How Much Money Can You Make on Shopify?

How Much Can You Make on Shopify

How much money can you make on Shopify?

This is one of the most popular questions that most of the people ask when they hear about Shopify and consider starting their own store with it.

And that’s an important question to ask, as you need to know what to expect before you invest your time and money in setting up an online shop and spending money on marketing it.

And the answer can vary on the main five factors you will learn below, which makes it misleading to listen to ecommerce “gurus” on YouTube and other channels who show you big numbers without giving you any context.

This is why I created this short guide in order to give you an estimate on how much you should expect to make with a Shopify store.

Without further ado, let’s jump in!

How Much Money Can You Make on Shopify?

The amount of money you can make on Shopify depends on many factors and varies from one person to another depending on their expertise in running businesses in general, and online businesses in particular.

A serious Shopify merchant who puts the time and effort on consistent basis might make up to $10,000 a month in sales after solidly optimizing their store and advertising channels, usually working full time at this point, or/and having VA’s working for them.

Many Shopify store owners reach the level $1,000 and $2,000 in sales working few hours on daily basis.

Some Shopify stores make millions of dollars in sales per year, but these are the exception, not the rule.

These are gross sales numbers and not the net profit numbers, as the profit varies depending on the products, margins, sales volume, marketing strategy, conversion optimization and more.

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How Much Can You Make on Shopify in a Month?

It is possible to make $1,000 per month on shopify working 2-3 hours a day after a month or two of optimizing your advertisement channels and store pages.

From there, depending on how you manage the cash flow, how much you invest back in your Shopify business to sell more products, find new customers, re-sell to the existing customers, and how aggressively you work on business, you can increase your monthly income on Shopify into $10,000 a month, and after that all the way to $100,000 a month or more after going full-time and hiring VA’s to help you with time-consuming repetitive tasks.

However, there’s a possibility that you don’t make money and even lose money at all if you treat your Shopify business as a hobby, or as a magical push button that is supposed to send you money without any deliberate action or skills.

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How Much Do Shopify Stores Make on Average?

As per Shopify’s report called “The Shopify Effect“, all Shopify stores combined made the total of $307 billion in sales in year 2020 alone.

Dividing that by the total number of 1.7 million Shopify stores, that gives us the average of around $181,000 per year per store, or the average of $15,000 per month per store, which is how much Shopify stores make on average.

How Much Shopify Stores Make

But that’s not a number to rely on when thinking about how much an average person can make, as these numbers are highly affected by the extraordinary performance of few Shopify stores that belong to the most successful Shopify store owners and big brands who existed long before using Shopify as a tool for receiving orders online such as Kylie Cosmetics, Red Bull, Whole Foods, and others.

There are of course solopreneurs who started with Shopify selling physical products either through dropshipping or by manufacturing their own products like InspireUplift, Bulletproof, Gymshark, and others, and they are already making millions, or even billions of dollars per year in sales, but these are also exceptions and don’t represent the average person who starts a Shopify store.

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How Much Does The Average Person Make on Shopify?

The average person makes little to no money on Shopify, or at least, with their first Shopify adventure, especially those who come from the 9-5 job with a 9-5 mindset.

But this doesn’t mean that no one came from a 9-5 job and succeeded with Shopify.

Actually, there are many successful people who made millions through Shopify after being in a 9-5 job.

You just need to understand that a Shopify store is a real business, not a job or a hobby.

It’s a real business that you can start for a very little cost and for a minimum amount of risk.

The different between those who succeed and those who fail is that the ones who fail are the ones that stick to the 9-5 job mindset and don’t realize that operating a Shopify store is a real business that requires a different mindset and skillset if they were to succeed with it.

Average Person Shopify Income

This means that you need to wear many hats at the same time, especially at the beginning, as you need to research the market, find a niche or audience to serve, find what problems they have or what outcomes they wish to get, and find the products that help them.

Then you need to learn some marketing skills in order to bring your target audience to your store, and you need to optimize your store for conversions and to increase the average order value and the customer lifetime value.

Also, you need to take care of your existing customers through good support and keep them engaged through social media or email in order to get them come back and buy from your Shopify store without having to keep paying for ads.

And because the average person who comes from a 9-5 job doesn’t realize these facts, or understands them, but doesn’t want to change anything in order to raise above being an average person, they fail and give up after not seeing the money pouring into their bank account after few weeks of starting their Shopify store.

And if you were to succeed and make money with Shopify, you need to raise above the average person, grown your mindset and skills, and put in the work on consistent basis managing your Shopify business and growing your skills.

How Much Money Can You Make on Shopify with Dropshipping?

High performing dropshippers make up to a hundred thousand dollars per month on Shopify with dropshipping, other serious dropshippers make up to $10,000 a month, some make around $1,500 per month, and the majority lose money trying to do dropshipping on Shopify.

The main reason why the majority fail trying to do dropshipping on Shopify is the fact that because it has a low barrier of entry, it attracts a lot of people with the 9-5 job mindset and skillset, and worse, people who have a false impression that dropshipping is a get-rich-quick scheme as many fake gurus on YouTube and Facebook try to promote it.

This all leads to a very low success rate of dropshipping.

But the ones who realize that this is a real business, and take the time to learn the necessary skills and the time to test and optimize the different aspects of their business are the ones who have higher chances of making a lot of money on Shopify with dropshipping.

Some of the most successful dropshipping stores on Shopify are: Inspire Uplift, Odditymall, CheddarGadgets, Bluecrate and others.

Shopify Dropshippers Can Make a Lot

How Much Can You Make Selling Print on Demand on Shopify?

Like it is with dropshipping, some Shopify merchants make hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales every month with print on demand products, some make a couple of thousands per month, and many don’t make any money.

Gearbunch is one of the most successful print on demand Shopify stores and makes millions of dollars in sales per year, which is again, the exception, not the rule.

POD Shopify Stores Can Make Money

Print on demand is similar to dropshipping as you don’t need to have inventory or ship anything by yourself, but it is different as you need a little more investment to create compelling designs, and might be harder to scale after finding a winning design like it is when finding a winning dropshipping product.

To make money with print in demand on Shopify, it is better if you focus on a passionate niche with a relatively large audience or people in a profession or a status with ability to spend a lot of money on products that allow them to show off.

Or, if you already have a personal brand and a following on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, or any other platform, you can make sales and money relatively quickly designing and selling your own merchandise on Shopify.

How Much Can You Make Selling Your Products on Shopify?

The amount of money you can make selling your own products on Shopify could be higher than what you can make with dropshipping or POD as you have unique products that keep your competitors away and allows you to sell for higher margins and get repeat customers who are loyal to your brand.

Gymshark for example makes hundreds of millions per year in sales on their Shopify store, and they started from the garage of their founder, but they succeeded because they innovated products that their target audience wanted as an alternative to the available products in the market.

And Bulletproof makes tens of millions in sales on their Shopify store selling their own products.

Make a Lot on Shopify with Your Products

Another Shopify store, BlendJet, started selling portable smoothie blenders through dropshipping, but then decided to build a brand and asked the manufacturer to create a better version with their branding, which allowed them to stand out from the competitors and build a bigger business and attract loyal buyers, even though they don’t manufacture the blenders by themselves.

Others like Alo Moves use Shopify to sell their own video courses, which has a high margin as their is no additional cost other than creating the course once, different from physical products.

Sarah Titus makes tens of thousands in sales per month selling printable templates and planners, which are digital products that don’t have any manufacturing costs other than creating them the first time, and don’t require any shipping costs.

Add to that, Sarah uses content marketing as one of the free traffic methods to get visitors to her Shopify store, which increases her profit margin.

Other Shopify store owners might make less money if they sell handmade items that take time to produce, or if they have a smaller audience, or if they sell live workshops or consultations that require their presence, which is harder to scale.

5 Factors That Affect How Much You Make on Shopify

As you saw above, how much money you can make on Shopify ranges from nothing into millions of dollars or more, which depends on many factors, such as:

Your Target Audience

The size, location, and status of your audience affects how much you could earn with your Shopify store.

For example, if you want to sell in a country were people are less comfortable paying online, or where not many people have credit cards or PayPal accounts to pay you, then it would be a little bit harder to make a lot of money with your Shopify store compared to selling to people in the US, UK, Canada, Europe, or even worldwide.

Also, if you want to sell to people who are over 60 years old, then it might be difficult to target them with ads on Facebook and Instagram as many of them don’t use these platforms.

And if you try to sell print on demand items to people who don’t have much in disposable income, then you would find it difficult to make any sales.

Try to understand your target audience will, find where they hang out online, what products they could benefit from buying, and their ability to spend on these products before you set up your store and have big hopes of making lots of money with Shopify.

The Products You Sell

The type of products you sell also affects how much money you could make with Shopify.

For example digital products like courses and downloads have high margins, but at the same time, people find it easier to spend money on tangible products.

Also, products that solve a real problem or make doing a certain job easier have more potential to sell in big quantities than print on demand products, while print on demand products can be scalable if you sell to people who are passionate about something or about their job and have money to spend on them.

Good Products Make a Lot on Shopify

And selling consumable products might be good for increasing the average order value and the lifetime value of a customer, while selling high ticket items can bring you more profit per sale and less labor work as you can make more money with a fewer number of transactions or orders.

And selling a unique item can help you increase your margin compared to selling the same item that others sell on their own online stores, on Amazon, or other platforms.

To make more money, you need to find products that are at least slightly better that what others sell in terms of quality and/or grade, in order to justify higher prices and margins and avoid going into the price war that no one wins.

Marketing Strategy

Depending on where your audience exists, you can use the different platforms to get traffic to your Shopify store in order to make money.

Most Shopify store owners focus solely on Facebook ads as the beginning and the end of their marketing efforts, but these might not be the only way to make money on Shopify.

Sometimes, your audience might exist on different platforms, or on different platforms than Facebook.

Some products are better advertised through Instagram ads or influencers, some on YouTube, and some perform well only when advertised through search campaigns for people looking on them on Google and Bing.

And some other products can be sold better through content marketing by educating people on how these products can help them solve a certain problem or gain certain desired results.

Optimization for Conversions & Revenue

Another major factor that could make or break your Shopify business is optimizing your store for conversions and for maximum results so that you make the most money for the least advertising spend.

Examples of ways to increase Shopify sales and revenue are:

  • Optimizing the product page to increase sales through good copywriting elements.
  • Offering guarantees and clear shipping terms.
  • Showing the benefits of the products you sell and how they are different from other products in the market.
  • Offering upsells and cross-sells with related products, in addition to offering quantity discounts, or discounts after a certain cart value.
  • Using retargeting ads to remarket to people who visited your store and didn’t purchase, or to people who purchased showing them other relevant products.
  • Following up with email marketing campaigns.
  • Staying engaged with your audience on your social media platforms or with email messages that are intended to provide value in your niche.
  • Providing the best possible customer support and ensuring that your customers are satisfied in order to get them purchase from you again without having to advertise to them again.

Optimization to Make More on Shopify

The more you can make from the same customer on your Shopify store on the long run the more profit you keep in your pocket.

Trying to sell to a customer only once and then looking for the next customer through paid ads makes it really hard to make a lot of money on Shopify as you would need to keep spending money on paid ads in order to acquire new customers.

Effort & Consistency

As I explained earlier, you need to treat your store as a business if you want to make good money on Shopify.

And this means that you don’t expect to become rich on the first month or so.

Shopify cannot make you rich.

It is you who determines how much money you can make on Shopify depending on how you approach your Shopify business.

You need to give yourself the time to learn the necessary skills for advertising and running your Shopify store, find your target audience, what products to sell to them, the marketing strategy that works best for your business, optimizing your store for trust and conversions, testing products, ads, marketing and sales strategies, and optimizing as you go.

It is more about consistency and optimization that it is a hit or miss adventure.

If you know that you have products that can help people and you know that your target customers are online and have the means to pay you, then you can succeed and make money on Shopify if you give your business the time and effort it needs.

Conclusion – Can You Really Make Money on Shopify?

Yes, you can make money on a Shopify store, provided that you treat it as a real business and you make your focus on helping your customers through the products you sell, and if you give yourself and your business enough time and build the necessary skills for building and running your business.

Choose the best way of making money whether by selling your own digital or physical products, or through dropshipping as a start.

If you don’t have a product of your own yet, then dropshipping might be the fastest way to get started at the lowest cost and risk, but you need to focus on selling quality products that are useful.

You can check out my guide on how to sell products on Shopify without inventory in order to start your Shopify dropshipping store today.

And if you still have any question regarding how much you can make on Shopify or if you need help on anything related to this subject, feel free to ask me in the comments’ section below, and I will do my best to help you out 🙂

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