audience and a digital presence that raise awareness about the service and get a reward every time someone follows through with their referral link and signs up for one of Shopify’s paid plans. You can apply for the program here, there are no entry fees but you will need to wait for the platform to approve your application.
The benefit of this approach is that you don’t have to do anything associated with products or stores: no customer service, returns, shipping, storage, etc. All you have to do is create original content, like video tutorials or overview articles, that would highlight Spotify’s value. You don’t need to have any e-commerce experience either if you get to know the service well enough. This could also become a source of passive income, if, say, you upload a video to YouTube and it stays there, attracting new views via search.
Company type: Service-based
Effort: Low
Leverage: Medium
Initial costs: 1/5
Earning potential: 3/5
Establish a clothing or accessory brand
Shopify has a large client base that uses the services for selling apparel and offers an array of supporting instruments like product variants like sizes and colors, collections, and image sets to properly display clothing items. Accessories fall into a similar category since they can come in different sizes (like rings, gloves, or bags) and need a similar organizational structure of the website. You can also leverage Shopify apps to add detailed size guides on product pages.
Starting a clothing line is not an easy way to earn money, though, as it requires you to come up with designs, purchase fabrics, facilitate sample creation with a suitable manufacturer, and test out the creations until you are satisfied with the result. To make sure the initial investments are returned, you should have a strong brand identity, an underlying concept, and a positioning strategy to set the line apart since clothing is a very competitive e-commerce niche.
Hiut Denim Co. sells jeans for men and women.
Company type: Product-based
Effort: High
Leverage: Medium
Initial costs: 4/5
Earning potential: 4/5
Choose a niche product and target its audience
Niche products make for less competition, and even though they generally cannot attract a broad audience, the segment that would be interested in them will be much more receptive to marketing campaigns. That’s because you would intentionally choose to target a group of people with a certain need or pain point, and the product in question should fall into their demand. Some trending handmade items, organic beauty products, and specialty foods.
Meow Meow Tweet is an organic vegan skincare company.
Company type: Product-based
Effort: High
Leverage: Medium
Initial costs: 3/5
Earning potential: 4/5
Create a local food delivery service or a grocery store
The pandemic prompted the rise of online grocery shopping and restaurant take-out services, and the trend keeps on gaining momentum. While there is bound to be competition in large cities, smaller towns might yet to have delivery representatives, and you could take advantage of that by partnering up with a store or farmer’s market. As for marketing the shop, rely on geolocation as the main audience segmentation factor.
Partake gives a good example of combining the niche and grocery concepts in a single store.
Company type: Product-based
Effort: Medium
Leverage: High
Initial costs: 3/5
Earning potential: 5/5
Offer digital products and monetize downloads
Digital products like games, stock photos, e-books, mobile applications, and Shopify store themes can also be distributed via a Shopify-based website. Make sure you only sell goods that you legally own the rights to. With a self-produced virtual product like a podcast, a webinar, or an educational course, you could make money and not have to worry about physically maintaining storage or a manufacturing center. This is a suitable niche for starting on a smaller budget and purchasing more equipment or software to invest in product quality later on.
Day One Publications sell eBooks.
Company type: Product-based
Effort: Medium
Leverage: Medium
Initial costs: 3/5
Earning potential: 3/5
Sell products via your social accounts
Shopify supports social commerce and enables sales directly on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook with ‘Buy now’ buttons. Influencers and bloggers that want to start selling their own merchandise can easily convert their loyal followers to customers since the user won’t need to leave the app or provide their payment information, which makes for a very seamless purchase. Brands with online stores that use social media as a marketing channel can benefit from the additional source of income.
Company type: Product-based
Effort: Low
Leverage: Medium
Initial costs: 1/5
Earning potential: 3/5
Offer freelance services to existing Shopify stores
This way of earning with Shopify is more like a regular job than entrepreneurship: it allows you to have a stable source of income for a remote service that you offer and doesn’t involve much risk. There are also no up-front costs as all you have to do is put together a portfolio and add it to a website like Upwork. You can offer help with anything from marketing, photography, store design, content, advertising, or even streamline the production by building your own team of freelancers and managing them.
Company type: Service-based
Effort: Medium
Leverage: Medium
Initial costs: 1/5
Earning potential: 4/5
Make a print-on-demand store
The print-on-demand model is similar to a dropshipping store in a way: you work with a supplier that handles the customization, packaging, and shipping for you once you receive an order from a client. A drawback lies in higher production costs since the items are not purchased in bulk. However, that approach allows you to mitigate risks in having unrealized goods. You will likely need a graphic designer to handle the inventory, which could be anything from t-shirts to mugs.
The Classic Dad store sells print-on-demand t-shirts with dad jokes.
Company type: Product-based
Effort: Low
Leverage: Medium
Initial costs: 3/5
Earning potential: 4/5
Showcase your art
You can use Shopify for selling art: the resulting online store could be regarded as a gallery that showcases your best pieces and offers the option to buy them online. This could apply to paintings, photographs, videos, songs, lyrics, or anything creative that you create. You could also leverage the print-on-demand method described above to cover a wider audience with different product types.
Amira Rahim showcases prints on a Shopify-powered website.
Company type: Product-based
Effort: Medium
Leverage: Medium
Initial costs: 2/5
Earning potential: 3/5
What are the best practices to make money with Shopify?
All of the ways described above have an earning potential — greater for some, lower for others — but simply going with a chosen concept and putting your new online store out there is not enough to cash in on it. If you want a business that keeps on delivering revenue in the long run, you will have to work on presentation and customer experience.
Work on product presentation
Your website has to be visually appealing, well-structured, and have a clear representation of all the products you offer. That means choosing a uniform color scheme, providing high-quality photographs and possibly videos, and writing detailed descriptions for each store item. Include as much factual information as possible to make the customer feel confident in their choice and add a call-to-action like the ‘Buy’ button to each page.
Know your target customer and competition
Shopify is a very popular platform, and the chances are, someone is already selling a similar product (or even the same one) on the basis of it. Your goal is to find an unoccupied market position, so even before you dive into setting up your store, look for competitors that offer similar services. Study their pricing, stock, and presentation, and try to gauge which audience segment they are covering. You can get inspired by their best practices and work on improving weak spots.
Focus on customer experience
There is nothing worse than an unhappy customer: if the product itself is great but something went wrong with shipping, delivery, packaging, or payment, their overall impression of your brand will be tainted. Shopify offers an array of automation instruments for most of these order stages, so your focus should be on only working with trusted providers, monitoring product quality, and quickly responding to any issues. A seamless online shopping experience and responsive customer service make for repeat clients.
Stay flexible and monitor feedback
At the end of the day, customer demand is the main driver for any product-based business, no matter if it is online or offline. To continue offering relevant goods and keep the customers happy, you should follow the latest trends in website design, adjust pricing strategies, discontinue products that do not perform well, and add new items to the store. Consider adding short questionnaires or review sections for products to monitor feedback and customer satisfaction.
What are the ways to gain traffic to your Shopify store?
Yet another challenge to overcome in the quest for making money with Shopify is attracting traffic to your store. This is especially pressing for newly established websites or brands that cannot rely on word-of-mouth or organic traffic and need the initial boost to raise awareness. Shopify does offer some build-in tools to facilitate marketing and offers integration with popular services like Google Ads to help you gain more views and leads.
PPC ads
PPC ads are a great fit for online store promotion since they are only displayed for relevant search queries and are set up on a pay-per-click basis. Usually, these types of ads lead to a landing page, but in the case of a Shopify-powered website, you can use a specific product page that corresponds to the chosen ad image and text. You can run these campaigns on a variety of resources, Google Shopping Ads being the most common example.
Social media ads
Social ads heavily rely on targeting: generally, people on social media are not looking to buy anything at the moment, and might even ignore banner ads that are not powerful enough to attract their attention. Test out different images and slogans to see what works best and play with demographic and location data to reach the right audience segment. Retargeting strategies tend to work very well for social ads as the potential customer will recognize the product or brand, which can stop them from scrolling down right away.
SEO
Search engine optimization is more of a long-run strategy as it would take a few months to start seeing a steady flow of organic traffic triggered by your actions, but it is definitely something worth the effort. The blog section provided by Shopify is a great instrument to start with since you can regularly post informational articles or product overviews to attract a wider audience. You should also look into optimizing the meta-descriptions on each product page, which is something that Shopify also has.
Influencer marketing
Partnering up with influencers is something to consider when the store is already performing well but needs an extra boost since it can get you access to their loyal audience. With product-oriented stores, the most common partnership is sending someone your goods for free in exchange for a review. Another option to consider is a sponsored promotion. Make sure the chosen influencer would be the right fit for the product and request their media kits in advance to study their audience profile.
Content marketing
Another long-term strategy to consider, content marketing is more about building a stronger brand presence than selling products right away. You can create helpful tutorials, industry-relevant podcasts, or even share your expertise in the business side of maintaining a Shopify store, like dealing with shipping issues or finding the right suppliers, to engage the audience. If your content has value for the customer, they will automatically think of your products as more valuable too.
Conclusion
Platforms that power e-commerce stores, like Shopify, are built with the customer in mind and provide a great array of tools to aid monetization. Some of the strategies to earn money require active involvement, like managing your clothing brand or supporting a dropshipping business, others, like selling art or offering freelance services, look more like a nine-to-five job opportunity. That means that regardless of your previous experience and skills, you could find an option that would work for you.
Entrepreneurs that want to establish their online stores should come to Shopify prepared with a product line and concept, initial investments, substantial market research, and a strong positioning strategy. The platform does help streamline the creation and set-up processes but can only aid promotion and marketing to a certain extent. Whether you make the best of the given opportunity or become yet another website in a pool of competitors is up to you.