Shopify is the best ecommerce platform for businesses. They have the most comprehensive ecommerce theme designs and features and an extensive app store to expand the possibilities of any store’s features.
Where it is surprisingly lacking is in its blog features. Not that blogs are necessarily an ecommerce feature, but blogging can be a tremendous tool for businesses to improve their SEO, build consumer trust and retention, provide educational content leading to increased sales, and increase lead generation. We wrote about why ecommerce brands should be investing time into their blogs here.
So when we say that blog features are lacking, part of that is that it’s very difficult to make blog posts shoppable on Shopify. By “shoppable” we mean making it easy for store owners to insert and promote products right within blog posts so that customers can shop directly from blog posts.
In this article, we’ll explain three methods of making blog posts shoppable on Shopify.
1. Add products and collections into a blog post
Since there weren’t any good or easy ways to make blog posts shoppable on Shopify, we created our own easy method that anyone can follow. That’s the Luna Templates Simple Shoppable Blog Method training & template.
What does it allow to you do?
- You can easily insert products into your posts without any clunky code. For products with a single variant, customers can add to cart directly from the post. For products with multiple variants, they’ll be led to the product page. You can always go to the product page by clicking on the product image or title. That looks like this:
- You can easily insert collections into your posts without any clunky code. This will display the first three products in any collection, and allow customers to shop the entire collection or click on individual products. That looks like this:
- You can easily insert a newsletter form into your posts without any clunky code. Use the simple form we’ve provided, or embed your own. That looks like this:
We’ve made it as easy as possible for store owners to add products and collections to their blog posts without paying a monthly fee for apps. Note that this solution was created for web designers to implement for their clients. Once set up, it’s easy for store owners to use.
2. Use the Buy Button in blog posts
Shopify offers a sales channel called the “Buy Button” which allows you to sell your Shopify products on any website. The tool lets you create embeddable code that features a product and leads to checkout with one click.
We tried using this in blog posts and found it to be a huge pain. Here’s why…
Downsides of the Buy Button
- Time consuming to set up. After setting the style settings for how you want a product embed to look, you can copy the embed code. But this code isn’t saved anywhere for you to reference after leaving the page. This means you have to go through all the steps again to grab a code snippet, although thankfully the styles are saved.
- Clunky code. The huge chunk of code that is copied has to be inserted into the HTML of the blog post. This isn’t a friendly way for store owners to edit their blog post content, and is bound to lead to errors and frustration.
- Doesn’t link to the product page. While there are options to set it up so that you can view the product description, in no situation do you go to the product page. Product pages are so important for helping customers make educated purchasing decisions and increasing customer satisfaction. Today, product pages are a crucial step in the customer journey.
- Checkout is not the store checkout. You can either have customers check out right away, or allow them to add to cart. However, the “add to cart” cart is not your store’s cart. It’s a separate “buy button” cart. So by using the buy button on a Shopify blog, you will essentially have two carts on the website. This is very confusing as you’re unable to customize the cart experience, and customers can’t continue shopping on the website within the same cart. How confusing!
- Collections are too long. You are able to show collections, but it will show the entire collection which is too much to display in a blog post. Blog posts should only display about three products in a collection and then link to view more.
For all the downsides above, we don’t fault Shopify because the Buy Button is meant to be inserted on non-Shopify websites. The benefit is that you can use the backend of Shopify to manage inventory while having your website elsewhere. But for us, it’s a nightmare to use on Shopify blog posts and it was previously the only solution.
3. Use a Shopify Blogging App
There are Shopify blogging apps that allow you to design blog posts nicely with drag and drop builders. They can allow you to create different layouts, and even insert products and collections into blog posts.
However, these apps tend to have a monthly fee of $25+. While it might not seem incredibly high, by using these apps you become completely dependent on them. If you ever want to stop using them, you’d need to set up and format all your blog posts again, which isn’t a sustainable solution. We always prefer to modify the theme code where possible rather than rely on apps that have a monthly fee. Those fees can really add up over the years!
Make Shopify Blog Posts Shoppable
If you loved our solution to making Shopify blog posts shoppable, then do check out the Luna Templates Simple Shoppable Blog Method training & template. Again, this solution was created for web designers to implement for their store owner clients. Once set up, it’s easy for store owners to use.
The code snippets can also be easily styled to match any brand. In the examples above, we’ve use rounded corners, pill shaped buttons, shadows, and brown text. But we’ve made it super easy to customize these things to match your brand.
Check it out below:
Hana Drdla
