r/shopify_growth

I have been running my business on Shopify for a while now and have been trying to understand why a customer bought a product and why they didn't. I tried calling users after purchase but most are not open to talk. How do I learn more about how they decide.

Please dont suggest analytics, I have both GA4 and reports from Shopify, none show me anything other than patterns, always missing the reasons.

Has any one of you used post purchase surveys, exit intent popups, or review prompts that actually get people to explain their reasoning?

I've been putting more focus on retention lately instead of putting everything into acquisition. Sales are consistent, but I know there's more I could be doing with repeat purchases and LTV.

I've already been looking at email, loyalty, post purchase and offers for existing customers, but I don't wanna add a bunch of stuff without knowing what actually moves the needle.

For stores that are already getting consistent sales, what made the biggest difference for you? Was it improving the first to second purchase, increasing AOV, better post purchase follow up, or something else?

I’m struggling to find much useful advice for the type of dropshipping business we’re building.
Most dropshipping content seems to be: find a product, add it to Shopify, let a platform fulfil it, run ads.
Ours is very different.
We’re launching a curated wellness marketplace with a small number of established UK/EU brands. We approach each brand directly, agree commercial terms, and they fulfil orders to the customer.
So technically it’s dropshipping, but every supplier has different dispatch times, returns policies, packaging and shipping rules.
The two things that have surprised me most are:
1. The legal side.
We’re the seller of record, so returns, faulty goods, non-delivery and chargebacks ultimately sit with us. Getting the supplier agreement right has honestly been more work than building the store.
2. Multi-brand shipping.
A customer might place one order but receive three parcels from three different suppliers. “Free shipping over £X” suddenly becomes quite dangerous when you’re paying three separate shipping charges.
Longer term, we’ll probably run a mix of dropship, wholesale/3PL and affiliate depending on what actually sells.
Has anyone here built something similar?
Particularly interested in:
How you handled split-order shipping
What you wish you’d included in supplier agreements
Which Shopify app you used for routing orders to multiple suppliers
Whether anyone successfully runs dropship + wholesale + affiliate on the same store
And if you’ve done this before: what would you tell someone about six weeks out from launch?

seen a lot of posts here about connecting ai to shopify and whether you can trust it on a live store. wanted to give an honest answer because i've broken things this way myself.

everyone assumes the risk is that it does the thing badly. it almost never does. it does the thing correctly and something else three pages away depended on what it just changed.

and it has no idea, because it was only ever looking at the bit you pointed it at.

that's the whole category of problem. i'll give you the shape of it without getting into specifics:

• you ask for a small badge on the product page
• It writes something that works perfectly on the product you had open when you asked.
• then it turns out it behaves completely differently on a product where you've got inventory tracking switched off and now those products all show as sold out with no buy button.

no error. page loads beautifully. and sold out products don't generate support tickets, people just leave. 

so you find out in three weeks, or you never find out.

or

- you ask for something on the product page and it works, and then a customer adds to cart and the drawer refreshes itself and the whole thing vanishes.

- you tested by refreshing the page, where it's fine. the customer hits it mid purchase, where it isn't. so it breaks in exactly the part of the session that makes money.

the pattern in every one of these is the same. the thing that made the change is also the thing that decided it worked.

it says done. you believe it. why wouldn't you, it's confident and it's usually right.

so here's what i actually do now, and this is doable manually today, you don't need anything special.

1. never work on the live theme. duplicate it, change the duplicate, preview the duplicate. publishing the old one back is the only real undo shopify gives you and it's one click. almost nobody uses it.

2. before anything changes work out what the change touches. not will this work but what else on this store depends on the thing i'm about to change. if you can't answer that or it can't answer that, then neither of you knows enough to make the change safely. this is the step everyone skips and it's the one that catches most of it.

3. don't let it decide for you when it isn't sure. if there's an ambiguity the right move is to ask not to pick the likely option and carry on. every genuinely bad break i've seen came from something assuming its way past a question it should have asked.

4. whatever made the change doesn't get to confirm the change. separate pass. go and load the real storefront yourself as a customer, not in the theme editor because the editor hides some things that show up live.

5. check the awkward cases, not the happy path. a product with tracking turned off. one that's genuinely sold out. one with no sale price set. the page opened cold rather than clicked through from a collection. something deep in a big collection. a second currency if you run them. the cart drawer and quick view, not just the product page.

that list takes about ten minutes and catches basically all of it.

none of this is anti ai. it's very capable and i use it constantly. the point is that capability was never the problem. the problem is that it's confident, it's scoped to what you showed it, and it's the one telling you it worked.

those need to be two different jobs.

(i've built this loop into what i work with, saying that for context not as a pitch. the manual version above is the part that matters and it's free.)

what's the worst thing you've had break this way? curious whether the pattern holds for other people or if i've just been unlucky.

Hello everyone!

I'm currently reselling games and consoles on ebay and vinted, but I feel like I can't express my creativity there. That's why I want to launch my own e-commerce store using Shopify.

I've seen a beginner guide on youtube by davie fogarty to understand how an independent e-commerce business works, but I still have a few questions:

1. How are your products manufactured or sourced?
2. In the beginning, is better to grow organically (making reels and tiktoks) or use google and meta ads?
3. How long did it take to get your first order?
4. Do you manage your shop alone or do you have employees?
5. Do you have any genuine youtubers or books to suggest?
6. Lastly, where do you get your shipping labels?

Thanks to anyone that will reply!

I spent way too long trying to figure out why my bundles weren't performing.

The first thing I changed was the number of options. I had four different bundle configurations showing on the product page, which just seemed to create more hesitation. Cutting it down to two made the choice much easier.

I also realized I was making customers calculate the discount themselves. The saving was there, but it was buried below the bundle details. Making the actual saving obvious helped quite a bit.

Another mistake was using fixed bundles for products where people had pretty different preferences. Switching those to mix-and-match worked much better.

The other thing that surprised me was placement. I originally had the upsell in the cart drawer because it seemed logical, but putting it directly on the product page made more sense for the way people were actually shopping.

And then there was the annoying technical stuff. My theme's JS was conflicting with the bundle code, so I spent days troubleshooting something that wasn't really a bundle strategy problem at all.

Honestly, I think most of the issues came from how I had set everything up rather than the bundle system itself.

If your bundles aren't converting, I'd probably look at the number of choices, discount visibility and placement before changing the whole setup.

For people who have actually had success with dropshipping, what do you look for before deciding a product is worth testing? Not asking for product recommendations — I’m trying to get better at product research and understanding why people buy.

I'm curious how Shopify brands here handle product sourcing once they move beyond dropshipping or buying inventory through the usual marketplaces.

For those already sourcing physical products:

• Do you work directly with manufacturers, wholesalers, or sourcing agents?
• What made you choose your current sourcing country?
• Has anyone deliberately moved some sourcing from China to India?
• What has been the biggest challenge with Indian suppliers — finding the right manufacturer, MOQ, quality control, communication, shipping, or consistency?
• For a smaller Shopify brand, what order size makes direct international sourcing worthwhile for you?

I work with an India-based export business, so I'm particularly interested in hearing from Shopify brands that have actually sourced from India — both the good and the bad.

I'm not struggling with getting new customers as much anymore. I've got a formula down that's working pretty well for me right now, so I want to start putting more attention into getting those customers to come back and order again.

What are some things worth adding or changing on the store to improve retention? I've been looking at loyalty programs, post purchase flows and a few other ideas, but I'm trying to figure out what makes the most sense to focus on first.

What have you been doing to increase returning customers?

It's underwhelming that even on plus accounts Shopify can't filter out the bot traffic. On a US Shopify store, we are getting a 900% increase in traffic from China and Singapore for no reason. That's completely screwing up our CRO and impacting our regular revenues too now.

Is there any way we can block this apart from geo filters? We do genuinely want people from other countries to come in and check the products to define the demand in the new countries.

been lurking on aov posts and wanna add something nobody mentions enough

everyone talks about getting people to spend more once they decide to buy

but half your lost revenue isnt people who bought less

its people who almost bought and just closed the tab

i started watching session recordings on my own store and it was kinda brutal ngl

people scrolling back to the price 3 4 times

opening size chart then closing then opening again

reading reviews for like 4 min then just leaving

no discount would have fixed that

they werent price shopping they were just not sure

added a tiny bit of reassurance right at that exact moment (basically just answering the doubt before they leave) and saw a real bump

not saying its the golden fix for everyone but if ur churn on cart isnt a discount problem its worth checking where ppl hesitate before they bounce

curious if anyone else tracked this kind of stuff on their own store

Direct's been climbing for months. Not from anything we changed. Best guess is AI answers and dark social, but totally a guess.

Is anyone actually breaking this down, or are we all just letting it sit there?

For stores with hundreds of SKUs, how do you currently figure out which products are most likely to run out soon?

For example, a product with 80 units in stock might look healthy, but if it's selling 20 units a day, it could be much closer to a stockout than a product with only 10 units that barely sells.

Do you use an inventory/forecasting app for this, or do you mostly monitor it manually?

Curious how other Shopify brands handle this as they scale.

Hey everyone! 👋

I build automation tools and I'm currently looking for new, real-world projects to develop for the Shopify ecosystem.

Instead of coding something in a vacuum that no one will actually use, I’d rather ask you directly: what is THE manual task (inventory, fulfillment, data entry, customer support...) that wastes most of your time every day and that you'd love to automate?

If I spot common operational bottlenecks that I know how to solve, I’ll try to build an automation tool to make your lives easier.

Drop your worst daily struggles in the comments! 👇

Made a website but my product failed, can anyone point me in right direction on what products to look for , mine was old and over saturated.

What are the best options for sending 10k+ SMS per day? I’m mainly looking for something free, but I’m open to a cheap provider if free isn't realistic.

When a store owner says, “I’m getting traffic but not enough sales,” the usual response is to change the theme, add a pop-up, install an upsell app, or run another discount.

That can help, but it is often guessing.

I’d look at the customer journey in this order:

1. Product page → Add to cart
   If people view a product but do not add it, the problem is usually not checkout.

It is more likely that the page does not answer something important:

1. What exactly do I get?
2. Is this right for me?
3. Why is it worth this price?
4. How fast will it arrive?
5. What happens if it does not fit/work?
6. Can I trust this store?

For products with sizing, variants, compatibility, or higher prices, unanswered questions kill more sales than people realise.

2. Add to cart → Checkout
   If people add to cart but do not begin checkout, look for surprise shipping, unclear delivery time, weak trust signals, a discount-code hunt, or a cart that is simply annoying on mobile.

Do not immediately give everyone 15% off. First understand why they paused.

3. Checkout → Purchase
   This is where payment options, mobile friction, tax/shipping surprises, location settings, and technical issues matter.

4. Purchase → Second purchase
   A customer who has bought once should not disappear into silence. Order updates, delivery support, product education, review requests, and well-timed replenishment messages are usually more valuable than another homepage redesign.

The important part is that each leak needs a different fix.

A beautiful new theme will not fix a bad shipping surprise.
An abandoned-cart flow will not fix a product page that
never earned trust.
An AI chatbot will not help if it gives vague answers and cannot hand off to a human.

Before changing anything, I would pull the funnel numbers for the last 30 days and identify the single biggest drop-off.

If you are comfortable sharing it, what does your store struggle with most right now: product-page conversion, abandoned carts, checkout, or repeat purchases? I’m happy to give a second opinion on the most likely first fix.

Hello everybody!

I've been doing dropshipping consistently for about 2 months now, and in these recent weeks I received my first sale. I'm grateful for that, but now I'm looking for a partner, someone who has experience doing this. My store is based around nutrition, so if anyone has experience in nutrition or dropshipping and would want to team up, I'd love to partner with you. I'm really just looking for a possible mentor in the space who can help me out and partner up with me.

Thank you for reading this!