Populating Your Store Slowly for Success

When you start a new store, it is tempting to add as many products as you can as fast as possible... but don't!

Doing this will quickly kill your store's SEO potential, kill conversions from your visitors, and make it difficult for you to manage your store.

How to Populate Your Store for Success

This quick video will show you the best way to populate your store and will demonstrate the reasons for keeping it small in the beginning:

Why start small?

There are three big reasons to start your store with minimum products:

1. It's Good for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

   Google likes to see a new store grow slowly over time. A new store with thousands of products will look suspicious, and most of those pages will not get indexed. Any link juice you have will be spread over too many pages.

   
   

2. It's Good for Conversions and Sales

   If you offer your visitors too many choices, they will get overwhelmed and leave your store. This will kill your conversions and damage your sales. Instead, give your visitors a small, focused, and high-quality selection of products.

   
   

3. It's Easier to Manage Your Store

   You want to learn about your niche and know which products generate sales. Adding too many products makes this hard and also increases the chance that you create duplicate products in your store.

What if I already have too many products?

No problem! You can easily delete products from your store and start again with populating.

Clear down your products (you can delete them in bulk from the product list) and take another look at your categories. Then, follow the guidelines in this article.

Remember to clear your cache after deleting a lot of products so Google will see the changes right away.

Can I grow my store later?

Yes, absolutely; it's a good strategy to keep growing your store by adding new categories and products over time.

The key is to do it slowly and to stay in control of your store. When adding products, consider removing some that have become outdated or are not performing.

Learn about your niche and add new categories based on your visitors' wants.