If you are starting a new business using Shopify, one of the most common pitfalls is to build everything custom. Going custom means working with a designer first and then finding a developer to implement the design or using an agency to do it all.
This means the project will take longer and the complexity will go through the roof, adding a lot of risk to what it could be a simple project.
Our preferred strategy is to use photography and branding to position properly in the market and using a premium theme to launch the site.
You can use a Theme and still look pretty different than everyone else using the same theme, so don't worry. Even Shopify shows you the ability to leverage specific Themes on their page with a couple of options very different from each other.
If you are starting out with no funding and with zero revenue, you shouldn't build anything from scratch. There are far too many drawbacks for someone just getting started, here are a few:
- It is expensive as you need a specialized team
- Hourly estimates are never 100% precise, so it is harder to control budget and timelines
- You will need more maintenance to keep things functional for longer periods of time
- It is very easy to make the wrong hires
For the majority of people just getting started in business, you can live happily with a template. We've seen time and time again businesses grow to 200k+ a month with barely any customizations done in the template.
Most of the themes in the Shopify Theme Store have those factors already built in. As a matter of fact, the companies that build those themes spend tens of thousands of dollars to create and update them so that you don't have to do it yourself, which is a great win if you are just getting started and can purchase them for ~200USD. Even if you are an established business looking to redesign, I still advice to use a Theme as the foundation of your store and then customize on top of it. That way you have a great base to work on and the little issues of responsiveness, misaligned sections will not happen.
So this means you shouldn't customize things at all? Of course not, you just have to be smart about it. As you grow your business and have more resources to invest, you can start making better decisions using data to decide on the customizations and improvements you need in your store. Without Data, you will be guessing and spending money on things that might not bring a lot of value to the business.
In order to deliver the best service for your business and start out in the right way, at Colored Byte, we've created a system we call, Shopify MVP. This is a low barrier point of entry to Ecommerce that is time and cost-effective, building a Theme-based Shopify Store. We tailored this process through hundreds of projects done in the past and found the solution you need, helping you start selling your products in under a month.
Our recommendation is to use an MVP coupled with really good brand assets as photography and video. Having this with a solid ads strategy is enough for you to start getting sales and scaling using real data. You don't need a fully customized solution to get started and create a very profitable Ecommerce business. Any extra effort should be focused in brand identity and photography, that will make the most out of your marketing efforts.
