Welcome to the Shopify Editions Winter ‘24 issue of Morning Commerce.

I’ll be honest, after the 100+ updates released in the Summer Editions I was expecting a slightly more humble update this time. Instead what we got was another 100+ updates to the Shopify platform 👀

They nicknamed this editions “Foundations” which perfectly sums up the theme of these updates, improving the core Shopify product from all the angles that matter; conversion, channels, marketing, operations, and developer experience.

Today I’ll be sharing some of my favourite updates that I know a few of my clients will be excited about, including:

• Rich product attributes based on category

• POS UI extensions and smart grid editor

• 2000 variants per product!

• Exchanges on Shopify

• Combined listings app

• New POS terminal

• Semantic search

• Shop campaigns

• Theme blocks

• And more!

I’ve worked directly with over a 120 Shopify brands and the one thing I’ve learned is everyone uses the platform in their own unique way. So it’s worth your while to take a look at the official Shopify Editions Winter ‘24 website and take a gander at any updates specific to your situation.

— Kyle Tully

CONVERSION

Rich product attributes based on category

Shopify has updated their taxonomy mapping each product category to a set of product attributes, making it easier to organise products and automatically create variants.

For example, if you select the “snowboard” product category for a product, Shopify will automatically give you metafields for properties such as “color”, “age group“, “recommended skill level“, and “snowboarding style”.

If you have more than a handful of products these type of classifications are so important for helping people easily find the products they are looking for, and they really do help conversions.

Verticals already released include Apparel & Accessories, Food, Beverages, & Tobacco, Home & Garden, Sporting Goods, and Furniture. All 20 verticals are set to be fully updated by the end of February. You can track the status here.

Combined listings app

One of the most common customisations we code for stores where visual merchandising is particularly important is combining product variants into a single product listing, with product photos that update based on the selected variant.

The effect is really nice, but it can be a tricky piece of code that is resource intensive and often not compatible with various apps.

Shopify’s new Combined Listings App aims to solve this problem, giving you a centralised product listing, with each variant getting it’s own image carousel, descriptive URL, and publishing controls.

This is one of the exclusive Shopify Plus releases due to roll out in ‘24.

2000 variants per product!

Shopify’s 100 variant per product limit sounds like a lot, until you actually start working with products that combine multiple options and you quickly hit the limit.

(Shopify Plus stores can get access to 250 variants by asking their rep to enable the jumbo_extended_variants_per_ feature. Everyone else needs to use an app to simulate more variants.)

In API release 2024-04 (currently in developer preview) Shopify is updating the product model, which includes variants no longer fixed at 100. Most shops will support an initial rollout of 2000 variants, with the wording of the release sounding like this may just be a starting point.

Semantic search

Another Plus-only update, Shopify’s new Semantic Search uses AI to enable search-intent matching that goes far beyond keywords and uses natural language to provide rich search results.

For example, right now you need to search for something like “red dress” or “mens size 12 running shoe“ in order to get relevant results that are matched directly to product names and properties.

But with semantic search enabled, people will be able to search for things such as “something sexy to wear for my school reunion“ or “the best shoes for running a spartan race“ and Shopify’s AI will use both text and image data of your products to match relevant results.

CHANNELS

New POS terminal

Shopify has very deliberately moved away from the word ecommerce and now simply uses commerce in most of their communications. Backing up their words with actions, they’re making improvements to their in-store solutions with the release of a new POS terminal that accepts tap, chip, and swipe payments and has some fancy custom image display.

POS UI extensions and smart grid editor

The new smart grid editor lets you configure and assign smart grid layouts on a per-location basis, and the new extensions setting allows you to manage app UI extensions across multiple store locations.

MARKETING

Shop campaigns

Risk-free CPA ads targeting Shop Pay users are now available to Shopify Plus merchants via Shop Campaigns.

Here’s how it works: Buyers earn Shop Cash on Shop Pay purchases. Shop Cash can be spent (and boosted) with offers on Shop. Shop Cash offers are displayed on the Shop store and promoted via push notifications and email. You earn the full product value while gaining risk-free new customers.

Campaigns can be setup in a few clicks and merchants using the program have seen up to a 43% increase in new customer growth.

Shop minis

Shoppable videos, livestreams, product recommendation quizzes, and one-click upsells are just some of the app-powered customisations you can add to your Shop app storefront with the power of Shop Minis.

OPERATIONS

Shopify lending

Shopify lending leverages machine learning and a 360 degree view of your business to provide fast capital for your business.

Once approved you can receive funds in as little as two days, and similar to Paypal’s Working Capital product, you simply pay it back with automated payments as a percent of daily sales.

You can use the funds for anything related to your business, including paid marketing, inventory, hiring experts, or new product launches.

Larger retailers can access lines of credit, term loans, and cash advances.

AI product photography

Improvements coming in early ‘24 for Shopify Magic include AI-enabled image editing features, allowing you to quickly remove backgrounds from images, or merchandise products with natural language image generation.

Exchanges on Shopify

Native exchanges in coming to Shopify early ‘24 — you’ll be able to create, track, and manage exchanges for any order from the admin.

DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE

Theme blocks in developer preview

Powerful drag-and-drop layout editing is coming to themes, with flex sections allowing merchants to re-size, group and edit content with a few mouse clicks.

Nested theme blocks will extend the power of metaobjects allowing merchants to design layouts for content without needing to touch code.

Customer account extensibility

Soon you’ll be able to build extensions directly into new customer accounts with the same UI components as Shopify Checkout — currently available in developer preview.

100+ Shopify updates

There are SO many awesome little updates in this Editions that it was impossible to include even a quarter of the ones I’d love to talk more about.

Shopify is moving fast and my advice is grab your beverage of choice and have a good read through the full list of updates and see which ones may have the biggest impact on your business so you can position accordingly.

How we can help…

🔥 Looking for an experienced Shopify Partner to work with? 
Smart ecommerce brands rely on us for innovative design, development, optimisation, and growth strategies to create highly profitable Shopify websites. Work with our consultancy.

🎯 Want to reach our audience? Hit reply to discuss advertising.

Welcome to Morning Commerce!

With Shopify Editions set for tomorrow, today feels like the calm before the storm. If previous editions are anything to go by, I expect a few sleepless nights over the next few weeks as we wrap our heads around what is launched… and what becomes possible.

Here’s what’s in today’s issue:

• Reminder: Shopify Editions tomorrow

• Put Google AI to work with Search ads

• Kith loyalty gives you members-only merch

• Acquire new customers with Shop Campaigns

— Kyle Tully

ACQUISITION

Put Google AI to work with Search ads

Conversational AI has arrived at Google Ads, with Gemini-powered chat allowing you to create better search campaigns with significantly less effort.

Starting with just your website and a now familiar chat-based interface, Google AI can bang out complete campaigns including ad content, creative, and keywords.

The tool has been optimised to create campaigns with “Good“ to “Excellent” ad strength, a measure which Google says they have found has a strong correlation with conversions.

In the coming months, image generation will be added to the mix, allowing you to create an almost infinite number of campaigns with generative AI images.

Beta access is currently available to all English language advertisers in the US and UK and will roll out to other English language advertisers over the next few weeks.

Acquire new customers with Shop Campaigns

Shopify Plus merchants now have access to Shop Campaigns, allowing them to run risk-free CPA ads targeting Shop Pay users.

Here’s how it works:

• Buyers earn Shop Cash by using Shop Pay at checkout.

• You target Shop Cash buyers with a maximum acquisition cost campaign.

• Shopify takes care of the corresponding offer and audience.

• Your offer gets promoted on the Shop app.

• You acquire and retain new customers, never paying more than your preferred acquisition cost.

Campaigns can be setup in a few clicks and merchants using the program have seen up to a 43% increase in new customer growth.

CONVERSION

Kith loyalty gives you members-only merch

Shopify-powered apparel brand Kith launched their loyalty program this week, offering members incentives including members-only custom items, early access, line priority, and in-store returns.

A limited-edition partnership with Adidas kicked off the program with exclusive footwear available for members only.

Members can earn loyalty points by spending money online, in-store, and using the Kith app. To encourage participation, points can also be earned by visiting physical stores, adding shopping preferences to the app, and entering contests.

I think we’ll see more brands rolling out these kind of multi-layered loyalty programs that go far beyond discounts and hit consumers with a combo of FOMO and exclusivity rooted in real benefits and pain points.

SHOPIFY NEWS

Reminder: Shopify Editions tomorrow

Twitter tweet

Sign up here.

Five new Shopify updates

• Enhanced sales tax reports now support annual filing - Shopify Tax’s enhanced sales tax report has been updated so you can select the exact timeframe you need to file.

• Update: Pricing Selector for Draft Orders - The market selector for draft orders has been updated to a pricing selector, allowing merchants to change the pricing and presentment currency for their orders.

• Reduced permissions for POS Login now in Organization Settings.

• Shipping service suggestions are now available when purchasing Shopify Shipping labels - A Suggested shipping service will be pre-selected based on similar orders in your store.

• Updated Order Details experience in the Shopify Mobile App.

INSPO OF THE WEEK

Aussie sauce brand Truff hit the nail on the head with premium product packaging and overall presentation of their products. (Their product photography is outstanding.) Super important when you sell a hot sauce that’s 5-10X the price of what you’d find in a supermarket. Best selling and starter packs help increase AOV and discounted subscriptions no doubt improve LTV 😉

How we can help…

🔥 Looking for an experienced Shopify Partner to work with? 
Smart ecommerce brands rely on us for innovative design, development, optimisation, and growth strategies to create highly profitable Shopify websites. Work with our consultancy.

🎯 Want to reach our audience? Hit reply to discuss advertising.

Welcome to Morning Commerce!

Kyle here with another action-packed issue full of Shopify goodies:

• New ways to search in 2024

• Smokesperson fails to boost sales

• Shopify to announce financial results

• Why profitability feels SO hard in ecom

• Thumbnail A/B testing coming to Youtube

— Kyle Tully

ACQUISITION

Smokesperson fails to boost sales

We reported on the brilliantly creative Smokeless campaign by Solo Stove back in November, well now the results are in… and they’re not good.

So bad, in fact, they’ve got a new President and Chief Executive Officer.

This highlights the importance of ensuring influencers and brand ambassadors you work with are a good match for your audience and messaging. Seems they were a little off the mark with this one as Snoop failed to connect with outdoor enthusiasts, and Snoop’s exisiting audience are still focused on the other smoke.

CONVERSION

Thumbnail A/B testing coming to Youtube

Thumbnails can make or break a video on Youtube. In fact, most creators find it’s the single most important factor that determines the success of a video.

Smart creators have been using tools like Tubebuddy or manually split testing and optimising their thumbnails for a long time… but soon this functionality will be available to all.

Youtube’s thumbnail testing option will let you upload three different variations which it will run in a side by side A/B split test for two weeks before letting you pick the winner.

Early reports from people in the beta say it’s looking really good!

SEO

New ways to search in 2024

Google is introducing two big updates to search, including Circle to Search and an AI-powered multisearch experience.

Circle to Search makes searching on your Android device as simple as circling or highlighting text, images, or video with your finger. No need to leave the app you’re in.

And the new multisearch experience allows you to point your camera (or upload a photo) and ask a question using the Google app, and get AI-powered insights that go beyond simple visual matches.

Google is all-in on AI and plans to continue experimenting with gen AI and introducing helpful applications more broadly to search, so expect to see plenty more updates like this in 2024.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Why profitability feels SO hard in ecom

Twitter tweet

If you’re anything like me you probably fell asleep in Accounting 101 when they started talking about COGS, but turns out it’s actually kinda important. Whodathunkit?

COGS = Cost of Goods Sold.

In other words, the direct costs of producing the products you sell.

This includes materials, labour, and operating expenses directly required to produce each product.

Knowing your COGS helps you find profitability, fine-tune your profit margins, and determine which products and prices will give you the best returns.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of looking at the wholesale cost of your products and comparing that to your retail price and convincing yourself everything is hunky dory… when in fact you’re on a sinking ship and don’t even know it.

Definitely worth taking a few minutes to calculate your true COGS and get a handle on your numbers.

SHOPIFY NEWS

Shopify to announce financial results

Shopify will announce financial results for its fourth quarter and full-year 2023 on February 13, 2024.

Shopify's management team will host a conference call to discuss fourth-quarter results at 8:30 a.m. ET on Tuesday, February 13, 2024.

The conference call will be available via webcast on the investor relations section of Shopify's website at https://investors.shopify.com/news-and-events/.

An archived replay of the webcast will be available following the conclusion of the call.

One new Shopify update

• Automatic order cancellation for Suppliers after 14 days - Shopify Collective automates the supplier order cancellation action under certain conditions.

INSPO OF THE WEEK

Earthy tones, vintage photo filters, retro packaging colours, and a trippy peace sign come together to give a positively groovy vibe to Bathing Culture. A great example of a simple Shopify site done well by getting the basics right.

How we can help…

🔥 Looking for an experienced Shopify Partner to work with? 
Smart ecommerce brands rely on us for innovative design, development, optimisation, and growth strategies to create highly profitable Shopify websites. Work with our consultancy.

🎯 Want to reach our audience? Hit reply to discuss advertising.

Welcome to Morning Commerce!

Bit of a quiet week on the content front, but lots of Shopify news, including:

• Shopify Editions - Winter ‘24

• Shop Pay on non-Shopify websites

• Growing a store at “holy shit” speed

• Shopify joins Google Cloud Marketplace

• Earn 3.86% annually with Shopify Balance

I’m looking forward to what’s in store for the upcoming Shopify Editions and will be tuning into all the live streams to keep you updated.

— Kyle Tully

ACQUISITION

Growing a store at “holy shit” speed

Twitter tweet

Shopify president Harley Finkelstein sat down with @BeisTravel and @glossier to talk about how they’ve grown at what he calls “holy shit“ speed, including:

1. Continuously disrupt yourself.

2. Create a category within a category.

3. Get a vice grip on the consumer.

There are a few videos in this series and they’re worth watching to hear how some of the fastest growing brands on Shopify think and act.

SHOPIFY NEWS

Shopify Editions - Winter ‘24

Twitter tweet

While most of us are still stumbling upon new features released during the previous Summer Editions, the team at Shopify have been busy building and have set a date for the '24 Winter Editions:

January 31, 11am EST.

You can register here to get notified and learn about upcoming features before they start rolling out.

Shop Pay on non-Shopify websites

Twitter tweet

Shop Pay now integrates with all commerce platforms.

By turning Shop Pay into a Commerce Component, enterprise brands on virtually any platform can tap into Shopify’s 100-million+ network of high-intent buyers.

This should also benefit native Shopify stores as it will enhance the overall visibility of Shop Pay across all commerce, and more Shop Pay users means easier checkouts across the Shopify ecosystem for those users.

The Shopify Plus team did a full write up on this here.

Shopify joins Google Cloud Marketplace

Shopify is now officially available on Google Cloud Marketplace.

TBH I’m not exactly sure what this means. But it sounds good I suppose.

You can read the write up here.

Earn 3.86% annually with Shopify Balance

Twitter tweet

Four new Shopify updates

• Product insights page removed from Analytics - The product insights beta has been removed from Analytics and will be replaced by an improved product conversion reporting experience later in 2024.

• Shopify Duties and Import Taxes preferential treaty support - Shopify Duties and Import Taxes now supports preferential trade agreements in duties calculations.

• Redirect visitors to translated storefronts based on their browser language - It is now possible for merchants to automatically redirect visitors to translated storefronts with the Language redirection setting within Markets.

• Earn 3.86% annually with Shopify Balance - Shopify Balance now rewards you with 3.86% in the form of an annual percentage yield (APY) on all money held in your Balance account.

INSPO OF THE WEEK

The Beis website is a bit of a sleeper… everything about it is good, but nothing really stands out as spectacular. (That is until you see $218 products with over 8820 reviews 👀) I like the top section on their new arrivals page. Not only promoting new collections, but also hinting at an upcoming collection. They use this same format for the mega menu for New Arrivals as well.

How we can help…

🔥 Looking for an experienced Shopify Partner to work with? 
Smart ecommerce brands rely on us for innovative design, development, optimisation, and growth strategies to create highly profitable Shopify websites. Work with our consultancy.

🎯 Want to reach our audience? Hit reply to discuss advertising.

Welcome to Morning Commerce!

Things are really heating up on the agency side of things with what feels like all my clients kicking off new projects this week 😅

Here’s what you’ll find in this week’s issue:

• 7 things to consider before working with an influencer

• Handpicked curated brand guidelines

• Brand building is world building

• 58 rules for beautiful UI design

• Customer service is a choice

• A freaky inspo store

— Kyle Tully

ACQUISITION

Brand building is world building

Eric Bandholz sat down with freelance growth marketing consultant Joe Anhalt to talk DTC growth strategies. The conversation covered everything from marketing channels and design essentials, to multichannel selling and brand building.

On the topic of producing quality media on a budget:

Marketing channels for growth in 2024:

Check out the full interview here.

7 things to consider before working with an influencer

Delve into the world of influencer marketing and you’ll quickly realise that finding the right influencers to partner with is often much more difficult than it might first seem.

A surprisingly good article from Entrepreneur lays out 7 things that will take you far beyond looking at follower count:

1. Authority and trust in the category

2. Influence that sells

3. An authentic brand story and aesthetic

4. A product that serves a market need

5. Product excellence beyond expectations

6. Smart and effective operations

7. Continual community building

Astute readers will notice more than half of these focus more on the brand than the influencer. Like all marketing strategies, the stronger the product and business machine behind it, the more powerful the results.

Worth a gander if you’re looking at new partnerships for 2024.

CONVERSION

Customer service is a choice

“It’s either part of your strategy or you’re paying for your mistake.”

In a world of 5-day email response times where the response is a template email that doesn’t even answer your question… and AI chat bots that have you madly hunting for the “talk to a person” button… it’s not hard to stand out on the customer service front.

In fact, I think it’s one of the biggest advantages smaller stores have over their larger competitors. The ability to quickly reach a real live human who talks like a real person and knows enough to confidently answer your questions and allay your fears.

Happy referrals and delighted reviews are the natural byproduct of making customer service part of your strategy.

DESIGN

Handpicked curated brand guidelines

If you feel like your brand isn’t quite hitting the mark, or has perhaps got lost along the way, check out BrandGuide’s impressive list of brand guidelines from around the world.

With complete brand guides from the likes of Instagram, Afterpay, Wise, Firefox, Herman Miller, and many more, you’ll see exactly what it takes to carve out a compelling brand in some of the toughest categories on the planet.

Reading through these is an absolute masterclass in creating a strong brand.

58 rules for beautiful UI design

New year new web design? Brush up on your design fundamentals with these 58 rules for beautiful UI design.

Three new Shopify updates

• Shopify Flow - Get discount data - You can now use a Get discount data action in Flow. In the action, you can get a list of discounts and then use that data to automate processes in your store, or send scheduled reports.

• Shopify Collective orders simplified for Suppliers - A Shopify Collective order marked as ‘Paid’ now indicates that payment has been collected from your Collective retailer, and the order is good to fulfill.

• Shop channel now pre-installed for new merchants - The Shop channel will now be pre-installed and pinned in the sales channels section of admin navigation for all new merchants in Shopify Payments supported countries.

INSPO OF THE WEEK

Strong branding oozes out of every pore of the Rotten store. The attention to detail hits you on every scroll. From delightfully freaky copy to custom section breaks and backgrounds through to hilarious “testimonials” and the first logo I’ve seen that looks better the larger you see it. So cool.

How we can help…

🔥 Looking for an experienced Shopify Partner to work with? 
Smart ecommerce brands rely on us for innovative design, development, optimisation, and growth strategies to create highly profitable Shopify websites. Work with our consultancy.

🎯 Want to reach our audience? Hit reply to discuss advertising.

Welcome to Morning Commerce, 2024 style.

Kyle here and I’m slowly getting back into some sort of work routine. Today I checked my emails. Tomorrow I might reply to a few!

Here’s what made my reading list for the first week of the new year:

• Shipping priorities of online consumers

• What does the future hold for DTC retailers?

• An inspo site that did $4.5 million in year one

• 5 content marketing ideas for February 2024

• Growing cyber weekend sales 70% from ‘22 to ‘23

— Kyle Tully

ACQUISITION

5 content marketing ideas for February 2024

If you’re looking to get a head start on your content marketing calendar for 2024 then Practical Ecommerce has some good ideas for Feb based on upcoming holidays and events:

1. National Pizza Day, February 9.

2. World Marriage Day, the second Sunday in February.

3. International Darwin Day, February 12.

4. National Drink Wine Day, February 18.

5. Leap Year Day, February 29.

Want more ideas like this every month?

I use a handy Google Calendar called “Holidays and Email Marketing” with lots of unique and creative holidays you can build campaigns around.

CONVERSION

Shipping priorities of online consumers

Free delivery and easy return shipping continue to dominate consumer preferences when it comes to ecommerce shipping priorities, with 89% and 65% of 6000 respondents respectively stating each as the most important shipping factor.

Breaking the data out by gender, females valued free delivery and easy returns more than males. While men rated next-day and same-day delivery as higher priorities than women.

All other preferences were rated almost exactly equal between genders.

Growing cyber weekend sales 70% from ‘22 to ‘23

Simply Gum sells “better-for-you” gum in over 14,000 retail locations, including Whole Foods, Target, and CVS. Around 20% of their revenue comes from online, split 80/20 between Amazon and Shopify.

This year they grew online 47%, and cyber weekend 70%, by focusing on a few simple strategies:

• Introducing new products online before launching in stores.

• Experimenting with flavours and collecting customer feedback quickly.

• Selling variety packs online that are not available in stores.

DTC

What does the future hold for DTC retailers?

Notwithstanding the fact that lumping all DTC retailers into a single category is kinda silly, there are broad economic and environmental factors that will effect almost everyone selling online.

Cheap online advertising and free pandemic money for everyone led to the golden years of DTC. But with soaring online ad rates (set to be made worse by the upcoming US elections), high inflation, a tight monetary landscape, and increased competition, things have certainly changed.

Brands that fail to recognise and adapt to this changing landscape will struggle and eventually fail.

INSPO OF THE WEEK

Create has taken one of the oldest and most well-researched sports supplements — creatine — and repackaged it from a boring flavourless white powder into a trendy blue raspberry gummie… to the tune of $4.5 million in sales their first year. Their website ticks all the boxes you’d expect, but it’s the concept of repackaging that you should be paying attention to.

How we can help…

🔥 Looking for an experienced Shopify Partner to work with? 
Smart ecommerce brands rely on us for innovative design, development, optimisation, and growth strategies to create highly profitable Shopify websites. Work with our consultancy.

🎯 Want to reach our audience? Hit reply to discuss advertising.

Welcome to Morning Commerce!

A very under-the-weather Kyle here with a short MC issue for you:

• 5 steps to $100k/m in DTC

• Top Shopify releases of ‘23

• Understanding the new WCAG 2.2 criteria

• TikTok as a new source is growing for all age groups

— Kyle Tully

ACQUISITION

TikTok as a new source is growing for all age groups

File this one under “scary for society, great for DTC brands”, TikTok is the fastest-growing social media platform for news consumption, according to data from Pew Research.

5 steps to $100k/m in DTC

Twitter tweet

Twitter/X influencers and their threads can be rather obnoxious, but this one from Pura Vida founder Paul Goodman is gold. I won’t repeat the steps here because the good stuff is in the tactics he shares in between the steps. Worth a read.

ACCESSIBILITY

Understanding the new WCAG 2.2 criteria

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) covers many recommendations for making Web content more accessible. In October, WCAG 2.2 became the official recommendation of the W3C, and includes 9 new success criteria:

• Clear Focus for Keyboard Navigation (2.4.11 & 2.4.12)

• Enhanced Visual Cues (2.4.13)

• Simpler Interactions (2.5.7)

• Spacious Click Targets (2.5.8)

• Consistent Help Placement (3.2.6)

• Visibility of Essential Controls (3.2.7)

• Accessible Authentication (3.3.7)

• Less Redundancy, More Efficiency (3.3.8)

Stark wrote an article with a few nice visual examples of these in action so you can see how your store stacks up.

SHOPIFY NEWS

Top Shopify releases of ‘23

Twitter tweet

Two new Shopify updates

• More support for metaobjects in theme text settings - added reference lists to the rich text, text, and inline richtext setting in the theme editor and you can reference lists of text directly in your theme using dynamic sources.

• Email notifications are now available in Shopify Forms - You can now turn on email notifications that send whenever a new form is submitted via Shopify Forms.

INSPO OF THE WEEK

Sheila May Swim had us build this nifty little mix-n-match page that lets users quickly browse through collections and see how different pieces work together. The feature is built as a custom theme section allowing the client to choose whatever collections they like and add other content using the theme customiser. Simple but effective.

How we can help…

🔥 Looking for an experienced Shopify Partner to work with? 
Smart ecommerce brands rely on us for innovative design, development, optimisation, and growth strategies to create highly profitable Shopify websites. Work with our consultancy.

🎯 Want to reach our audience? Hit reply to discuss advertising.

Welcome to Morning Commerce!

Now the dust has settled from BFCM we’re deep into planning 2024.

What’s on the cards for you this coming year? We’ve got an in-house brand to launch in Q1 and on the agency front will be moving more heavily into app development. Exciting times.

Here’s what I’m reading this week:

• NYSE welcomes Shopify

• What truly enhances AOV

• Updates to Meta Ads bidding

• Top 1% E-Commerce UX Awards

• A nifty update on Shopify Collabs

• How Google Search and ranking works

• Gen Z women driving consumption on TikTok

• New Customer Accounts coming to Shopify Apps

• How to make your ecommerce content more helpful

— Kyle Tully

ACQUISITION

Gen Z women driving consumption on TikTok

Gen Z women are setting the tone for what’s hot online thanks to the larger share of women who use TikTok (75%) compared to men (62%). This increased use time leads to deeper bonds with influencers and a larger share of females purchasing influencer-sponsored products. “It’s the younger generation’s version of keeping up with the Joneses”.

Updates to Meta Ads bidding

CONVERSION

What truly enhances AOV

Twitter tweet

The dev behind Monk app wrote a thread breaking down data from over 5000 stores showing what matters for increasing average order value.

Some interesting highlights:

• For high-SKU stores setting up custom upsells/bundles is worth the time investment and better than any AI-recommendation engine.

• Stores with < 500 orders/month or <$50k/month should focus on finding winning products, increasing conversions, and scaling with ads rather than worrying about upsells.

• Post-purchase and in-cart upsells are free money.

You can check out the full thread for some juicy offer specifics.

Top 1% E-Commerce UX Awards

Baymard have announced their 2023 top 1% E-commerce UX award winners. Looking at 234 top-grossing US and European e-commerce sites and benchmarking against 500-680 weighted UX guidelines that total over 10,000 hours of auditing work, the sites on this list are worthy of study.

Notable winners include:

• https://www.bang-olufsen.com/en

• https://www.carparts.com/

• https://www.gousto.co.uk/

• https://www.musiciansfriend.com/

• https://www.allegromedical.com/

SEO

How Google Search and ranking works

Twitter tweet

Google’s Pandu Nayak testified at the U.S. vs. Google antitrust trial in October and the transcript of his testimony contains a ton of juicy stuff for SEO nerds.

According to his statements, there are around 100 ranking signals currently in use, with the key signals being:

• Document.

• Topicality.

• Page quality.

• Reliability.

• Localization.

• Navboost.

It’s a fascinating read and the Search Engine Land article that covers it is worth your time if you want to dig into the weeds.

How to make your ecommerce content more helpful

Creating valuable content across your entire Shopify site has become more important than ever thanks to Google’s “helpful content” update. And as we’ve heard in Pandu Nayak’s testimony in the antitrust trial, the single most important ranking signal is the document.

In other words, the content on the page.

Frankly, most stores are seriously lacking in their on-page content. Minimal product page descriptions, thin collection pages, and little other helpful content anywhere on the site.

This SEL article is a solid start to help you revamp your ecommerce content strategy with actionable tips on making your pages truly helpful through dynamic elements and UGC.

The best part about this type of content is that it’s truly helpful for consumers, so not only does it help with search engine rankings but it’ll likely bump conversions as well.

SHOPIFY NEWS

NYSE welcomes Shopify

Twitter tweet

New Customer Accounts coming to Shopify Apps

Twitter tweet

A nifty update on Shopify Collabs

Twitter tweet

Six new Shopify updates

• Collaborator request code now required for partners to access your store - Collaborator request codes, previously an opt-in feature, will now be enabled by default for all merchants.

• Edit existing local currency orders in Shopify - Merchants selling in multiple currencies with Shopify Payments, can now make changes to an order without using workarounds.

• Set payment terms and collect deferred payments for local currency orders - For merchants selling in multiple currencies with Shopify Payments it is now possible to collect deferred payments for local currency orders

• Enhancements to the Cohort Analysis report - it now includes an amount spent per customer metric calculating the average amount customers have spent in their history with your store.

INSPO OF THE WEEK

“The life upgrade you didn't know you needed“ is the perfect way to describe the Rocco drinks fridge. I’d never heard of it before this week, wasn’t in the market for a fridge, but now it’s all I can think of. Lots of great little details on this site, but my favourite is the animated product features section as you scroll down the homepage. It helps stop skimming and slows you down to focus on the copy. Nicely done 👌

How we can help…

🔥 Looking for an experienced Shopify Partner to work with? 
Smart ecommerce brands rely on us for innovative design, development, optimisation, and growth strategies to create highly profitable Shopify websites. Work with our consultancy.

🎯 Want to reach our audience? Hit reply to discuss advertising.

Whew!

We survived another BFCM 🙏 

Time to sit back, relax, and get your fill of Morning Commerce:

• Metafield madness

• Claude 2.1 launched

• Accessibility lawsuits

• $9.3 billion in sales by Shopify merchants

• Preparing for the end of third-party cookies

• Where DTC brands see opportunities in 2024

• Google Bard can now answer questions about YouTube videos

— Kyle Tully

ACQUISITION

Where DTC brands see opportunities in 2024

Digital advertising expansion leads the way for areas of opportunity for DTC brands in 2024, with 59% of respondents saying it’s their greatest opportunity, according to a new study by Digiday / Klaviyo.

51% say testing is an area of opportunity, however this was dampened by 68% claiming that finding budgets and buy-in for testing is a challenge.

Other top opportunities include:

• Shipping/fulfillment improvement (50%);

• Website/UX improvement (47%);

• Content creation capacity/quality (47%)

You can download (sign up required) the full report here.

CONVERSION

Preparing for the end of third-party cookies

If you’re still using third-party cookies then here’s your monthly reminder that Chrome plans to disable third-party cookies for 1% of users from Q1 2024 to facilitate testing, and then ramp up to 100% of users from Q3 2024.

Here’s a detailed breakdown by Chrome for Developers on how to prepare:

1. Audit your third-party cookie usage

2. Test for breakage

3. Use Partitioned cookies with CHIPS

4. Use Related Website Sets

5. Migrate to the relevant web APIs

And some interesting conversation on Hacker News.

If all this is flying over your head you’re not alone. Just know that tracking and advertising might get a little worse in the short term while we figure all this out. But a lot of smart minds (and money) are working on solutions.

AI

Claude 2.1 launched

Claude 2.1 is now available via API and the chat interface at claude.ai.

The new version boasts an industry-leading 200K token context window, which basically means it can understand up to 500 pages of content at a time. Great for summarising those long, winding emails you get from your mum (just me?).

They’ve also halved its hallucination rate, meaning it’s more reliable and less likely to make up answers.

Both of these updates make it a solid contender in the AI space for working with large codebases (like a Shopify theme or app), financial statements, and Shopify data exports.

Google Bard can now answer questions about YouTube videos

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Accessibility lawsuits

Over the past few months, a plague of opportunistic lawsuits appears to be targeting Shopify merchants who fail to live up to accessibility standards.

I’ve had a number of people reach out for accessibility audits and code updates after lawsuits were filed claiming vision-impaired users were unable to use various parts of their Shopify store, or in some cases were completely unable to checkout.

While the lawsuits do feel like a bit of a shakedown, there is validity to the claims that most Shopify stores simply aren’t usable for a large population. Try turning on Voice Control in the Accessibility settings of your computer and then browse the web… it’s darn near impossible.

Is your website accessible for vision-impaired users? Frankly, the average Shopify merchant has no clue. In my experience, in most cases, the answer is a clear-cut “no”. And if you’re on the receiving end of one of these lawsuits it could cost you dearly.

You can run a basic audit and find a “quick reference” guide to accessibility here.

SHOPIFY NEWS

Metafield madness

Twitter tweet

If you’re metafield curious but haven’t yet discovered all the unique things you can do with them, this screenshot from one store’s product page metafield setup should get your brain firing.

While this might be overkill for many stores, it does give you an idea of what’s possible.

But why would you put this info in metafields rather than just stuff it in the product description? A few reasons come to mind:

1. You separate data from formatting and can systemise the display of all this info across your entire product catalogue.

2. You can re-arrange your PDP content using the OS2.0 visual builder and every product using the same template will get updated instantly.

3. You can use logic in your PDP to show/hide other elements or change formatting based on the values in these metafields.

I’m sure there are dozens of other reasons and use cases. You’re only limited by your imagination… and a max of 200 metafields for each resource type..

$9.3 billion in sales by Shopify merchants

Twitter tweet

Shopify merchants absolutely smashed it this Black Friday / Cyber Monday, with a total of $9.3 billion in sales, up 24% from 2022’s $7.5 billion.

Oh yeah, and they live-streamed the whole thing on the Vegas Sphere 👀

Even cooler, 55,000+ merchants had their highest-selling day EVER on Shopify.

Other interesting nerd stats:

• Shopify achieved 99.999+% uptime, serving over 5 TB/min.

• Shopify’s egress processed 145 billion requests on Friday alone.

• App servers handled peak of ~60 million requests per minute.

• 61 million consumers bought from Shopify-powered brands.

If you’ve ever run a non-Shopify site you know how easy it is to crash a website. A single dodgy plugin, slight server misconfiguration, or a fraction too much traffic will do the trick.

So these numbers absolutely boggle the mind and are a testament to how much work (and resources) are put in behind the scenes to handle this kind of volume without missing a beat.

One new Shopify update

• Select custom dates for metrics on Home - you’ll now find a custom date range picker for metrics on Home, giving you the ability to select specific time ranges to view store performance metrics.

INSPO OF THE WEEK

I’m a sucker for productivity porn and everything analogue, so obviously I’m obsessed with Ugmonk. Product design and photography take centre stage here and all the website needs to do is step back and let nature take its course.

How we can help…

🔥 Looking for an experienced Shopify Partner to work with? 
Smart ecommerce brands rely on us for innovative design, development, optimisation, and growth strategies to create highly profitable Shopify websites. Work with our consultancy.

🎯 Want to reach our audience? Hit reply to discuss advertising.

Welcome to Morning Commerce!

Kyle here with another issue full of Shopify goodies:

• BFCM Live

• Snoop Dogg X Solo Stove

• Optimising collection filters

• Shopify speed optimisation scam

• How a native Amazon brand hit 1 million orders on Shopify

— Kyle Tully

ACQUISITION

Snoop Dogg X Solo Stove

“I’m giving up smoke”.

So read the cryptic Tweet from Snoop on Nov 17.

Four days and 149 million views later, the second piece of this brilliant campaign landed, with a second Tweet (and another 59 million views) announcing “I'm done with smoke. I'm going smokeless with @SoloStove“.

Press announcing Snoop as the official spokesman of Solo Stove hit at the same time announcing the launch of the Limited Edition Bonfire Snoop Dogg Collaboration.

All in all a brilliant campaign.

One blunder though: the promo website for the campaign goingsmokeless.com currently redirects to a 404 page on their website. I imagine there are a LOT of links and leads going wasted right now.

How a native Amazon brand hit 1 million orders on Shopify

Twitter tweet

DTC on Shopify is a different beast than selling on Amazon.

Many brands from both sides have failed to make a successful transition to the other platform. Whether it’s a Shopify brand failing to get traction with the notoriously price-sensitive Amazon shoppers, or Amazon sellers struggling to build a brand and drive traffic on Shopify, the struggle is real.

Simple Modern is a native Amazon brand that recently hit the 1 million orders on Shopify milestone. One of the co-founders, Bryan Porter, wrote a solid post laying out their challenges, the solution, and where their breakthroughs came from.

The Challenge: 

Amazon and DTC pricing strategies are opposite.

The Solution:

1. Limited edition drops. Collect names and emails of website visitors and market directly to prospects with high-margin limited edition products not available anywhere else.

2. Bundling. “With each additional item added to a cart our margins skyrocket. It costs us $12/unit to fulfill 1 item but only $2.70/unit to fulfill 6 items in the same box.“

3. Personalisation. Build personalisation features into the website so customers can personalise their products for a small fee.

Well worth reading the full post and be sure to check out their site to see how they’re implementing some of this stuff.

CONVERSION

Optimising collection filters

If you want to totally nerd out on how to optimise your collection filters then Baymard’s latest research breakdown is what the Dr ordered.

TLDR; put the most important filters for each collection — the ones that will help users quickly filter the list to their preferences — at the top of the filter list.

SHOPIFY NEWS

BFCM Live

Twitter tweet

As if the engineers at Shopify aren’t busy enough, they’re back again with another update to the BFCM live map website.

Check out the website to see what sales across over 1 million independent retailers look like this BFCM, including:

• Sales per minute

• Orders per minute

• Carbon offset amounts

• Active flash sales in progress

And who knows what other new data they’ll reveal this year 😉

Shopify speed optimisation scam

While doing regular updates on one of our client sites I noticed some extremely concerning code in their theme.liquid file.

Obfuscated javascript that at first glance is impossible to understand — and in almost every case is a sign of some kind of hack or scam:

<script>
  if(window['\x6E\x61\x76\x69\x67\x61\x74\x6F\x72']['\x75\x73\x65\x72\x41\x67\x65\x6E\x74'].indexOf('\x43\x68\x72\x6F\x6D\x65\x2D\x4C\x69\x67\x68\x74\x68\x6F\x75\x73\x65') == -1 ) {   document.write({{pDescription | json}}); } else { } document.close();  
</script>

A little investigation led me to an old speed optimisation scam that seems to be doing the rounds again.

The scam is extremely simple:

• Someone reaches out to the store owner (usually via cold email or DMs) to let them know their site is slow and let them know they can fix it, usually for a very good price.

• Once the scammer gains access to your site, they add a few simple lines of code that check if the user browsing the site is the Chrome Lighthouse tool — the most popular tool for running speed reports — and if so, instead of loading the site they load a blank page.

• They show you your blazing-fast Lighthouse reports (based on a blank website which of course is going to be very fast) and get paid.

The only problem is your site is not actually any faster… in fact, it’s actually slightly slower for users due to this extra code that checks who is visiting!

If you think you might have fallen pray to this scam please hit reply and let me know and I’ll get you sorted.

Five new Shopify updates

• Shopify Flow: Get notified when errors happen - You can now use the new trigger, Workflow error threshold reached, which will run the first time an error is detected for a workflow version.

• Add, remove, or update discounts on existing line items when editing orders - Previously, discounts could only be added to new items, and couldn't be updated or removed.

• Markets Pro preferential trade agreement support - Markets Pro now supports preferential trade agreements in duties calculations and customs documentation. Merchants should review their products’ country of origin to allow international buyers to take advantage of preferential duties treatment.

• All merchants can now choose between the one-page checkout and three-page checkout - Merchants on the Basic, Shopify, and Advanced plans can now use the theme editor to choose between the one-page checkout (default) or three-page checkout.

• ‘Add a recipient’ and ‘scheduled send’ options on gift cards for customers - Customers can now add a recipient and personalized message to gift cards, as well as schedule their gift card to be sent at a specific time, for a more personal, thoughtful and convenient gifting experience.

INSPO OF THE WEEK

Krave Beauty has nailed the oft-neglected “shop all” page with a custom collection page that breaks down products by series and gives you everything you need to know to find the right product for your needs, first click 👌

How we can help…

🔥 Looking for an experienced Shopify Partner to work with? 
Smart ecommerce brands rely on us for innovative design, development, optimisation, and growth strategies to create highly profitable Shopify websites. Work with our consultancy.

🎯 Want to reach our audience? Hit reply to discuss advertising.

Hello! Kyle here with another issue of Morning Commerce.

Lots of conversion-boosting and email marketing content this week:

• Did Swifties crash Shopify?

• Plain text emails for BF/CM?

• Just send me Black Friday emails

• Turning adversity into opportunity

• How to opt out of “shopping insights”

• Generating product descriptions from images with AI

• 6 ways to get more out of your order confirmation page

• Boosting search conversions: 5 behavioural strategies to test

— Kyle Tully

CONVERSION

6 ways to get more out of your order confirmation page

Did you know you can add content to your order confirmation page on Shopify? For example…

• A cross-sell for a best-selling product.

• A video from the founder thanking them for their purchase, welcoming them, and letting them know what to expect from your brand.

• A post-purchase survey getting insights into their purchase decision.

• A newsletter signup, unique discount code, or referral promo.

Just about anything you can think of!

Yup, even if you’re on a non-Plus plan this feature is available in your account.

You’ll need to know a little HTML or Javascript as there is no visual editor, but any decent developer can help you with this. You’ll find it under Settings → Checkout → Order status page.

Need ideas? Check out this article for 6 ways to get more out of your order confirmation page.

How to opt out of “shopping insights”

Twitter tweet

Google is adding “shopping insights” to some Shopping display panels in Chrome which will show, amongst other things, historical price info from the past 90 days.

Possibly helpful for consumers… but a potential conversion killer for brands if historical sale prices are being compared to current full retail pricing.

“Ah it was $23 cheaper a week ago, maybe I’ll wait til it goes on sale again.“

You can opt-out of this with your merchant center ID here.

Boosting search conversions: 5 behavioural strategies to test

Getting more traffic is great, but it’s expensive and requires ongoing time and effort. Optimising existing traffic is cheap and once you find some patterns that work, the results often stick for months or years at a time.

Suffice it to say I’m a big fan of CRO — having seen it’s impact on both our own stores and those of my clients.

So it was nice to see Search Engine Land step out of its usual SEM-focused content with a solid article on boosting conversions with behavioural strategies, including some ideas you might not be familiar with:

1. Social proof and herding

2. Cognitive load

3. Scarcity and FOMO

4. Loss aversion

5. Anchoring

Definitely worth a read to gear you up with test ideas for your next CRO campaign.

Turning adversity into opportunity

Twitter tweet

“Reason why“ marketing is a simple but super effective marketing strategy. The idea is simple, people are more likely to take action when given a reason why.

Even if the reason is fairly flimsy, just giving a reason increases “yeses”.

Smart marketers are always looking for reasons to exploit in their marketing and this example from Mini Katana is a great off-the-cuff example of how to turn adversity into opportunity.

EMAIL MARKETING

Just send me Black Friday emails!

Twitter tweet

I love this idea from Moiz of giving people an option on your “unsubscribe” page to just receive Black Friday emails. While some people don’t want to hear from you every day, week, or month… they do like big specials and FOMO might be enough to keep them around for BF/CM.

In Klaviyo you can implement this by customising your preferences page and giving people a checkbox to select “only send me Black Friday specials“. You’ll then want to exclude this segment from all other campaigns.

Definitely something worth testing and if it saves just a small percentage from never hearing from you again it could be worth thousands of dollars each year.

Plain text emails for BF/CM?

Twitter tweet

It’s no secret that plain text emails — or very minimal HTML emails that mostly look like plain text — are superior for email deliverability, and when done right, absolutely killer for conversions.

(Yes, even highly image-focused industries like fashion can crush it with these types of emails. Our “a letter from the girl boss“ personal style emails always did great mixed in with all the image-heavy newsletters we sent.)

The key is doing them right as you can’t lean on product imagery and lifestyle shots to get your message across.

A few nice tips from Jimmy here:

• Add a little light branding imagery to keep it on-brand less spammy looking.

• Focus on strong copywriting and focused CTA.

• Segment out new subscribers.

SHOPIFY NEWS

Generating product descriptions from images with AI

Twitter tweet

If you want to see what the very near future holds for Shopify, check out this little demo of an app that uses the brand-new GPT4 Turbo to generate product descriptions based on product images.

You let it know how long you want the description to be, choose which image to base the description on, and the AI does the rest 🤯

Did Swifties crash Shopify?

You may have noticed some Shopify storefronts were down for up to an hour on Nov 14. Rumour abounds that it was the hoard of Taylor Swift fans — affectionally known as “Swifties” — clamouring to her new store that caused the outage.

But in a postmortem of the event, Shopify says the issue was due to “a code update that renamed a table in our database“.

I’m not sure which explanation I like worse.

In an effort to avoid similar issues during critical times, Shopify said “we made the decision to lock code deployments starting earlier today and keep it locked extending through Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM).“

They’re currently going through a root cause analysis to understand what led to the issue and to implement measures to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Six new Shopify updates

• Shopify Tax is now available on Point of Sale Orders, supports orders sold into the U.S. from abroad, and supports tax-inclusive pricing in the United States.

• Filtering by Markets in Analytics - you can now filter your Shopify reports located in the Analytics page by Markets.

• Support for visual filters - you can now add colour and images to the filter options shown on the collection and search result page in the Search & Discovery app.

• Cancel orders and void transactions on POS - you can now cancel orders up to 15 minutes after the order is completed via POS.

INSPO OF THE WEEK

It might not be doing much for conversions — the fact you need a line of text explaining how to use the UI and a notice on mobile to use the desktop site attest to that — but I do love the creativity of the hero section on Taylor’s store. Browsing the rooms of the house to explore different collections reminds me of some of the interfaces we designed back in the early 2000’s and I’m sure it’s a fun experience for the Swifties who figured out how to use it.

How we can help…

🔥 Looking for an experienced Shopify Partner to work with? 
Smart ecommerce brands rely on us for innovative design, development, optimisation, and growth strategies to create highly profitable Shopify websites. Work with our consultancy.

🎯 Want to reach our audience? Hit reply to discuss advertising.

Welcome to Morning Commerce!

This week I’ve been busy helping some of my Shopify Plus clients migrate from Shopify Scripts and Checkout.liquid to Checkout Extensibility and Shopify Functions. So far so good! You’ve got until August 13 2024 to make the switch but the sooner the better IMO.

Here’s what’s on my radar:

• Shopify Q3 earnings

• Shopify Tax Platform

• November 2023 core update

• How to drive traffic in Google Discover

• Generative AI comes to Performance Max

• What difference does a theme decision make?

— Kyle Tully

ACQUISITION

Generative AI comes to Performance Max

Generating gobs of top-notch creative has always been a struggle for fast-moving brands. AI is proving to be the perfect tech to solve this problem, and Google is the latest company to add generative AI capabilities to their ad platform, with the release of generative AI in Performance Max.

Starting with just your website URL, the system will scan your site and populate your campaign with text and other assets, plus suggest images uniquely generated for your business.

You can then further refine the assets generated using both text-to-text and text-to-image prompts. Plus you’ll be able to enhance both generated and existing assets with AI-powered image-editing tools.

And Google AI will never create two identical images, so no more worries about your competitors using the same stock images.

What’s most impressive is these generated assets take performance data into account, creating one of the largest self-learning ad creation platforms on the planet. Scary. Nice!

AI asset generation is available in the US for now, with other countries set to roll out in 2024.

CONVERSION

What difference does a theme decision make?

Twitter tweet

There’s no way to sugarcoat it, some Shopify themes are just slow.

Bloated javascript. Unnecessary CSS. Poor programming decisions.

And there’s only so far you can optimise them before it makes sense to start looking at other options.

If you found your theme way down in the rankings in last week’s “How fast is your Shopify Theme?“ article and are thinking about changing themes, you might be wondering just how much of a real-world difference a change can make.

Wonder no more…

After testing a bunch of different themes, st_malachy made the switch to the lightweight Paper theme and in the last 40 days conversions are up 54% 👀

Now, this isn’t a scientific A/B test as many variables changed at once (the theme, layout, and time period for starters), but we know speed is a conversion booster and this is another solid anecdote to add to the list.

SEO

How to drive traffic in Google Discover

Google Discover was introduced by Google in 2018 but has largely gone unnoticed by most ecommerce sites. Until now.

If you’re unfamiliar with Discover, it’s a queryless Google feature that shows curated content to logged-in users across Google apps and websites. And it’s been known to drive tens of thousands of clicks to a site in a day.

Most of the time, Discover shows trendy, timely, viral-style content from news-style websites and blogs. But it will show ecommerce product pages and other high-converting pages to in-market prospects from time to time.

If you’re tapping out other traffic sources or just keen to add something new to the mix, this ultimate guide by Moz is worth a read.

Among other things it covers:

• Ensuring technical eligibility for Discover

• Understanding user affinities & entities

• Getting the image right

• Using web stories & video

November 2023 core update

Google started rolling out the November 2023 core update on the 2nd. It’s expected to take up to 2 weeks to roll out. It can’t be any worse than the last one… can it?

SHOPIFY NEWS

Shopify Q3 earnings

Shopify president Harvey Finkelstein appeared on CNBC to talk Q3 earnings, with a glowing Jim Cramer singing Shopify praises.

The highlights:

• GMV was over $56 billion up 22%

• Revenue hit $1.7 billion and was up 25%

• Free Cash Flow was over $270 million

Harvey also talked about:

• The benefits of AI being integrated into the platform.

• Some of the biggest brands moving to Shopify including Ted Baker, Tom, Quicksilver, Billabong, and LVMH.

• Why he believes Shopify merchants large and small will see outsize returns this holiday season.

• Amazon’s Buy with Prime app.

Shopify Tax Platform

Twitter tweet

Five new Shopify updates

• Extensibility is now available for Plus merchants on thank you and order status pages - Plus merchants can now use the checkout editor to customize the appearance and functionality of checkout.

• Connect your preferred tax service to Shopify with the Shopify Tax Platform.

• New granular staff permissions for Orders - there are 12 new, more granular staff permissions to fine-tune what staff can access.

• Update and automate gift card email sending with on/off toggle - Preview gift card emails and control whether or not to send gift cards manually on creation by adjusting the default setting for this sending behavior from your Gift Card > settings in your Shopify admin.

• Improved Shopify Collabs creator profile pages.

INSPO OF THE WEEK

The Flings PDP is a treasure trove of features to discover. Each flavour has its own unique style page, starting with a custom colour scheme all the way down to custom animations and different content sections for features, ingredients, and lifestyle images. Not sure if I’m a fan of the reversed layout (with the image right and ATC left) but it does get attention, and the massive ATC button helps orient you.

How we can help…

🔥 Looking for an experienced Shopify Partner to work with? 
Smart ecommerce brands rely on us for innovative design, development, optimisation, and growth strategies to create highly profitable Shopify websites. Work with our consultancy.

🎯 Want to reach our audience? Hit reply to discuss advertising.

It’s Wednesday and you know what that means… Morning Commerce. 

Here’s what’s in this issue:

• $3k/day on Amazon

• Shop expands to the web

• Lewis Hamilton on Shopify

• How fast is your Shopify Theme?

• Google mobile-first indexing has landed

• 7 reasons to be optimistic about ecommerce

• New AR beauty tools for shoppers and brands

— Kyle Tully

ACQUISITION

New AR beauty tools for shoppers and brands

Google Shopping introduced AR beauty tools over 3 years ago, and continues to bring innovative features to the platform.

The latest addition is the ability for shoppers to virtually try on hair color and foundation, and access AR beauty tools on mobile browsers.

And exciting news for beauty brands who can now promote products with AR Beauty ads.

$3k/day on Amazon

Twitter tweet

I’ve seen a lot of brands over-think launching on Amazon. And to be fair, there are plenty of reasons you might not want to sell on there… but there are also 3,000 reasons (per week) you might want to think about it.

Zack is spending a little on Amazon Ads to hit these numbers:

• “Today we spent $490 and did $4,697.”

• “I’ve spent a total of $1,073 so far to generate $15,310.”

And no doubt the paid social ads on Meta that drive to the DTC site are also leading to people searching on Amazon for the brand.

Never underestimate the power a brand like Amazon has on consumer confidence, especially for first-time purchasers.

You and I might be comfortable buying from a new random Shopify store every other day, but plenty of shoppers are still super cautious and would rather shop on Amazon when possible.

Google mobile-first indexing has landed

Mobile visits now dominate most website traffic — in some areas, people almost exclusively use mobile devices to access the web. Google has been slowly moving to a mobile-first focus since 2015. That move — to what they call “Mobile First Indexing“ — is now complete.

What does this mean? 

If your site works on mobile, then they will prioritise crawling it with their mobile Googlebot. And here’s the important part — their ranking systems will now look at the mobile version of a page's content to evaluate its relevance to the user.

If your site flat out doesn’t work on mobile (throws errors or is blocked via robots.txt etc), then they will continue to crawl it from the desktop Googlebot. But this will likely be sunset in the not-too-distant future.

You can look at your Crawl Stats report to see how Google is currently crawling your site.

CONVERSION

How fast is your Shopify Theme?

The Shopify web performance team continue to pump out helpful content, this week it’s a comprehensive comparison of theme performance against Google's Core Web Vitals.

What’s interesting about this comparison is they used real-world data over a 7-day period from stores using the most popular themes. So these scores aren’t just based on demo stores, but real stores fully built out with various apps installed.

The biggest issues they found?

And their recommended immediate steps for merchants?

There are large speed differences between themes so if you’re in the market for a redesign this is worth taking a look at and factoring into your decision.

The other interesting piece of data in this article is you can see the most popular non theme store themes such as Avone and Wookie, which tend to be feature-rich but performance-poor.

So how fast is your Shopify theme? Check out the full article and data table.

And if you’re thinking of going headless for better performance? (Don’t) They also have a nice write up on Liquid Vs Headless here.

“Done well, headless can be fast. The catch? Data suggests that it’s not common to see headless implemented in a way that supports great performance.“

In my experience, headless can make sense when you have very specific customisation or integration reasons, but if it’s performance you’re after then standard Liquid is the way to go. (You’ll also save yourself $100k or so.)

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

7 reasons to be optimistic about ecommerce

Twitter tweet

If you’re in a rut right now it’s easy to let the doom and gloom naysayers get into your head. We’re hard-wired to pay attention to negative news more than positive so it’s easy to fall into pessimistic thought patterns.

This tidy little thread from Andrew Faris sheds light on some of the more positive things ecom has going for it:

1. The world is quickly getting a lot richer.

2. Online retail specifically keeps growing.

3. DTC is getting smarter.

4. Meta's incentive to keep being a great source of customer acquisition is gigantic.

5. Google's (and others) incentive to grow in this continues.

6. The DTC software infrastructure is massive and awesome.

7. People are smart and figure things out.

Some of my client’s biggest breakthroughs came just after their toughest battles. You’ve got this 😉

Optimising returns… or not

One thing I’ve been thinking about this week is optimising returns.

A fashion client was worried about their 9% return rate. (The average return rate for fashion ecom is around 20%.) There are a few things we can do — better sizing guides, more detailed descriptions, more photos, live customer support etc.

But at some point very quickly you hit a point of diminishing returns (no pun intended) where those resources are better spent growing the business.

For example, if 9% returns equal $10k in sales then your max impact here is $10k. And you’ll likely get nowhere near that because a certain percentage of people are always going to return for one reason or another. Let’s say you halve your return rate and have an extra $5k in your pocket.

Great… but optimising ads, email flows, or social marketing? There is no max impact on these efforts. A single campaign could be worth $100k or more.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t optimise and get your returns as low as possible, but it’s important to focus where you can have the biggest impact and be OK with not everything being perfect.

SHOPIFY NEWS

Shop expands to the web

Twitter tweet

Shop is now available on the web at shop.app/search

There is a search auto-suggest feature on the page that’s worth playing with to see what search phrases you’re potentially showing up for.

And don’t forget you can manage what shows up on your Shop page by managing the sales channels each product shows up on.

Lewis Hamilton on Shopify

Legendary F1 driver Lewis Hamilton just launched the first non-alcoholic tequila, Almave, and it’s powered by Shopify. They also got the nod for our inspo of the week site down below.

Six new Shopify updates

• Hydrogen v2023.10 has been released - Hydrogen v2023.10 is now available including a number of new features and breaking changes.

• Structured return reasons - you can now capture data on in-store returns with staff now able to select from a static list of return reasons when performing a return.

• Send cart POS attribution - when a customer completes an online checkout from the email link sent from the retail store, the Send Cart feature now accurately attributes the sale to POS channel, Retail location and Staff member.

• Shopify Payments now supports multiple payment captures for the same order - now you can capture partial payment multiple times directly from the Orders Page or using the GraphQL API.

• New POS UI extensions activation in admin - new setting allows you to add and remove third-party app POS UI extensions to the Smart Grid from Shopify admin.

• Markets Pro - Shipping Label Price Adjustments - Merchants will see shipping label price adjustments in their Payouts moving forward, with details available in Order timeline events.

INSPO OF THE WEEK

Not all brand collabs make sense. (Ralph Lauren x Fortnite… amirite?!) But a non-alcoholic beverage and a professional race car driver is a match made in heaven. Almave has done a great job on their Our Story page of nailing this point. “I’ve always loved a good tequila, but on days or nights when I needed a clear mind - either the night before a race or while hanging with friends…“

How we can help…

🔥 Looking for an experienced Shopify Partner to work with? 
Smart ecommerce brands rely on us for innovative design, development, optimisation, and growth strategies to create highly profitable Shopify websites. Work with our consultancy.

🎯 Want to reach our audience? Hit reply to discuss advertising.

Welcome to Morning Commerce!

Kyle here with another roundup of what’s good in the world of Shopify:

• Nike launches on Shopify

• ChatGPT-4 fails miserably at UX audits

• TikTok shop driving 15% of daily sales for one brand

• Google testing ads within organic results

• Direct mail drives $1.3M for one DTC apparel brand

• The current state of e-commerce product page UX performance

— Kyle Tully

ACQUISITION

Direct mail drives $1.3M for one DTC apparel brand

Twitter tweet

It’s no secret that ad costs skyrocket and inboxes get flooded during BFCM. But when was the last time you got a direct mail letter from one of your favourite brands?

At least here in Aus, I can count on one-hand the number of promotions that hit my mailbag every year. The US is a lot more sophisticated with direct mail, so the numbers are probably a little more respectable for many of you… but I bet you don’t get as many offers as you should.

This campaign is the perfect example of just how simple a direct mail campaign can be:

• Simple 30% off discount

• Basic offer-focused creative

• Coupon code to track results

• Tagged high-value customers in Shopify to send to

Way back when I was a gun-for-hire copywriter, we did a lot of direct mail and frankly, it was kinda a PITA. (Licking stamps, folding letters, stuffing envelopes, then dragging it all down to the post office.) But the results were awesome which is why we kept doing it.

These days, with tools like PostPilot, running a direct mail campaign is about as easy as setting up a Klaviyo flow. But even if you’re not yet at the $3-5M a year sweet spot to work with them, adding direct mail to your marketing mix might just be the breakthrough you’ve been looking for.

6 weeks in, TikTok shop driving 15% of daily sales for BK Beauty

BK Beauty got onto the TikTok shop bandwagon early, before the native Shopify integration launched. In just 6 weeks, it’s now responsible for 15% of their daily sales.

Not bad for a business doing over $10 million in annual revenue.

Co-founder Paul Jauregui spoke with the Ecommerce Conversations podcast recently and said, “We’ve always worked with content creators on social platforms. TikTok Shop aligns well with that effort. We’re seeing a lot of success. It makes up about 15% of our total revenue on any given day, and that’s growing."

He continued, “However, TikTok is spending a lot of money extending discounts to buyers on the platform — roughly 20-40%. We don’t pay for that. It drops directly to the bottom line. TikTok also offers free shipping, which goes into my pocket too. Both of those — discounts and free shipping — are helping with conversions.“

With the addition of TikTok Shop, the app has gone from a top-of-funnel awareness platform where creators could talk about your products, to a bottom-of-funnel place where they can drive direct conversions without leaving the platform.

Google testing ads within organic results

Twitter tweet

Since the dawn of Adwords, Google has been looking for more ways to get ads in front of eyeballs. (Alphabet reported revenue growth of 11% for the 3rd quarter so I’d say they’ve found a couple.) The latest test found in the wild is showing ads within organic search results.

Barry Schwartz responded, “It's continuous scroll so as you scroll you get ads on what would be page two.”

But at position 9, what would traditionally have been the bottom of “page 1”, it shows how easily Google can wedge a few more ads in thanks to the less defined nature of continuous scroll.

Just one more reason to be running as many ads as you can afford.

CONVERSION

ChatGPT-4 fails miserably at UX audits

ChatGPT may one day take all our jobs, but at least for now, UX auditors live to work another day.

Baymard tested ChatGPT-4 against a qualified UX professional conducting UX audits of 12 different web pages, and the results were… not good.

• ChatGPT-4 had an 80% false-positive error rate and a 20% accuracy rate in the UX suggestions it makes.

• ChatGPT-4 discovered just 26% of the UX issues in a screenshot of the webpage found by a human expert. (And just 14% of the UX issues actually present on the live website.)

• ChatGPT-4 found on average 2.9 UX issues per page, but overlooked 18.5 UX issues on the live web page.

So while the image-recognition and apparent cognitive abilities of ChatGPT-4 are indeed impressive (especially to a layman in any given area) there are still massive holes in its actual capabilities as compared to a skilled human.

However, where the AI killed the humans in this test was in speed.

The humans on average spent 2-10 hours on each of the 12 web pages.

ChatGPT-4 would have spat out its suggestions in a few seconds.

The current state of e-commerce product page UX performance

Baymard is at it again with a UX benchmark, this time analysing product page performance of the top-grossing US and European e-commerce sites.

“Only 48% of the top-grossing US and European e-commerce sites have a ‘decent’ or ‘good’ product page UX performance — and no sites have a ‘perfect’ performance.”

There are a few ways you can interpret these results:

• You can be a top-grossing ecommerce site even with an average product page.

• There is a lot of room for improvement!

As always, a Baymard report is worth an in-depth read, but here are some highlights you can action immediately for your PDPs:

1. Provide “in-scale” images so people can determine the size of your product visually.

2. Provide a “human model” image to give context to your products.

3. Add text to some images to convey non-visual or abstract information such as weather resistance, weight, or scent.

4. Show “price per unit” where applicable to help users compare products with varying quantities.

5. Show or link to your return policy on the product page to instil confidence.

6. Show “free shipping” info near the buy button not just in header banners.

7. Respond to negative reviews to give context and show you care.

SHOPIFY NEWS

Tobias Lütke wins Rails Lifetime Award 2023

Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke was awarded the “Rails Lifetime Award“ at Rails World, “acknowledging individuals whose long-term dedication and impact on the Rails ecosystem have been nothing short of legendary“.

Ruby on Rails is the web application framework Shopify is built on.

You can watch the full presentation here.

Nike launches on Shopify

Twitter tweet

Five new Shopify updates

• Shopify Flow - Publish and Hide Products to any channel - Both actions now support being able to choose one or more Sales channels as part of the action.

• GeoIP is now a part of Automatic Redirection - GeoIP functionality for Plus merchants with the Geoip setting enabled have been rolled into the “Automatic Redirection” setting within Settings -> Preferences.

• Checkouts will enforce local currency based on shipping address - If you sell in local currencies and have access to 1-page checkout, customers will checkout in the currency that you've set for the country of their shipping address.

• New search capabilities within the Shopify Translate & Adapt app - it now supports global search across all languages for store resources.

• Reducing permissions required for initial POS login - In order to set up Shopify POS on a new or updated device, a staff user must log in to the app by entering their email and password. Once logged in and set up, anyone with POS access can unlock the app with their PIN.

INSPO OF THE WEEK

Nike Strength got my attention this week with a unique take on a sometimes complex problem: how to present an ala carte offer with many products/options to choose from. Their approach? Show them all! But somehow it works. The subtle AOV boosting copy and bar chart are nice too. “The heavier the cart, the more you save on shipping. Add 250 lb to save“. Lovely.

How we can help…

🔥 Looking for an experienced Shopify Partner to work with? 
Smart ecommerce brands rely on us for innovative design, development, optimisation, and growth strategies to create highly profitable Shopify websites. Work with our consultancy.

🎯 Want to reach our audience? Hit reply to discuss advertising.

Welcome to Morning Commerce! The weekly newsletter covering the juicy bits of what’s happening in the world of Shopify and DTC.

I’ve been neck-deep in custom app development this week, but here’s what caught my attention in between coding sessions:

• 7 things you need to know about this year's holiday shoppers

• The negative impact of mobile-first web design on desktop

• Shopify files lawsuit against false DMCA claimant

• Youtube’s AI-powered Spotlight Moments

• How to use SEO to build your brand

• POS Terminal launches

— Kyle Tully

ACQUISITION

Youtube’s AI-powered Spotlight Moments

Youtube is adding more AI firepower to its ad offerings, launching “Spotlight Moments” which identifies popular, relevant videos in real time and serves your ads on them.

Sounds dope 🎃

A faceless, voice-over UGC format to test

Ben @ Biddyco

Ben at Biddyco always comes with the goods when it comes to ad creative.

This faceless, voice-over UGC format is one that would work well for many brands. Especially if you’re camera-shy or just haven’t done your hair.

Check out the full sample here.

CONVERSION

The negative impact of mobile-first web design on desktop

If you’re thinking about a redesign any time soon this thought-provoking article from NN/g is a must-read.

Most modern websites (and themes) are built with a mobile-first approach, and little thought is given to the range of desktop sizes the design must scale to.

The same layout that looks good on a 1440 × 900 laptop often scales horrendously on a 5120 × 2880 retina device.

• Screen-covering images

• Large bloated text

• Excessive negative space

• = long pages and more scrolling

They call this design trend content dispersion.

What to do about it? Read the full study for their design recommendations.

My favourite article of the week 👍

7 things you need to know about this year's holiday shoppers

Sapio Research conducted a survey of 12,000 consumers and 4,800+ businesses in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the U.K., and the U.S.

Here’s what they said:

AI drives product discovery for shoppers - 69% said they think AI will make it easier to discover new brands and products, 74% think AI will also help them find deals and special offers.

Tech-enabled shopping = loyal customers + bigger spenders - Shoppers who plan to spend more than $1,200 USD this BFCM are at least twice as likely to use spatial commerce, virtual assistants or chatbots, augmented reality and virtual reality.

Meaningful purchases trump big splurges - 78% of consumers surveyed said they plan to make smaller purchases that give everyday satisfaction.

Bargain hunting is big this year - 84% say they will compare prices to find the best deals and discounts.

Social shopping isn’t niche - 33%, 31%, and 28% said they would be likely to shop directly from Instagram, Facebook, or Tiktok.

Physical stores are a fave for product discovery - 34% of consumers said browsing in a brick-and-mortar store is their favourite way to discover new products.

Shoppers want to see your deals before they start - 71% said it’s important for a brand to communicate with them about their offers ahead of BFCM.

How many of these do you have a strategy for your brand?

SEO

How to use SEO to build your brand

How do you know if your brand is gaining visibility online?

1. Direct traffic.

2. Branded search.

If these numbers are low then it’s safe to say there’s work to be done to grow your presence within your niche.

Adriana Stein over at Moz wrote a nice little article covering exactly how to do this, including how to:

• Build topical authority around topics important for your brand values.

• Integrate your brand within your SEO content strategy.

• Optimize content for brand keywords.

• Promote SEO-driven content across other channels.

If all your SEO efforts so far have been aimed towards BOFU (mostly products and collections) then this is a must-read.

SHOPIFY NEWS

Shopify files lawsuit against false DMCA claimant

Twitter tweet

False DMCA claims have been a huge drama for some merchants recently, with many reports of legitimate stores being taken down.

A couple of years ago we had an Insta account with 30k followers permanently banned for the same reason, so I feel their pain.

Shopify vowed to do something about it just a few days ago and has already filed its first lawsuit against one of these bad actors. Let’s hope this sends a message.

POS Terminal launches

Twitter tweet

Five new Shopify updates

• New Stocky transfers extension for the Smart Grid - create native-like experiences using POS UI extensions technology for quick and efficient inventory management workflows in-store.

• POS Terminal - all-new payment device for Shopify POS - Shopify's newest, most powerful payment device for Shopify POS is now available to retail businesses in the US and Canada.

• Shop Pay now redirects to the post-purchase page on merchant's domain - This change enables consistent post-purchase conversion tracking and cookie access for all payment methods.

• Shopify Flow - New subscriptions and delete tasks are available.

• Set a fixed discount amount for Buy X Get Y discounts - You can now create promotions like "Buy 2 items, get $10 off" as an automatic discount or a discount code.

INSPO OF THE WEEK

Cometeer gets the nod this week thanks to their nifty home page animations that draw you into their unique product benefits. First a drop of coffee falls into a pod, then the pod slides into the next section and freezes, before finally moving to the next section and melting into your cup. “Melting is the new making”. Love it.

How we can help…

🔥 Looking for an experienced Shopify Partner to work with? 
Smart ecommerce brands rely on us for innovative design, development, optimisation, and growth strategies to create highly profitable Shopify websites. Work with our consultancy.

🎯 Want to reach our audience? Hit reply to discuss advertising.

Managing Director, YouTube Brand Advertising

It’s Wednesday. Time for Morning Commerce.

We’re now a full month into that Woocommerce to Shopify project I told you about. I’m happy to report conversions have held steady at 2.5X the old site, and more importantly, sales are up from an average of $50k/m to over $120k in the last 30 days.

Shopify is a thing of beauty.

Coming up:

• Sued for fake discount timers

• European ecommerce report 2023

• Another day, another Google core update

• The content strategy of a $100k MRR brand

• How to increase conversion rate: 14 tactics for 2024

• How to uncover hidden, high-converting landing pages

• Google Ads rolls out Demand Gen to all customers globally

• One of the best product pages I’ve ever seen. (Oprah agrees.)

— Kyle Tully

ACQUISITION

European ecommerce report 2023

Ecommerce Europe — an association representing 150,000 companies throughout Europe — dropped a 97-page behemoth of a report (PDF) on the state of ecommerce in the region.

Some highlights:

• Turnover in European B2C e-commerce increased

  from €849bn in 2021 to €899bn in 2022.

• Growth slowed from 12% in 2021 to 6% in 2022, but is forecast to slightly increase to 8% in 2023.

• Online sales are expected to keep growing in the coming

  years, reaching an estimated 30% of retail sales by 2030.

• 76% of internet users in Europe shopped online in 2022, increasing to a projected 78% in 2023.

If you’re selling anywhere in Europe — or want to — there are sure to be some juicy tidbits in here for you.

Google Ads rolls out Demand Gen to all customers globally

Demand Gen is Google’s new AI-powered campaign designed to, as the name implies, drive demand.

These campaigns are for driving conversions, site visits, and signups on Google’s entertainment-focused touch points — YouTube (including Shorts), Discover and Gmail.

• Use video and image ads in one campaign: including short-form videos, carousels, portraits, and square images.

• Find customers with Lookalike segments: use first-party data and Google will match it with audience intent and interest signals.

• Drive performance based on your unique goals: Similar to Discovery ads, you can optimize Demand Gen for conversions or use value-based bidding strategies. Or, if you want to drive high-value customers to your website, you can optimize for site visits and actions with Maximize Clicks bidding.

It’s now available to all Google Ads users.

The content strategy of a $100k MRR brand

Twitter tweet

The lowly Shopify blog is one of the most under-used and under-appreciated growth strategies available for free to every store owner.

If you sell to a market that has questions about your product or how to use it… compares your product to the competition or other alternatives… or just searches for your product category online… then you should be blogging.

Ash has a nice mini breakdown of some of the strategies Beardbrand uses to get in front of potential customers at each stage of the customer journey.

What’s missing from your content strategy?

CONVERSION

How to uncover hidden, high-converting landing pages

Shane shares a bunch of simple (but sneaky) tricks you can use to find “hidden” pages on Shopify stores… like secret offer pages and paid traffic landing pages.

He likes to start with the Facebook Ads library to find interesting stores he can dig into. From there…

1. Add /sitemap_pages_1.xml to the url of any store to see all their pages. (At least those not hidden from the sitemap)

2. Use the Google site: command to see what else comes up on Google.

3. Use an SEO spider tool to dig even deeper.

Fairly basic stuff for web-native people but if this is new to you prepare to have your mind blown at what you can discover!

How to increase conversion rate: 14 tactics for 2024

Increasing sales online comes down to two fundamentals:

• Traffic

• Conversion

If you double either one, you double your sales. (In a perfect world.)

While traffic tends to get the lion’s share of people’s attention, conversion is often the easier metric to manipulate.

The Shopify Plus content team posted another banger this week, detailing no less than 14 tactics to improve your conversion rate.

My advice: treat this like an action plan. Don’t just “read” it. Do it. Dedicate a sprint to each item and you’ve got months of conversion-boosting tests you can run.

Sued for fake discount timers

Twitter tweet

Cialdini’s 6 Principles of Persuasion are powerful conversion boosters, but you must use them for good not evil.

Ecommerce sites are being sued for all kinds of “Cialdini abuses” where they have created fake urgency, scarcity, or social proof through the use of things such as fake timers, fake stock numbers, and fake “just purchased” widgets.

If you’ve ever installed an app like this it might be a good idea to do a quick audit and make sure you’re not accidentally running afoul of the law trying to eke out a few more percentages on your conversion rate.

SEO

Another day, another Google core update

Twitter tweet

Is it just me or are the search results getting worse with every update?

SHOPIFY NEWS

The Shopify counter is back

Twitter tweet

Check current availability here.

One new Shopify update

• Preview Gift Cards before sending! - You can now preview Gift Cards before sending them via email or SMS, from within the Shopify admin.

INSPO OF THE WEEK

Judy was featured as one of Oprah’s favourite things of ‘23, so you know they’re having a pretty OK year. They also sport one of the best product pages I’ve seen lately ever — with a bold hero section, value-packed “what‘s inside” image, top-notch product photos, a no-brainer comparison table, and education content sure to scare anyone into buying 👌

How we can help…

🔥 Looking for an experienced Shopify Partner to work with? 
Smart ecommerce brands rely on us for innovative design, development, optimisation, and growth strategies to create highly profitable Shopify websites. Work with our consultancy.

🎯 Want to reach our audience? Hit reply to discuss advertising.

Welcome to Morning Commerce!

Between the October long weekend and the start of daylight savings time here in Aus, this shortened sun-filled week has been a nice change of pace before things go absolutely bonkers any day now.

Here’s what’s good this week:

• Shopify X Faire

• Merchants exiting free returns

• Are Core Web Vitals a Ranking Factor?

• New Gmail rules for bulk email senders

• Where do consumers get gift inspiration?

• The SMS marketing consumer sentiment report

— Kyle Tully

ACQUISITION

Where do consumers get gift inspiration?

A new dive from RetailDive reveals where consumers of different ages will be getting their gift inspiration this holiday season.

• Facebook (35.8%)

• Instagram (32.7%)

• YouTube (24.1%)

• TikTok (23.4%)

• Pinterest (16.2%)

Not surprisingly, millennials and Gen X shoppers will be heading to Facebook and Instagram for inspo, while younger shoppers 18-29 will turn to Instagram and TikTok.

While nearly half of Gen Z plan to do their holiday shopping at malls, Amazon still dominates online destinations with a whopping 64.7% of consumers stating they will shop there. Walmart and Target rounded out the top three online retailers of choice, at 47.6% and 41.8% respectively.

CONVERSION

New Gmail rules for bulk email senders

Google has announced a new set of rules for bulk email senders, aimed at creating a safer and less spammy inbox.

Senders of over 5,000 messages per day to Gmail inboxes will be required to:

• authenticate emails using established protocols such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.

• allow for easy one-click unsubscription to be processed within 2 days.

• stay under a reported spam threshold.

The new rules are set to go into effect in February 2024.

All major email providers already have one-click unsubscribe and the required functionality to implement authentication, but you may need to enable and set up authentication if you have not done so already.

Keeping under the spam threshold will likely make best practices such as list segmentation, list hygiene, and personalisation all the more important.

The SMS marketing consumer sentiment report

SMS marketing is a different ballgame to the email marketing most Shopify brands are long familiar with. What messages to send? When? How often? These are just some of the questions merchants struggle with.

A new SMS marketing report from Klaviyo goes a long way to answering these questions and more. Like why people subscribe (and unsubscribe) from SMS, which age groups are open to buying from SMS, and which brands are doing SMS effectively.

Here’s a sample of what they found:

• 96% reported willingness to receive a text at least once per week. (Up from 31% in 2021.)

• 70% said between once and a few times a week was preferred.

• Most people want confirmations via text — things such as order, delivery, and shipment notifications.

• 30-50% said they want coupons, promotional codes, and birthday deals.

• 30% said they wanted messages regarding back-in-stock items and loyalty program benefits.

• 48% said they wanted discounts tailored to their past purchases.

• 49% said they DON’T want articles.

• 44% said they DON’T want “item in cart” reminders.

• 37% said they DON’T want event announcements.

• 95% of consumers subscribe to less than 7 brands via SMS.

• Discounts are the biggest driver of SMS subscriptions at 69%.

• Too many (73%), too similar (69%), and no-purpose(62%) messages are the biggest reasons for unsubscribing.

Now, keep in mind they surveyed 1,975 consumers from the US & Canada all over the age of 18 who are engaging with brands via SMS. So the data is obviously skewed towards those demographics. But interesting data nonetheless.

As always, the answer is to test for yourself and find out what works for your market and your customers.

ECOMMERCE

Merchants exiting free returns

Returns cost retailers about $816 billion in lost sales in 2022, and many large stores have started fighting back with a sledgehammer: charging for returns.

H&M UK is the latest retailer to announce a fee for online shopping returns, charging £1.99 for each returned package.

Many prominent US brands — especially those in fashion and apparel — are now charging for returns, including:

• Uniqlo - $7

• REI - $5.99

• Zara - $3.95

• J.Crew - $7.50

• JCPenney - $8

• L.L.Bean - $6.50

• Foot Locker - $6.99

• Urban Outfitters - $5

This is virtually guaranteed to hurt conversions and one wonders if investing more into fit-technology, education, and more nuanced purchase/return policies would net better results?

SEO

Are Core Web Vitals a Ranking Factor?

Yes.

Core Web Vitals measure page experience signals — roughly translating to “website speed” — to ensure an engaging user experience for users.

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how long it takes to load the largest content in the viewport.

• First Input Delay (FID): how long for the browser to respond to a site visitor’s first interaction with the site while the site is loading.

• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): the unexpected shifting of webpage elements while the page is still downloading.

While there is some debate as to whether they impact search rankings, Google has stated it quite simply:

CWVs are not an independent ranking “system” on their own, but they do contribute to page experience evaluations. They work within the helpful content ranking system and go toward page experience signals.

Check your Search Console reports and take care of any pages that need work!

SHOPIFY NEWS

Shopify X Faire

Faire has announced a partnership with Shopify, establishing the B2B retail marketplace as Shopify’s recommended wholesale provider. Shopify Point of Sale will become the preferred provider for Faire’s retail community.

This partnership will allow merchants on Shopify to access close to 10 million products from over 100,000 brands directly via Faire’s buyer app. Meanwhile, brands selling on Shopify will get access to thousands of independent retailers via Faire’s wholesale seller channel. Brands on Shopify will be able to also enable a free Faire-powered Stockist Map on their ecommerce websites to help consumers shop their products locally.

As part of the deal, Shopify will also become a Faire shareholder, doubling their commitment to the partnership.

One new Shopify update

• Storefront API support for product bundles - Merchants using Hydrogen or the Storefront API through the Headless Channel in the admin, can now offer product bundles with Shopify.

INSPO OF THE WEEK

Lestrange’s clean-cut collection pages are brought to life with the strategic use of video on every few products. One moment you’re scrolling down looking at static product images and then an image comes to life and the model looks down, adjusts his jacket, or does a little spin. Simple but highly engaging.

How we can help…

🔥 Looking for an experienced Shopify Partner to work with? 
Smart ecommerce brands rely on us for innovative design, development, optimisation, and growth strategies to create highly profitable Shopify websites. Work with our consultancy.

🎯 Want to reach our audience? Hit reply to discuss advertising.

Welcome to Morning Commerce!

Lots happening in the world of DTC Shopify this week as everyone is ramping up anxiety levels to ludicrous speed in anticipation of BFCM.

Shopify has not slowed down its impressive dev schedule with no less than eight platform improvements this week, including two big ones in the much anticipated one-page checkout and Audiences 2.1

Here’s what else caught me eye:

• DTC copycat hell

• Shopify Audiences v2.1

• One-page checkout is here

• How to work ON your business

• 4 common email marketing problems

• A comprehensive guide to customer lifetime value

— Kyle Tully

ACQUISITION

DTC copycat hell

Twitter tweet

Wise words from David Herrmann on how easily we can be swayed by the latest tactic everyone is talking about and how quickly this can disrupt your entire marketing strategy.

• a little creative from here

• a dash of offer from there

• a bidding strategy from anywhere

Before you know it you’re running a Frankenstein marketing campaign with bits and pieces cobbled together from a dozen different sources and wondering why you can’t replicate the success of others.

David reminds us of some of the important lessons passed on from David Ogilvy you can use as a filter for deciding which, what, when, and how you apply the strategies and tactics you hear:

Lesson 1: Do your homework

Lesson 2: Focus on benefits

Blind copying might not break your business, but it can certainly put a nice dent in it.

CONVERSION

A comprehensive guide to customer lifetime value

Customer lifetime value is one of those metrics that when you finally get it — and figure out how on earth to actually calculate it — everything changes.

The idea is simple. Customer lifetime value (abbreviated to CLV or LTV depending on who you listen to) represents the total worth of a customer over the lifetime of their relationship with you.

If the average customer buys 3 times and spends $100 each time, your CLV is $300.

This lets you know how much you can afford to spend to get a customer.

Once you know this number you can slice and dice it to figure out the segments of customers who are most and least valuable and adjust course accordingly.

• Perhaps customers coming from SEO are twice as valuable as those from TikTok.

• Maybe people who accept an upsell end up being five times more valuable than those who don’t.

• You might find people 26-35 are only half as valuable as those 36-45.

The ever-elusive CLV metric has escaped most ecommerce business owner’s attention. Perhaps because it can be difficult to calculate on Shopify. RetentionX is aiming to change that and wrote a comprehensive guide to CVL for Shopify that is well worth the time investment.

EMAIL MARKETING

4 common email marketing problems

Twitter tweet

Jimmy Kim from Sendlane wrote a tasty little morsel of a post this week breaking down the 4 most common problems with the email accounts he audits.

Worth a read, but some takeaways:

1. Treat opt-ins, customers, and repeat customers differently. (Aggressive, easy, love.)

2. Segment by lifecycle and behaviour not just engagement.

3. Single CTA repeated multiple times.

4. Focus on clicks and what drives them. Do more of that.

5. Clicks are your KPI with a 5%+ goal for email and 25%+ for SMS.

I can’t stress enough how much of a goldmine email is if you take the time to do it right.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

How to work ON your business

Twitter tweet

The average ecommerce business has so many moving pieces and so many things that can catch fire on any given day (both good and bad) that it’s easy to get stuck working IN your business:

• customer support

• dealing with suppliers

• packing and shipping orders

• running social media campaigns

Without careful planning, it’s easy to forget to work ON your business:

• analysing customer feedback to iterate product design

• carefully crafting and adjusting long-term strategy

• diving into analytics and hypothesising new tests

• fostering win-win partnerships across all areas

This simple idea from Brennan Dunn of scheduling time in your calendar for “1% improvement” — a dedicated time block every day/week/month to work on your business — is a winner.

Try it and let me know how it impacts your business over the next 90 days.

SHOPIFY NEWS

One-page checkout is here

After what feels like years (ahem, it has been years) one-page checkout is finally rolling out.

The demos look good and while the basic info you input is the same, the streamlined one-page process does feel quicker. Fewer clicks and screen refreshes can only be a good thing.

The new checkout experience will be available to everyone by October 2.

Plus merchants who have updated to checkout extensibility will see the new one-page layout in your checkout editor right away.

If you are on the Basic, Shopify, and Advanced plan, your checkout will be auto-updated to the new design first week of October.

In case you’re wondering, abandoned checkouts are created once a customer is attached to the checkout by inputting a phone number or email.

Shopify Audiences v2.1

Good news for Shopify Plus merchants, Audiences 2.1 is out and according to Shopify, it can help you cut your customer acquisition costs by up to 50%.

Audiences 2.1 also includes:

• The best-performing algorithms yet to drive more conversions.

• New benchmarks dashboard so you can compare and optimise your campaigns.

• Support for three new ad channels - TikTok, Snapchat, and Criteo.

Audiences now supports six channels in total, including the existing incumbents Meta, Google, and Pinterest.

Eight new Shopify updates

• Manage Gift Cards with added “Gift Card ID” column in reports - see which gift cards were used for which orders.

• Acquire new wholesale customers with company account requests - the Shopify Forms app now has a customizable account request form to enable prospective B2B customers to submit their information for review.

• POS Go Remote Logout - you can now remotely log out devices.

• Shopify Flow - New Log output action - this action allows you to display the value of variables in the workflow run log, without taking action in the workflow.

• Edit your Shopify Inbox chat widget’s button - You can now customize the Shopify Inbox chat widget’s icons and text.

• New input setting text_alignment introduced.

• Enhancements to range and select input settings.

• More ways to filter products in admin - There are now more ways to filter and sort products in admin, layering in filtering for all metafield reference types.

INSPO OF THE WEEK

Cowboy electric bikes (operating on the killer cowboy.com domain) lean into their sleek product design with an equally impressive website featuring the longest product page I think I’ve ever seen. If you’re selling an expensive product with lots of technical bits to explain then this is a great site to break down and analyse.

How we can help…

🔥 Looking for an experienced Shopify Partner to work with? 
Smart ecommerce brands rely on us for innovative design, development, optimisation, and growth strategies to create highly profitable Shopify websites. Work with our consultancy.

🎯 Want to reach our audience? Hit reply to discuss advertising.

Welcome to Morning Commerce!

Here’s what I’ve been paying attention to this week in the world of Shopify:

• Pinterest ad updates

• Shopify's new 3D Scanner on iOS

• Marketers losing touch with the average Joe

• New Liquid features for better web performance

• AMA: Real Shopify Merchant Questions Answered

• Google quietly increases ad prices to meet targets

— Kyle Tully

ACQUISITION

Pinterest ad updates

Pinterest just announced a bunch of interesting updates for advertisers at their Pinterest Presents event.

Three new ad formats:

• Premiere Spotlight on search and home feed - Premiere Spotlight allows brands to exclusively own premium ad placements, now extended from search to the home feed.

• Showcase ads - Showcase ads are a new interactive ad solution that allows users to preview and explore a brand's content by swiping through branded images.

• Quiz ads - Brands can include up to three questions per quiz to create an entertaining experience for people to engage with.

Five new features for Business Manager, including:

• New dashboard

• New audience sharing features

Creative Studio:

• A speedy way to generate lifestyle imagery for product Pins.

• Add your Pin link, select the prompts that match your need, and Creative Studio will generate a selection of custom background images.

Making Pinterest more shoppable with mobile deep links and direct links that take people from a Pinterest ad to a retailer’s website with just one click. Hurrah!

Google quietly increases ad prices to meet targets

Wondering why your ad costs keep creeping up even though you’re optimising your campaigns to within an inch of their life?

It might be because Google raises auction costs to meet revenue targets.

That’s hot news out of the recent antitrust trial, direct from Google ad executive Jerry Dischler.

For some queries, they’ve raised prices by as much as 10%.

Now we know what the “smart” part of smart bidding is all about 🤑 

CONVERSION

AMA: Real Shopify Merchant Questions Answered

Kurt and Paul from the Unofficial Shopify Podcast always have useful content and this AMA covers some questions you might have wondered about, including:

• The pros and cons of one-page checkouts.

• Deep dive into the world of Google Analytics.

• SEO retainers

• International duties and taxes.

• Advice on growing without a hefty ad budget.

Always worth a listen.

Marketers losing touch with the average Joe

A recent study by Morning Consult and Advertiser Perceptions explores the growing disparity between consumer values and behaviors and marketing priorities in the U.S.

The full report is worth a read, but some highlights include:

• Marketers often chase “shiny and new” trends consumers don’t care about.

  • 40% of consumers have never heard about NFTs, which drops to 0% for marketers.

  • 33% of consumers have never heard of “charcuterie”, again dropping to 0% for marketers.

  • 33% of consumers have never heard of pickelball, once again dropping to 0% for marketers.

• Marketers are 4 times more likely to drive an EV than consumers.

• Consumers are motivated by friends and family, marketers are motivated by fortune, fame, and fear.

• 66% of Marketers are excited about the potential AI will unlock for society, while only 39% of Consumers are.

• Consumers value religion, the military and freedom of speech to a much greater extent than Marketers do.

• Both Consumers and Marketers say that they hear from too many influencers – and not enough real people – in marketing.

• The biggest thing both marketers and consumers agree on is if they had an extra hour, they’d use it for sleep.

A good reminder that you are not your customer and to always put the work in to get to know and understand them.

SEO

Google releases the September 2023 helpful content update

Dear Lord, when will it end? Google is keeping SEOs hot on their toes with another “helpful content” update.

According to the big G, “the helpful content system aims to better reward content where visitors feel they've had a satisfying experience, while content that doesn't meet a visitor's expectations won't perform as well.”

This update will further refine how they classify content.

We know little else about the specifics of this update other than it will take about two weeks to fully roll out. Good luck out there and stay safe.

Google Search can now validate responses from Bard

Ask a question in the latest version of Bard and you’ll see a little G icon and a notice that you can check Bard’s response using Google Search.

Click the icon and Bard will google the question you asked and highlight both confirming and conflicting information that appears on Google.

You can then click on the highlighted text and a popup will show the extra information with a link to the website.

This should be a good thing for content creators as traffic will funnel from Bard back to Google.

Not sure how I feel about having to fact-check the magic robots though, can’t they just do everything for me?!

SHOPIFY NEWS

Shopify's new 3D Scanner on iOS

Twitter tweet

If you just bought a regular model iPhone you might want to chuck it in the bin and go get a Pro model.

Why?

Shopify just released a native 3D scanner that lets you create 3D models of your products with nothing but an iPhone Pro and the latest version of the Shopify app.

This lets your customers view your products from any angle to capture the “complexity, character, and individuality” of what you offer. Shopify says these 3D models can also “boost customer confidence and conversion rates while reducing returns and customer service inquiries“.

This type of technology used to cost thousands of dollars (for each product) and take weeks to complete, which put it out of reach of most vendors.

Now you can DIY with your phone in about 20 minutes. Nice.

New Liquid features for better web performance

Optimising Shopify themes for performance has always been a tricky job for theme developers. They need to build a rich feature set used by thousands of different stores in all kinds of unique combinations.

It’s difficult to optimise when you don’t know exactly how something will be used.

Often it was up to independent developers like myself to take a client’s unique implementation of a theme and optimise it based on their use case.

Two new Liquid features should help reduce your reliance on such help:

• Default lazy loading for the image_tag for sections further down the page

• New section properties section.index, section.index0, and section.location for more fine-tuning of image lazy loading as well as async CSS loading.

If all that is Greek to you, never fear. All you need to know is in future versions of your theme, the theme developers have the ability to optimise image loading with much greater control than they do now.

Five new Shopify updates

• New: Automatic free shipping discount - You can now offer automatic free shipping to your customers, directly from Shopify admin, without having to rely on a discount code, Scripts, or an app.

• Access apps more easily with admin actions - Admin actions let apps integrate seamlessly with the Shopify admin by creating modals that can be used from resource pages in the Shopify admin.

• Set-aside Sales Tax - Merchants using Balance can now automatically save sales tax in a dedicated Balance account.

• Improved spam detection in Shopify Inbox - a powerful spam detection system that prevents unwanted messages from arriving in your Inbox.

• Increased POS PIN combinations - POS PINs can now accommodate up to 6 digits. Thrilling!

INSPO OF THE WEEK

Sometimes product photos alone don’t tell the whole story of how your product or the process of purchasing works. Fussy (a client of ours) uses a dead simple but effective “how it works” section on their homepage that explains in three panels everything you need to know. As a business owner, this sometimes seems obvious, but to first-time visitors who are just scanning, this type of section can be crucial to “getting” it.

How we can help…

🔥 Looking for an experienced Shopify Partner to work with? 
Smart ecommerce brands rely on us for innovative design, development, optimisation, and growth strategies to create highly profitable Shopify websites. Work with our consultancy.

🎯 Want to reach our audience? Hit reply to discuss advertising.