[February 2023 Edition] Survey Results Report: Shopify x Growth

In February 2023, we conducted a survey on Shopify and growth initiatives on the StoreHero website.

We received 70 valid responses (including 55 Shopify users), giving us insight into what kinds of growth strategies Shopify users are implementing, which ones are proving effective, and how their teams are structured.

We hope this will serve as a useful reference for those pursuing growth on Shopify, so we'd like to share some of the results.

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Products Being Sold

First, here is the breakdown of product categories sold by survey respondents.

Compared to the overall online commerce market, the share of household goods, furniture, interior goods, and bedding appears to be relatively small (reference: FY2021 Digital Commerce Environment Development Project (Market Survey on E-Commerce)).

Average Monthly Revenue on Shopify

Next is the average monthly revenue on Shopify over the past three months. Approximately 15% of the Shopify users who responded to this survey reported monthly revenue of 10 million yen or more.

Shopify only began gaining widespread adoption in Japan over the past two to three years, and it appears that many businesses are still in the growth phase. We look forward to seeing more merchants successfully scale their businesses through growth in the years to come.

Marketplace Usage

Here is the breakdown of marketplace usage, such as Amazon and Rakuten (not limited to Shopify users). More than half of respondents are actively using marketplaces.

As a side note (not shown in the chart), 33 out of the 55 Shopify users are also selling on marketplaces. With more than half of Shopify store operators also managing marketplace stores simultaneously, one wonders what their operational workload looks like.

Physical Store Operations

Next is the physical store situation. Of the 70 respondents, 28 also operate physical stores (while 42 do not), with pop-up shops and wholesale appearing to be the most common formats.

Below is the Shopify POS usage data. It appears that Shopify POS is still not widely adopted. Compared to North America and other regions, POS adoption in Japan still has a long way to go.

Growth Strategies Implemented

The following chart shows the growth strategies that Shopify users have implemented.

The top strategies include social media management, paid advertising, email newsletters and automated emails, and landing page creation and optimization — all of which are relatively short-term revenue-driving tactics.

On the other hand, strategies that take longer to produce results — such as content marketing (blog articles), PR activities and media outreach, and branding — appear to be less commonly implemented.

Effective Growth Strategies

Following the strategies implemented, here are the growth strategies respondents found to be effective.

Naturally, the more widely implemented a strategy, the more people report it as effective — but social media management, which ranked first in implementation, was overtaken by paid advertising in the effectiveness rankings, dropping to second place.

While not shown in the chart, among those running paid advertising, 9 respondents also implement content marketing (blog articles) — and all 9 report achieving results with their ads. The sample size is too small to draw conclusions, but this suggests that even for short-term results, building a pipeline of potential customers from the ground up is an important foundation.

Team Structure

Nearly half of Shopify users operate their stores with just one person, and when combined with those running 2–5 person teams, the figure exceeds 80%. This suggests that the majority of stores are run by small teams.

Below is a chart showing the extent to which Shopify store operations are outsourced to external parties. More than half of respondents do not outsource any operations.

Notably, among Shopify users who operate solo without any outsourcing, every single one reported monthly revenue between 0 and 5 million yen. It appears to be common for businesses to start small, gradually build revenue, and then — once a winning strategy is found — slowly expand the team, including through outsourcing.

Growth Challenges

The top growth challenges reported by Shopify users were: not being able to fully execute on planned strategies, difficulty measuring the effectiveness of strategies, and a lack of personnel capable of driving growth initiatives.

It's easy to imagine that managing multiple channels with a small team makes it difficult to fully follow through on planned strategies.

Summary

In this article, we reviewed the results of a survey on Shopify growth initiatives. My takeaway is that when aiming for significant growth, it's important to identify a winning strategy early and expand beyond short-term tactics to also include long-term initiatives. What insights did you draw from the data?

To everyone who took the time to fill out the survey — thank you so much. For our newsletter subscribers, we'll be sending a more in-depth analysis email, so please look forward to it.

StoreHero is here to support you from the ground up, starting with the design of a store built to sell. Feel free to reach out anytime. =>View StoreHero's Service Overview