Shopify is an excellent solution for anyone who wants to sell products or services online. However, winning and holding on to customers is challenging in this ultra-competitive business environment. Creating a great user onboarding experience can help you beat the odds and outwork your rivals.
 |
| Image by rawpixel.com on Freepik |
Our Shopify user onboarding guide will show you how to use a digital adoption platform (DAP) like Usetiful to boost your sales by creating better experiences for customers and merchants.
What is Shopify?
Shopify is the world's largest eCommerce platform. Since its inception in 2006, they have been helping people run all manner of online businesses thanks to a suite of tools that include:
Website Hosting
Payment gateways
Point of sale (PoS) hardware
Email marketing
Tax calculators
Shipping solutions
In other words, it's an all-in-one solution for anyone who wants to start an online business. There are over 4 million sites built with Shopify in 175 countries, and in total, it holds around 10% of the global eCommerce market.
What makes a good user onboarding experience for an eCommerce store?
If you run a Shopify store, you'll be more than aware of concepts like customer churn, retention, and loyalty. You'll also know that winning customers is challenging (and expensive), but holding on to them can be even harder.
Before we share user onboarding best practices for your Shopify store, it's worth defining
user onboarding in the context of eCommerce.
User onboarding in eCommerce involves a few different steps. They are:
Introducing users to your brand
Teaching them how to navigate your site
Showing them your products and services
Highlighting the value of your business
Showing users how to execute transactions
The idea is that the experience should be as fluid and seamless as possible. The user has an idea to buy something, and you don’t want to get in the way or disturb that train of thought. Subtle, inobtrusive guidance that feels natural is the goal. User onboarding tools are built to help you achieve this.
Here are three critical areas you need to consider when building a user onboarding experience for your Shopify store.
Signup process
One of the most critical Shopify user onboarding flows is the signup process. There are a few different steps involved, so it's a classic candidate for a user onboarding tool to make things much more manageable.
The key thing to remember here is that you don't have a relationship with the consumer yet. They may have heard about your store, or they may not. But you don't have trust or loyalty to rely on, so it's all about reducing friction. Don't give potential customers a chance to have second thoughts; make signing up as easy as possible.
Product discovery
Product discovery is how you help your users find the goods they want. From an onboarding perspective, you can use a user onboarding solution to show users where your search bar is, how to use filters, find different categories, etc. It’s also an opportunity to show how personalization can help your users discover products that work well for them.
Purchase completion
Once your users have found the goods they want, you need to help them pull the trigger. There are a few different things you need to make clear for your users here. These elements include adding payment details, discounts, delivery addresses, and even choosing from a range of shipping and packaging options.
Now that you understand the main elements you need to explain, let's explore some user onboarding best practices.
User onboarding best practices
Let’s discuss some best practices before we get into the steps you need to create an excellent Shopify user onboarding experience. These tips will help you understand what you should and shouldn’t do to increase the likelihood of retaining your customers.
Keep it short and sweet: Don’t overload your users with too many steps. Keep it around 4 to 6, and make sure onboarding doesn’t last any more than 2 minutes.
Only highlight your strongest suits: Don’t try and cram everything you’re good at into your onboarding. Just pick your most valuable characteristics and focus on communicating them. In other words, emphasize the important features, and let them discover the rest themselves.
Use crisp and simple language: Your copy should be simple and easy to understand. You want to make sure that everyone gets your message.
Think about the aha moment: What is your store’s value prop? It could be savings, unique products, or a wide selection. Whatever it is, think about the moment when your user will realize they need your Shopify store in their life. Funnel your onboarding toward the point where everything clicks.
Steps to creating an unforgettable Shopify user onboarding experience
OK, this is where all the theory comes together. If you follow the simple steps, you’ll understand how to leverage user onboarding software to boost your customer acquisition, retention, and sales.
Step #1. Think about the user experience
Remember, good user adoption it's all about creating a frictionless experience. So think about what sort of Shopify user onboarding flow you want to make.
You have a few options here. You can:
Use modals. These are like text boxes that popup and deliver key information to your users
Video: A simple explainer video to show people around
Interactive product tours: A step-by-step tour
Modals are a decent option here. The video is perhaps less good. For starters, they can be expensive and time-consuming to produce. What's more, you can't edit them easily as you adjust and optimize your onboarding flow.
An interactive product tour is the best option. It allows users to navigate your Shopify page and learn through actions. Usetiful product tours are flexible, and you can use modals, tooltips, checklists, and more to design the most effective flows.
Once you have an onboarding flow mapped out, it’s time to install a user onboarding solution. Read this article to learn how you can install Usetiful on Shopify.
#2. Welcome screen
The first page of your Shopify store that your customers navigate will be your home or landing page. This point is where your Shopify onboarding flow begins in earnest.
You can use Usetiful to build a modal that opens up when your users land on your page. You want to make your customers feel valued and welcome. Use bright and snappy content to say hello and relay any other critical information.
Asking for an email address at this point can be a great idea. Offer your users some incentive, like a discount, special offer, newsletter access, or something in exchange for their information. You can use their details to build an email marketing list.
Here is how you can build your first welcome message with Usetiful.
 |
Ask users to subscribe to newsletter or offer users special discounts with Usetiful ready-templates. |
#3. Launch the interactive product tour
Next up, it’s time to get your product tour started.
Now, you can make your welcome screen its own thing. Or, if you want, you can roll the welcome and interactive product tour into one. Of course, you should give your customers a clear opportunity to opt out of the product tour. Not everyone needs or wants directions on how to get signed up or navigate your products.
The other thing you need to remember is that customers must know what they are getting themselves into. So tell them how many steps or minutes your interactive product tour will likely take. People are busy, so shorter is better.
Here is an in-depth look at how you can build product tours with Usetiful.
#4. Interactive product tour steps
OK, so this part is all about what you need to communicate to your customers. You can build a tour that touches on the three key moments we’ve shared above: account creation, product discovery, and checkout.
If they’ve accepted the product tour, you can employ Usetiful to build either a checklist or a progress bar that your users can tick off as they complete each stage.
Your Shopify onboarding flow could include these stages. Each stage employs some of the features of Usetiful.
Prompt the user to make an account. Use a pointer to direct them to the registration button. From there, you can use tooltips with hotspot beacons for the form filling to prevent user confusion and errors. Ideally, you should offer a social login to make the process as simple as possible.
If you run a Shopify store with many products, you can benefit from showing customers exactly how to find the things they want. That could be about navigating different categories of products or extending to finding sizes, colors, or any other product-related information they might need. You can also include details like how users can add an item to checkout and keep searching or shopping.
Checkout is one of the most crucial areas of onboarding. For starters, it’s where many customers abandon their plans to buy the item. There are many reasons for this, some of which are out of your control. However, building an onboarding flow that shows them how to checkout, add discount codes, and add their payment and delivery details will greatly help some less tech-savvy customers. If you can hold your consumer's hands through what can occasionally be a confusing set of steps, you can maximize conversions.
#5. Get feedback
Onboarding is a constant process. Getting it perfect takes time and research. Usetiful allows you to add surveys to your onboarding experiences, allowing you to get a sense of what your customers want.
What’s more, you can also avail of Usetiful Reports to track user onboarding and see where users get stuck or lose interest. This information will help you fine-tune your user onboarding.
Read this piece to learn how to use feedback to improve your onboarding experience.
Final thoughts
Shopify user onboarding is ultimately about a few different things. They are:
Getting users to make accounts
Teaching them about your products and the value of your store
Showing them how to checkout and buy items
Our user onboarding solution is adept at helping you communicate these important elements simply and intuitively.