What a heavy rain can teach you about your Shopify store

We had a large rain system pass through recently.

Not flooding levels of rain but enough that the weather service sent out alerts about it. Probably the most rain we've had here since moving in.

I was anxious to see how the yard changes did as we added a lot of drainage in summer and the area is known for slow drainage in general.

With the exception of one area, everything worked well.

But that problem area is right outside our back door. The rain became standing water and mud. It stayed away from the house like it was supposed to but it'll make our back door unusable during heavy rains.

I already have a solution in mind though. This spring I'm going to be adding groundcover there in between pavers which will help drain and soak up any water.

We consider the storm as a passing test for the drainage system we built.

You can consider the holiday rush as a test for your Shopify store. Or any big event for that matter.

If orders got backed up, customer service fell behind, etc, then you know what areas will have problems in the future. You can expect those to appear again during next year's holidays or if your store grows to that level of revenue.

Take your experiences over the last couple of months and start picking them apart to find the drainage problems. What broke? How did it break? At what level did it break?

Those should be the start of your project list for this year. You don't need solutions today, just the problems to solve.

One common problem is customers defecting without you knowing about it until it's too late.

You can use Repeat Customer Insights to find out where customers start to defect so you can try to win them back easier and with less discounting.

Eric Davis