Shogun for Shopify - A Super Powerful Page Builder

What is it?

Shogun for Shopify is an awesome drag-and-drop page builder for online shop owners that provides a large library of templates with complete control over adjusting content such as images, copy and design to fit your branding and get it up and running in a minimal amount of time, with very little effort. You can also create dedicated landing pages and product page templates from scratch. The ability to create completely unique and responsive designs without ever having to code makes it easy for you to deliver a friendly experience for your visitors. This helps you to move faster when testing out new page elements and negates you having to spend money on a developer to deliver the same functionality.

Conversion optimization is the name of the game your custom pages can access and use product information dynamically from your site. This allows you to create complete unique product page templates and then test and optimize them to chase gains in conversion rates.

No more responsive design issues

Shogun offers an extensive toolbox including sizing and styling controls so you can actually change the padding and margins based on screen size. This is huge for fixing the spacing issues that sometimes occur between different devices. If you've ever had to manually resize things or use a widget for desktop and hide it on mobile because of responsive design issues, you could totally understand why this is such a welcome feature.

Customize to the max with Shogun

The best use case for Shogun would be for tricking out your product detail pages or creating a bunch of conversion focused landing pages for your single product ad campaigns. It is so flexible that it allows you to go as deep as you need to, even allowing you to create custom elements that more closely match your brand and theme. This means that if Shogun doesn't have the element or styling option you desire, you (or a developer) can write your own HTML with liquid, CSS and/or JavaScript, configure it as a reusable drag-and-drop element and use it across any and all pages of your site!

But what about load times?

Normally, using a page builder over the top of your platform of choice will slow things down but this is not the case with Shogun. Your page speed is not affected at all because the pages are not in the load path. Yes, this tool is taking over sections of your pages to make them look better but the page itself is still uploaded to your Shopify store like any other page on your site. The images are compressed automatically and lazy loaded to make things super snappy.

Multi-site capability

Shogun allows you to publish your creations across multiple sites at the same time, making it perfect for localization when publishing the sites under different languages. Cloning pages, products, snippets, custom elements and more

Being able to sync content from one store to another is also helpful if you want to develop your site on one domain and then move it to another when it is ready to go live.

Alternatives to Shogun

If we were looking outside of the Shopify ecosystem then Unbounce and Instapage would be comparable as they are both popular landing page builders with similar feature sets, though neither are built specifically for e-commerce or have seamless integrations into shopify.

The most direct competitors found on the Shopify app store would be PageFly and GemPagesand. You could also hire a developer and dish out a lot of dosh to achieve the same thing but obviously that is not ideal. If your developer disappears and you need something changed then that may cause an issue down the line too.

You own your pages

Shogun's native Shopify integration allows you to create pages under your own domain instead of having them hosted on a subdomain with the tool provider. This means that you own the pages, not the tool provider. If you were to quit Shogun after using it to work on your site then the pages and elements that you built with the tool will remain on your site, not break or change and continue to work.

Split testing with Shogun

Shogun provides awesome split testing tools for optimizing your pages for conversion. Being able to split test based on clicks, add to cart or sales make Shogun stand out from other page builders with A/B testing abilities by allowing you to dial in on what matters, while making sure you still collect enough data to get statistical significance and make data driven decisions.

Some of the more professional split testing services like Google Optimize and Optimizely use a method where they create what are known as “ghost pages”. This is different to Shogun which create actual variants of the page you want to test. If multivariate testing or strong personalization is important to you then you might want to consider using a service like that. If you just want to get some tests up and running quickly and start with onpage conversion optimization then Shogun is perfect for you and pretty much everyone!

How Shogun can help you increase profits

Being able to easily customize pages while not having to pay a developer can save you loads on expenses. And doing all this without using up much of your own time is important as well because your time is valuable and should be spent doing other things like finding ways to drive traffic to your site.

As you use this tool to optimize pages to increase sales with A/B tests, you will start to see your conversion rates steadily climb as well. Being able to make more sales from the same amount of traffic is an awesome way to increase your revenue without increasing your marketing expenses. This means a greater ROI and, in turn, profit.

Is Shogun for you?

This tool is super useful for new, small and growing stores where you and/or your team are more skilled in other disciplines of eCommerce than web development, giving you the ability to have a lot of control over the site without having to take a crash course in web development or get a developer involved.

Even as you grow and have the resources to add developers to your team there is a good chance that they will benefit from having Shogun available to them to increase their speed of work, electing to use it when beneficial and bypass it if they hit a limitation.