Ecommerce Advice From a Shopify Master

“Inspiration, motivation and actionable tips to increase your traffic and sales so your store can generate the sales you need to live the life you want”

That’s the goal that Felix Thea set for himself when he launched Shopify Masters. Today his podcast has become one of the top online destinations for would be and existing Shopify entrepreneurs, looking for tips on growing an online business.

As an avid listener to his podcast, I was excited to be able to get a chance to sit down with him and discuss the motivation behind his podcast, and the lessons he’s learned along the way.

Without further ado:

1) Tell us a bit about your background and why you started ShopifyMasters

I first got introduced to the Shopify platform when a client of mine migrated their store to Shopify. From there, I found the Shopify App Store and realized that there was a lot of demand for add-ons to Shopify stores so I started building apps for the Shopify app store. However, the mistake I ran into was that I spent too much time building the products and not enough time understanding what store owners actually needed. I talk about this realization and mistake more on this Shopify partner blog.

So rather than set out to build new apps or services, I wanted to help store owners with the most common problems they faced and 90% of the time store owners want to know “how do I increase my traffic and sales?”

There are plenty of great apps out there that help with this, but I wanted to take a different approach, I wanted to educate store owners with tips, tactics and advice on what has worked and what hasn’t worked. I didn’t know all the answers, but I knew that I could go and find successful ecommerce entrepreneurs and ask them the exact questions I was hearing over and over again from store owners.

I decided to record each conversation and put it out as a weekly podcast — and that’s how it all began!

2) Tell us more about ShopifyMasters and what kind of knowledge Shopify users can get from it to help their businesses

My opening intro to the podcast sets my goal as “inspiration, motivation and actionable tips to increase your traffic and sales so your store can generate the sales you need to live the life you want”.

I think most entrepreneurs are ultimately after the freedom that comes with owning your own business so the podcast is heavily focused on what works and what doesn’t work based on actual experience from successful Shopify entrepreneurs.

You also get to hear a lot about the early struggles and how it’s not always a walk in the park which I think is very important because success stories can actually be depressing because as humans we tend to compare our progress with others and if we’re only seeing the highlight reel, we’ll feel that we’re not measuring up. So I like to tap into failures as much as successes.

When it comes to the successes, the underlying question behind each question is me trying to figure out what they did to successfully set up a business and then increase their traffic and sales.

3) How has ecommerce changed in your experience and what are the biggest challenges for newcomers to the space today?

I think there are very little challenges. Everything can be done on the cheap.

I think the biggest challenge is very similar to what other entrepreneurs face which is lack of focus.

There’s so much information out there and so many tips that you can have a 100 point checklist of things you feel like you need to do.

If you listen to the podcast, you’ll often hear similar tactics or at least similar themes to successful tactics. Pick what you think you can do the best or the soonest, and just focus on that particular tactic until you absolutely feel like it’s not working, and then do it for another week and see if you should continue or move on to the next tactic. Focus!

4) What’s the best piece of advice you’ve heard from one of the guests of your podcast?

Best piece of advice was the one that has affected me most as an entrepreneur and that’s persistence. You just need to set a goal and show up every day. Most of the time I’ve found my failures come from giving up too soon. Every guest I’ve talked to has poured months and years into their business before things really took off.

So focus + consistent persistence will take you most of the way.

5) What is the most common question you get asked from your listeners and readers?

Most of the questions are around getting traction. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve heard about growing a business is: rather than come up with new ideas and tactics, look at what has worked already and keep on doing that until it doesn’t work, then figure out why it doesn’t work and make it work. Just keep on repeating that process and before you know it you’ll have traction and a growing business.

So it’s usually questions like: How do I increase traffic and sales? How do I scale up? How do I get my first 10 customers?

If you’re starting from scratch you don’t have any history to go off of, so use the advice from the podcast guests. Once you start seeing success, keep on repeating what already works.

6) What do you think the most difficult part of running a Shopify business is?

Showing up and doing the job even when there’s no traffic/sales/traction.

7) Do you have any final thoughts you wanted to share with our readers?

None other than to check out the Shopify Masters podcast :)

Ecommerce Advice From a Shopify Master