If you’re opting to follow this strategy and create a website for your business, Shopify makes it easy to get started and reduces the time to market (TTM).
Building a one-product Shopify store involves signing up to Shopify, choosing a theme, and then creating a high-converting landing page. You can then implement SEO techniques to gain organic traffic, or use paid ads to get quick sales.
In this article, you’ll learn how to start a one-product Shopify store. It also contains tips on optimizing your website to increase the chances of converting a curious visitor into a paying customer.
Before creating a Shopify store
1. Conduct product & market research
Product research is essential as it helps you understand the target audience. You also learn how to improve your offering, increasing the chances of turning a click into a purchase.
- Google Trends is a valuable tool that gives you insight into the interest of search queries over time and region. It also shows related queries and topics. You can use this information to understand the popularity of a product.
- Amazon or any other e-commerce website is an excellent place to learn about the best-selling products. If you’d like to perform a deep analysis of a specific product, tools like JungleScout and sellerboard provide comprehensive data to aid your research.
- Third-party tools such as Oberlo and Sell The Trend can help identify products you can sell in your store. You’ll find these tools helpful if you’re planning on following a dropshipping model.
Similarly, market research clarifies how viable your product is in the market. The information you acquire will help you understand how the target audience will view your product.
You can use this data to form a better pricing strategy and determine whether the market you’re entering is saturated with similar products.
U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) provides small business data and trends for free. It also contains helpful information on how to conduct market research.
2. Build the product
The product is the most important thing before doing anything. If you have no product, there’s no point in building the store. Your goal is to build or source the product, then you can begin getting your store together.
If you are selling digital products, make sure to follow this guide as we show you exactly how to sell digital products in the best method possible.
Here, you can find a list of best-selling digital products you can sell.
3. Establish a strategy
Your strategy is important to make sure you get it right and have a plan. First of all, get your branding sorted if you want to build trust. Branding gives your business a unique look and makes it easier for customers to recognize it in the market.
Branding
It helps to have a logo. You can also select a color palette that you’ll use throughout your website, social media page, advertisements, and logo. This helps build trust that you are an established brand.
You’ll need primary, secondary, and neutral colors for the color palette. If you’re confused about how to choose these hues, one option is to study your competitors.
You can also use tools like Canva’s Color Palette Generator or Adobe’s color tools.
After you’ve completed the prerequisites for building a one-product Shopify store, you can now start the process of creating the website.
4 Steps to build a one-product Shopify store
The process of creating a website on Shopify is straightforward. However, before starting this process, ensure you’ve completed the steps below. They make it easier to build your website, and you’ll also have a better idea about how to stand out in the market and reach out to your target audience.
If you have already done your due diligence, you can skip the prerequisites and move on to the steps to build the one-product Shopify store.
1. Sign up to Shopify
First of all, sign up to Shopify.
2. Add your products
Now you will need to add your products to Shopify. Remember to adjust your shipping costs and pricing too. If you are selling digital products, go to the digital product heading below.
- Go to your Shopify dashboard
- Click “Products“
- Click the “Add new product” button
- Fill in your product details
Selling digital products?
If you are selling digital products, use the Fileflare app on the Shopify app store. Shopify doesn’t have an in-built system for selling digital products, so you need to use their app store.
This app is trusted by Shopify experts and was staff-picked by Shopify itself. Make sure you use this app to deliver digital products as it has the most advanced file protection features.
3. Selecting a theme
Shopify is popular among businesses because it is to design a website. There are 9 free themes on Shopify, which you can customize to match your branding strategy.
Although they are great for getting started, you may find them limiting in design and features, especially when creating new pages.
You can use a free theme and then use a Shopify Page Builder app to design your pages. Note though, this will slow your page speed down by a little bit, but you compromise by creating epic landing pages.
You can always go for the paid variants if this is the case. Shopify’s store or Themeforest are great places to look for paid themes.
Make sure you read up about the compatibility and updates of paid themes before you pick one up for your business.
4. Build an eye-catching landing page (product page)
When prioritizing content, you should remember that you only have less than 10 seconds to convince users to stay on your site. Make sure you read our guide on landing page optimization; it will help you, trust me!
Your landing page should contain the following:
- Headline – Using the least number of words, the headline should be powerful and capture your audience’s attention.
- Benefits of the product – Why do people need your product? How will it make their lives better? Talk about the features and benefits of your product while keeping the content brief.
- Call-to-action (CTA) – A CTA asks visitors to take action. On websites, they’re generally the buttons you click to add a product to the cart, open a new page, or sign up to receive updates or a newsletter. You’ll have one primary CTA, followed by secondary CTAs, sprinkled throughout the landing page.
- Product images and video – Use media to showcase your product. They’re powerful as you can tell a story and evoke strong emotions among your visitors.
- Social proof – When you include testimonials and reviews from other users, it instils trust in your website’s visitors. Do not ever use fake reviews! Be truthful, and build trust using Trustpilot or Judge.me.
- Features of the product – Features are of low importance, so usually, they sit nearer the bottom in the specifications etc.
If you are using a page builder app, my recommendation is to use GemPages or PageFly, they are brilliant.
Make sure the layout of your website is easy to navigate and provides a clear picture of what your product is all about within a few seconds. You don’t want to overwhelm visitors with loads of information as it can turn them away from your website.
If possible, include a video about your product as this helps visitors decide whether they should choose your product.
4. Test the process
Your goal now is to see the live page, and make sure it works the way you want it to.
Test it on desktop, tablet and mobile devices to ensure everything works. You need to test the whole process from beginning to end, including the checkout. You can see how to make a test order on Shopify here.
Get more sales with your one-product Shopify store
To increase the traffic and sales of your website’s visitors, follow these four optimization tips.
1. Implement Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques
SEO techniques such as using keywords in your website copy, adding alt text to your images, and internal linking can improve your rankings in search results as well as many other things.
Organic traffic, people who visit your website via search engines, are valuable visitors. They are more likely to convert as they have search intent, which means they have been looking searching for products like yours, and they have found you.
If you’re interested in learning more about SEO, Ahrefs has a handy guide.
2. Use high-quality images & videos
Optimising images for web
Avoid using low-quality images throughout your website, as it can turn visitors away. You need to find the perfect middleground of quality and speed.
Before you upload any large, high-quality product images, make sure you compress them for the web. This way, they’ll load on smartphones quickly.
Compressing images for web is very important for 2 reasons:
- Maintains a fast loading time for your page (good for SEO and conversion rate)
- Maintains quality of the image
Lifestyle pictures also make it easier for users to connect with your product. For example, if you’re selling skateboards, images of people using your product in a skatepark are powerful imagery.
Videos
It’s really good to show videos. As you probably know, videos are the most connective and engaging forms of content. The proof is in the pudding; just look at TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. They are a few of the top social media platforms, among others.
- Show how to use your product
- Show other customers using it
- Testimonials
- Explain benefits
If you want to learn more about creating engaging TikTok content, check out Savannah Sanchez’s TikTok Ads course, she knows her stuff very well. Or you can check out her free tips on her Twitter.
3. Paid advertising
Make sure that you take advantage of paid advertising. Meta ads, Google ads and TikTok ads are the favourites among these.
Make sure you check Savannah’s TikTok Ads course if you want to learn more about video advertising, or check out her Twitter for great tips & tricks.
TikTok ads are the biggest upcoming ads platform at the moment. Meta ads are the leading platform with the best conversion rates. Don’t sleep on Google ads, they are great but not as scalable as Meta or TikTok.
4. Craft powerful & clear CTAs
The CTAs you use throughout your website should compel visitors to take action. Keep it as short as possible while being clear with the messaging.
They should be prominent, especially on your homepage and product page. Using contrasting colors can help CTAs stand out.
It’s actually important that you choose the right CTA. An example from my experience: On Facebook ads when I was selling some digital products in the Filmmaking industry, using the “Buy now” button had less of a click-through rate than the “Learn more” button. The “Learn more” button increased revenue by quite a lot, probably around 25%.
Final thoughts
Building a one-product Shopify store involves conducting product and market research, establishing a strategy, and creating a beautiful landing page.
Optimizing for SEO, improving image quality while keeping the file size low, and using prominent CTAs can help improve the conversion rates of your website’s visitors.