Top 4 Mistakes Shopify Store Owners Make That Keep Them BROKE

What's up, guys? Devin, Zander. And here in today's video, we're gonna talk about the four biggest mistakes that keep you poor, AKA keeps your Shopify store from scaling and making a bunch of God dang money. All right, so look, I'm on our store's dashboard here. Now, my partner Matt just acquired this store about a few weeks ago. Maybe like a month ago. Okay. And as we can see here, it did $2.4 million this year from January to October, or, sorry, to December 30, which is today would be like, oh, my God, that's great. However, this store is actually failing. It is on a massive decline. If we look at 2020, this store did $12,392,000 in sales, which is a huge increase. And not only are the sales much higher here, the profit obviously is much higher too. So what I want to discuss with you is the four mistakes the previous owners made that caused this once thriving store to burn and crash, which could lose them. Their business, their money, their income, all these different awful things. That's what we're covering today. And by fixing these mistakes, we plan on taking the store back to this $12 million mark. So this is our brand new store here. Pause. It is a dog store. You know, print on demand passion store, focusing on the dog niche, selling mostly to dog mommies. So before. I mean, not before, let's just get into it. So mistake number one is the previous owners let their success blind them and they lost sight of their costs. So the first thing that Matt noticed when he's taking over the site was There was over 100 apps installed on this store. A hundred apps? How are you supposed to. Like, I cannot comprehend how you would manage 100 apps. Like, if you open your little app tab and you see a hundred apps, I'd be like, oh, my God, what am I gonna do? And I just wouldn't wanna look at it anymore because I would be overwhelmed and I'd be like, oh, I'll just forget about it. But it's actually worse than that because almost every single One of these 100 apps was a paid app. Okay? Which means it costs money every single month to have. And a lot of these apps weren't even turned on. So you're still paying monthly for them, but they're not active on the store. They're costing money and they're not increasing revenue. And the reason that this happens, and the big lesson behind mistake number one is that people always think that it's just like, oh, it's Just one app. Oh, one more app won't hurt. Oh, one more won't hurt. Oh, I'll try this one. Oh, I'll do this. And then before you know it, you have over a hundred apps costing you ridiculous amounts of money. And when you're at scale like this, I mean, you're doing a lot of sales. These apps. There was one app in particular that was over $1,000 a month, wasn't even turned on. So this really cuts into your costs. It lowers profitability significantly. Not good. So biggest lesson here is don't use apps unless they're completely necessary. And then always look at these expenses, like every month, see what apps are installed. Ask yourself, do I really need this? Is there a way I can accomplish this for free? So we removed almost every single one of those apps. It's down to about 30 now, so 70%. And yeah, you know, just be careful with these recurring costs. Not good to have. So next things, I guess I should, like, maybe scroll down a little bit. Let's get the screen looking different. Don't want to just sit on that one page. The next mistake is that they ran out of inventory on their store without a plan. So let's just take a look at this product page. When we acquired the store, any given product you looked at would only have about two sizes in stock. Small, and then maybe like two XL or three xl. But it was missing the medium, the large, the xl. You know, these. These main products that sell really well. And all of the best sellers were completely out of stock. So these are the products that were making the money, and they were running the inventory model. So they, you know, were buying. They weren't doing print on demand, which is, in our opinion, like, with how advanced technology is and like, with how easy it is to implement, print on demand these days is absolutely bonkers to do, you know, but that's. That's okay. But they had no plan in case things ran out. And it's. It's very expensive to hold inventory because you have to buy it in bulk. You can't buy 1, 2, 3, or 4 shirts at a time. Now you have to buy hundreds, possibly even thousands of shirts at any given time to re up. So they didn't have a plan for this. And the site, eventually, you know, after doing this much revenue and getting down to here, was sold. All the best sellers were completely sold out. And then the random other products were these weird colors, like colors you wouldn't want to wear, like lime green with pink text, and then no size. So the Point is here is like really consider doing print on demand and not inventory. A lot of people think that inventory is a better model when you're at scale because you get really good margins. But they also don't understand that you can negotiate with suppliers once you're doing a lot of revenue. And I'm sure they do understand that. And I'm not talking about anyone in particular here, I'm just saying that some people don't consider this. And us, you know, we, with our supplier, we had approached them to actually partner with us on stores because it would help us get inside insane margins. Right? So, you know, big lesson here is you need to have a plan. If you're, you're doing a lot of sales and don't let this scare you, it's a good problem to have because that means you're really successful, means you're crushing it, and that's good. But if you want to keep crushing it, you need to heed our advice here because that if you don't listen to this type of advice, eventually your goal is to be at this mark, right? To be at that eight figure mark. Don't let your store get cucked and for lack of better terms and then go down to this like this is an obscene drop in revenue. So it's not what we want to see. And yeah, so make sure I would just use print on demand. Print on demand is like the best business model ever, especially if you're a beginner because there's no inventory, there's no upfront costs. Like with inventory you just pay when you receive an order and then you keep the profit. So boom. Like huge, huge, easy. So the third thing here were the simple basics were overlooked. Like if you've ever heard the saying, like Michael Jordan didn't and Kobe Bryant, they weren't at the gym every day practicing like insane shit, right? They were there practicing their chest pass, practicing their jump shot, you know, the really simple things, their free throw, they practiced the basics, they mastered the basics way better than everyone else. And honestly, like one of the biggest lessons, let this be a lesson to you right here, is that the basics are the most important part. Like your ads, your email, your sms, those are the most important things. All this advanced stuff might eke you out like a few more percentage points, which is really good. You do want those percentage points, but that shouldn't be your focus. Your focus should be doing the basics better than everyone else. And if you can do that, you will have immense amounts of success. Okay? So to give you an Example, there used to be a search app on this store. Search app cost $1,000 a month. In fact, we used to use this search app on our old store and until we built it into our own theme, avatar. Now we haven't put Avatar in the store, but since we already had the code for the search, since we used on Avatar, we were, we replaced that app and it's just, it looks like this, you know where you have this predictive search page is frozen. You have like a predictive search where it can show you the collections and products right here in search. So when you're doing a lot of volume, apps for this really get expensive. We cut it in. So they had insane things like the search installed. Right. Which is great. It's good. But again it's only a few percentage points, right. While they ignored things like having a simple email pop up and email follow ups in place like that is a massive driver of revenue right there. Okay. Just building an opt in in a welcome sequence that offers a discount code that's like one of the most important things for your store. It's one of the first things that you should set up. But they were so caught up in all these small things that they ignored the basics of which is not good. The second Matt took over, he removed the app, he built the search into the theme and replaced all these other things. And then he focused on the basics which was getting those email opt ins set up and the emails going, which generated since implementation, which wasn't that long ago, an extra five figures in revenue just from the emails. Right. And then as we scale the ads and now that we're starting to get all the products back in stock and doing all that, it's going to increase sales significantly. So that is just huge. Do not ever lose sight of the basics. And this is something that a lot of people do when they start making a lot of sales is they start thinking of all these fancy things and they start going to websites like Product Hunt, you know, like, you guys probably aren't doing this, but this is something a lot of like tech entrepreneurs do and they're always looking for that shiny object and like new fancy things, new software to increase revenue by 1%. Oh my God, can I please get a few hundred dollars more? When in reality we should just be focusing on the basics that generate us millions and millions of dollars instead of those 1% increase. And like I said, there is a time for the 1% increases, but that is once everything is running smoothly, everything's in place and you're you're focusing on getting those small incremental increases in that too. Like, just because you have your email opt in set up doesn't mean you ignore it forever. No, you track it and you're constantly improving it. Right? So there we go. That was point number three is do not overlook the basics because they're so fricking important. And then the fourth, one, fourth lesson that we learned taking over the store is that site speed is just massive. So, you know, you're, you can probably gather from the fact that there was 100 apps installed that the site speed was pretty bad. It was a 5 out of 100. If you go off Shopify chart, whatever Shopify's rating system is, you know, they gave it a 5 out of 100, which is really bad. The customer experience is terrible when you have a slow site speed. And I believe there's like a Walmart stat for site speed where, let me see, there was something here that, where the website performance affects conversion rate. Okay, so look, Walmart, this is like a famous thing. Walmart found for that every 1 second improvement in page load time conversions increased by 2%. Cook increased conversions by 7% by reducing load time by 0.85 seconds. Mobify found that each 100 millisecond improvement in their homepage load time result in a 1.1% increased conversion. So speed is just massive, all right? And every single millisecond, every single second counts. And not only were there a ton of apps, and even though these apps weren't like active, their code is still loaded on the website, so they're still slowing it down. So you might think that these apps, like, if they're not active, they're not doing anything to you, but they are. They're hurting you because they're causing visitors to load slower and they're causing those visitors to leave without making a purchase, which is massive. Right? And most customers are not going to sit around and wait for your site to load. Remember how are they getting here? They're clicking from a Facebook ad, it's an Instagram post, something like that, right? Just something they stumble upon. A lot of the times people aren't actually searching you out. Now if someone's searching for your brand on Google, which, you know, this brand, thankfully Pause does get a lot of search because it's a massive brand. And that is the only reason it was even able to do $2 million. Right. If it wasn't a massive brand, it probably would have done less than $100,000. So that was a huge asset but sales are way down. And it's a big reason is just because the site speed was so slow. Obviously things were sold out and things like that. But site speed, slow people are leaving. And that would lose thousands of dollars in revenue per day. Like, when you're at a large scale and you're doing a lot of sales, losing 1% of customers can be massive. It can be thousands of dollars per day that you are missing out on. So you don't want to have this. All right? And apps having bad theme code, basic site cleanup standards, not having, like, videos compressing your images. Like, none of this was in place. And it all created a bad customer experience where it was very difficult to shop on our store and it was slow. It would be buggy. When you have a ton of apps installed, they start fighting with each other. And simple things like add to cart buttons break, which is like, can you imagine? And then how long would it take you to figure that out? If someone's not emailing you and saying, hey, your add to cart button's broken, or, hey, your checkout button's broken. How long does it take to figure this out? And that's why it's so important to keep your website slender, right? And what I mean by slender is that was a really bad choice of words. I feel like Dan Brown, somebody was. I was reading something last night about how the way that he paints his characters, like, the adjectives he uses are just, like, so obscene that they make no sense. It was like he squinted his bug eyes with the glare of a rocket ship or something like that. I don't know. I actually liked some of Dan Brown's books, but I read them in high school, so I don't know, maybe I wouldn't like them now. So sorry for that. But, yeah, so keep your website, like, low code. Try not to install a bunch of apps. Try to make sure your theme is cleaned up and all those things. Because if you don't follow the four steps, like, remember, don't let success blind you, okay? Don't install a ton of apps. These costs add up. Make sure you're on top of that. That's number one. Number two, have a plan for scaling. All right? At least use the print on demand model and it will help you or keep you from running into issues when you are scaling. And it could still happen in 2020, our supplier ran out of black T shirts, which was our number one seller. And it wasn't just our supplier. It was suppliers all around the world. And this was because of COVID and like shipping issues, things like that. Great, I said the C word. Now my website's reach is going to. My video's reach is going to be throttled. What can you do, you know? You know what I'm saying, guys, sometimes, you know, YouTube algorithm just wants to spank you for being a naughty boy. So yeah, make sure you have a plan. And you know, we can't plan for everything, but do your best in the print. On demand model will help you from running into issues that prior owners ran into. Make sure that you're mastering the basics. That's point number three. All that fancy stuff is really good, but the basics, you know, just having your website set up and optimized, having your ads going well, having your retargeting ads, having your email set up and having your SMS set up, like mastering those will do more for you than any advanced technique. You know what I'm saying? And number four is site speed is important, so don't ignore it. It's important to have these things set up correctly and to understand what's going on. If you want to have a very profitable scaled shopify store, okay? Because if you don't, you'll start to see success. It'll look like this and then it'll turn to this and then we have to clean it up so we can get it back to this. Know what I'm saying? So make sure you keep an eye on the basics. You're taking care of everything. Don't let success get to your head and just keep working on the basics every day. It will pay off in the end. So keep it up. This is Devin Zander. Make sure you like Comment. Subscribe for more videos. I know this one's a little boring, but we just acquired the store. Obviously it used to do really well. We got it at a lower price because it was really declining and we're learning a lot by fixing this store up so we can scale it back up. So I thought it would be just so important and valuable to share with you. So I hope you enjoyed this slightly less or more boring video that is just so freaking important. Fucking important. I felt lame saying freaking. I had to. My manliness couldn't handle it. I'm too insecure. I had to drop an F bomb. So thank you for watching guys. Catch you in the next video. Like comment, subscribe, tell your friends, tell your grandma, tell your Boston terrier. If you don't have a Boston terrier, then you've got the wrong dog breed. You're smoking drugs. Get a Boston instead all right, peace, guys. See you in the next video.