How to Operate Your Shopify Store: Essential Tips for Product Selection and Avoiding Bans.

Independent sites and third-party platforms are currently the most common e-commerce sales models. Compared with third-party platforms, merchants on independent sites can build their own sites and decide on their own operating models, marketing methods and other strategies, especially in terms of entry barriers. The difficulty will be lower. These characteristics have attracted many merchants to choose independent sites to open stores.

Shopify is a Canadian e-commerce platform and has become one of the popular choices for independent websites. It provides sellers with a complete set of independent website solutions, including store building, product management, order processing, payment system, marketing , etc., to simplify the process of small merchants opening online stores .

But for sellers, the performance of the store must rely more on their own product selection capabilities. The higher the degree of fit between the product selection strategy and the market, the higher the possibility of improved store performance.

Ⅰ. Target market selection

Whether it is an online store or an offline entity, every merchant must understand their target market.

For example, if the target market is a mature market in Europe and the United States, the corresponding consumers are less sensitive to prices and have a stronger tolerance, so merchants will have a wider range of product selection, whether it is high-end, high-priced goods or low-priced or niche goods, they can have a high degree of fit with the market. If it is an emerging market with growing consumption potential such as Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, sellers can choose low-priced, highly applicable, popular goods, or goods targeting specific customs, religions, etc.

Ⅱ. Audience Demand Analysis

Sellers must pay attention to the needs of the audience in the target market, and only by clarifying the needs can they take targeted actions.

In the field of e-commerce, market demand and keywords are inseparable. Studying the popularity and changes of various keywords in search engines, social media and shopping platforms can provide sellers with considerable help. The following common analysis tools can be used:

1. Facebook Audience Insights. As one of the world’s mainstream social media, Facebook has a very high monthly active user base and can provide a wealth of information.

2. Google Keyword Planner: As a search engine with considerable weight, Google has billions of search data every day, which can reflect the needs of a lot of users.

3. Google Trend: It can help you understand users’ interests and their trends over time.

Ⅲ. Initial product types

In the early stage of opening a store, the merchant's store competitiveness is low and weak in all aspects. You can choose products with moderate weight and volume to save packaging, logistics and warehousing costs and increase profit margins. In the early stage, you can also choose products that are just needed for daily use by the general public, rather than special products that can only be used during festivals or specific periods and scenarios. This can effectively avoid cyclical sales pressure to a certain extent and reduce inventory pressure risks.

Ⅳ. Key points and techniques for preventing store closure

As a cross-border store, you must pay attention to IP issues. Avoid using impure, public free IPs. IPs with low purity are more risky, and there is a possibility that other users may use this IP for improper operations and bring risks to other users. At the same time, the billing address and payment tool related information should not be inconsistent with the IP, otherwise there is a risk of being judged as abnormal by the system . I use IPFoxy's dedicated static residential proxy configuration in the fingerprint browser , and the exclusive residential IP allows the store to have a real and safe simulation environment , avoiding the problem of account blocking due to unwarranted IP bans.

Understanding the target market, analyzing audience needs, choosing the right product types and paying attention to IP issues, I believe that doing well in these aspects will be of great help to the operation of a Shopify store.