What Is Ecommerce Automation? Shopify Flow Shopify has released their Flow app which can create automation workflows for your store. It’s a Plus-only feature for now but there are plenty of automation ideas in here that can be adapted to other apps and tools. The impact of JSON-LD for SEO on your Shopify SEO rankings … Read more

Ecommerce Survey 2017: The Trials & Tribulations of a Booming Industry Shopify released the first set of analysis from their ecommerce survey for 2017. It’s interesting that some of the top struggles are also things a few of my apps help with… almost as if I planned that huh? 😉 ROAS vs. ROMI: This is … Read more

Shopify Rich Snippets: Improved organic traffic that converts, without chasing rankings Getting Rich Snippets is one of the few "free lunches" in the SEO world that still works, mostly because Google really wants to better understand your store’s website. In this article I cover everything you need to know about Rich Snippets and Shopify. Marketing … Read more

Post-Purchase Communications: Expert Tactics to Stay in Touch With Customers Alexandra Sheehan has collected several ideas about how to contact your customers post-purchase to improve your customer relationships. New Features, New Categories: Selling on Amazon with Shopify Just Got Easier Shopify has updated their Amazon channel with more categories and the ability to register your … Read more

The Beginner’s Guide to Ecommerce SEO While it gets into more complex SEO advice, this article from Shopify on ecommerce SEO can give you some ideas on how to setup SEO for your store. I will say they over-emphasize keywords and rankings though, which have been weakened with the rise of personalized search results. Curating … Read more

The Beginner’s Guide to Getting More High Quality Traffic Getting traffic to your store is one of the top problems that every Shopify store faces, but it’s just as important to attract high quality traffic. 1,000,000 visitors to your site doesn’t mean anything if 0 of them buy. 13 Cognitive Biases in Ecommerce (and How … Read more

500,000 Shopify stores and growing First, a big congrats to Shopify for powering 500,000 stores. For comparison, that’s double the amount they ended 2015 with. Hopefully that means more improvements and features for everyone over the next 18 months on the way to 1,000,000. Psychological pricing: A secret sauce to more sales There’s more to … Read more

Introducing the New Merchant Overview Dashboard Shopify is beginning to release a new merchant dashboard with more data and charts. Though I have to wonder if all of this will lead to better behavior, or just data overwhelm. The Top 4 Reasons Users Abandon Their Carts and What to Do About it Cart abandonment is … Read more

Introducing the Black Friday – Cyber Monday Health Check Tommy Walker over on the Shopify Plus blog has just released a guide to get ready for Black Friday/Cyber Monday. I’ve only scanned the report but it looks like there’s some good recommendations in it, even for non-Plus stores On-page SEO for eCommerce: How to optimize … Read more

Introducing Checkout On Your Own Domain Starting later this month, every Shopify store is going to be able to have checkout on its own domain which could be a nice boost to conversions. Integrating Shopify, Google Merchant Center, and JSON-LD for SEO in order to effortlessly run product ads I’ve spent the last two months … Read more

How to Get Better Traffic, Free with Semantic Data Yesterday Kurt Elster published the podcast he and I recorded on SEO, Semantic Data, and how they can help Shopify stores. If you wanted a summary what I’m been working on day-after-day for the last six months, this is the best place to find out about … Read more

Our 7 best tips to get more product reviews and boost your sales Customer reviews of your products can be a source of invaluable social proof, one that most customers expect now. Bill Widmer has written about how to get more product reviews over at the Bold Commerce blog. 5 Scalable SEO Projects, for Faster … Read more

Overview of Rich Snippets, their jargon, and how you can get them for your Shopify store Keeping up with Google Search’s products and tweaks can be a full time job, one that you need to do very well if your store gets a decent volume of traffic from SEO. Mix that with complicated technical products … Read more

Introducing the BuzzFeed Channel for Shopify Shopify just released a BuzzFeed Channel that will let you share your products with BuzzFeed editors for a commission. While it’ll probably only work for a segment of stores, I could see if working very well for them due to the potential traffic levels. Recommended product review apps for … Read more

Introducing Flair product badges for Shopify Tom’s a friend and he just launched a new Shopify app called Flair. It’s a nice app to add social proof to your products and attract more add to carts. Ad Blockers Can Affect Analytics Reporting With the rise of ad blockers it can be difficult to access the … Read more

A Seamless New Shopify Experience to Power Your Business Shopify has started to roll out their Polaris redesign to stores in an attempt to unify the look, feel, and experience of their core products. Expect to see apps start to be updated over the next few months. Using scarcity and urgency to get more Shopify … Read more

The Non-Technical Handbook for Shopify SEO I decided to start sharing a lot of the Shopify SEO research I’ve been collecting into a single article, The Non-Technical Handbook for Shopify SEO. How to Implement Ecommerce Personalization Personalization is a great way to improve conversion rates while also making your customers happier about your store. Though … Read more

I’m excited to say that Sticky has been featured by Shopify in their New and Noteworthy section for the next week How to Conduct Research That Drives A/B Testing A/B testing can enhance your store’s conversion rate but only if you’re testing things that matter. Nick Disabato writes about easy ways to conduct the research … Read more

Great Ideas for Driving More Qualified Traffic to Your Ecommerce Store Getting more qualified traffic is a difficult, ongoing task that is needed for your Shopify store. William shares several traffic strategies that you can use. If I don’t have product reviews in my Shopify store, can I earn rich snippets? While review rich snippets … Read more

How to unlock rock-solid positioning in three steps Drew Sanocki writes about to build an ecommerce brand that stands for something in your customers minds. Using Google Data Studio for SEO This tutorial is a bit advanced but if you needed a free way to analyze a bunch of SEO data, this looks solid. I … Read more

The In-Depth Guide to Selling Your eCommerce Business Andrew has put together a massive guide on selling your ecommerce business. If this is something you’re considering, it’s a must-read. How to increase search traffic to your Shopify store using the rankings you already have Sometimes it’s easier to make your SEO rankings work better than … Read more

Shopify Unite 2017 This week is a special Shopify Unite edition covering many of the announcements from Unite last week. There was something for everyone announced: new payment options, Shopify Plus features, app APIs, new theme toolkits, and more. Everything We Announced at Unite 2017 (And What It Means For Merchants) Shopify Unite 2017 Youtube … Read more

Retention Marketing: How to Measure and Improve It Tracking and measuring your customer and retention metrics becomes important as your store grows. Kristen outlines how to calculate these metrics by hand and a few ways to improve them. How to Encourage Customer Reviews (And Why You Should) If you want to boost your conversion rates … Read more

5 Personalized Emails You Need to Replicate Outside of the Inbox Josh writes about five email campaigns that you can put in place with your store. Based on my work done in the repeat customer funnel, each of these campaigns should have a strong ROI. How to test your JSON-LD code on Shopify Whether or … Read more

Launch to your repeat customers on Shopify Huge launches are desirable but sometimes it’s better to set your sights lower. A focused launch of a new product to your customers might be a better idea, especially while it’s still under development. New Guidelines for Getting Listed in the Shopify App Store With five published Shopify … Read more

Overhauling Your Customer Acquisition Model Taking an analytical approach to your customer acquisition is required as you scale and compete in different marketing channels. If you can’t track sales back to the channel, you’re going to be wasting your marketing budget. Shopify Product Reviews App: case of the missing reviews Recently Google made some algorithm … Read more

Using Exclusive Flash Sales to Reengage Your Most Valuable Customers Flash sales aren’t just to get a spike in sales. You can also use them to bring back your most important customers to your store and as a way to keep your list excited. Encouraging your best customers to buy from your Shopify store again … Read more

More Shopify Plus Industry Reports: Insight & Imagination for Tomorrow & Beyond Shopify has released more industry reports which now cover: fashion, consumer electronics, home goods, health and wellness, fitness and sports, beauty, toys, and baby care. The essential structured data for your Shopify store SEO Make sure your Shopify store has all of the … Read more

How to Overhaul Your Retention Strategy and Develop More Profitable Repeat Customers Herbert Lui writes about how to plan our your customer retention strategy by looking at what industry veterans do. How to find the optimal time to email your store’s customers There’s common advice about when the best time to send your emails are … Read more

Shopify Shipping Brings Calculated Rates to All Shopify Plans Shopify has added support for calculated shipping rates to all of their plans. While limited to USPS and Canada Post for now, this might help your conversion rates or profit if you’ve been using flat rate shipping. Returning Ecommerce Visitors: How to ‘Nudge’ Non-Buyers Aaron Orendorff … Read more

How to Calculate Free Shipping Thresholds I’m a big fan of using customer behavior data to drive business decisions (in fact, that’s the point of my Repeat Customer Insights app). In this article Tommy Walker describes how you can figure out what thresholds to use for your free shipping.. Customer Problems: Find Your Starving Crowd … Read more

Introducing Shopify’s Draft Orders API Shopify has released a new API to create draft orders. Though still in beta, once apps start using this API I expect some interesting workflows to arrive: phone orders, wholesale order automation, and bulk ordering. Introducing Shopify Shipping Scripts: Innovative Shipping Customizations While it’s for Shopify Plus only, the new … Read more

How much Rich Snippets will enhance your search results Google’s rich snippets are a powerful tool to improve a store’s organic traffic and conversions. In this article I look at and compare different formats of rich snippets. Find and Leverage Retail Trend Data to Grow Your Business William Harris outlines a process he uses for … Read more

The difficulty of getting Google to add Rich Snippets for your Shopify store With less and less space being provided to Google’s organic search results, anything you can do to get more pixels on the page can help. Luckily for Shopify stores you can setup rich snippets and have your product details appear directly in … Read more

Introducing Shopify’s Build a BIGGER Business Competition Shopify has just launched a version of their successful Build a Business competition but this time it’s for existing merchants. It would be worthwhile to enter just to get access to the resources and community. Evaluating a store’s repeat customer metrics with fast but infrequent repeat orders Collecting … Read more

Start Selling on Amazon With Shopify Shopify has added an integration with Amazon so now you can sell your products on Amazon, sync inventory, and fulfill orders all within Shopify. It takes a bit of work to setup but if Amazon is or is going to be a channel you’re selling on, it’s going to … Read more

Special news: I just acquired a new Shopify app, JSON-LD for SEO. Predicting when your customer will buy again What if you could predict the future? With the right data you can, at least for your repeat customers. Customer purchase latency can give you an idea about which customers will be placing new orders. How … Read more

Drive Sales After the Holiday Retail Rush The holiday season is over so now it’s time to try to boost the slow first quarter sales. Jason Dent has four strategies you can start putting in place now, though to be honest they aren’t quick fixes and will likely payoff later in 2017. 3 Backend Fixes … Read more

Ditch the Crystal Ball: Where to Place Strategic Ecommerce Bets in 2017 With 2016 drawing to a close, it’s time to think about what major changes you’ll make for next year. My own experience leads me to bet on greater personalization backed by the quantity of customer data stores are collecting. How to discover why … Read more

Opportunities, Threats, and A Future Consumer Electronics Retailers Must Prepare For Shopify Plus has released another industry report, this one for consumer electronics. How to integrate Drip with Shopify to automate your marketing Combining Shopify with the marketing automation provided by Drip, you can build email campaigns that catch the attention and interest of your … Read more

The Science of Sales: How to Move More Merchandise with Discounts This article by Jessica Bianchi outlines how people behave to sales and discounts. You can use these strategies to create an offer that is both enticing for your customer and profitable for you. The Quick Guide to Holiday Email Marketing Campaigns There’s always time … Read more

Introducing Shopify Plus Industry Reports Shopify Plus is producing industry reports which describe upcoming trends and changes in different ecommerce industries. The first for Fashion and Apparel is out now. Measure how much of your Shopify store revenue originates from repeat customers Earning more revenue from your repeat customers is much easier than trying to … Read more

Facebook Ads for Ecommerce Entrepreneurs With its rich segmentation and huge userbase, Facebook advertising can be an important channel for your ecommerce store. Now Shopify has released a guide to Facebook Ads for Ecommerce Entrepreneurs which should make it even easier to get started. Why Customers Disappear After the First Sale – and How to … Read more

Happy Black Friday season, may your store reach new sales records. Introducing New Insight Reports That Will Help You Get More Sales Shopify has added some new customer reports that are a great first look at your customer base. While I’m a fan of more deeper analysis (like the ones two of my Shopify apps … Read more

14 actionable tips for building a more profitable ecommerce business in 2017 It’s never too early to start planning for major changes to your ecommerce store. SellBrite has put together a collection of ideas you can work on in 2017. Content marketing tips for ecommerce Content marketing works well for both attracting visitors and customers … Read more

Ecommerce Analytics for Absolute Beginners: A New Guide from Shopify Shopify has just released a new guide that I’m really looking forward to reading and recommending to customers: Ecommerce Analytics for Absolute Beginners. Switching to a metrics-based approach to ecommerce marketing In a similar vein, I wrote about how to take a metrics-based approach to … Read more

Introducing a New Way to Build Your Online Store Shopify released their "sections" feature for themes which are a way to design your store using drag-and-drop. While it won’t replace premium themes yet, it can make coming up with a functional and simple theme easier. Customer Loyalty Programs: Why Retailers Need Them (and How to … Read more

9 Ways to Recover Sales after a DDoS Attack The big news this week was a large scale DDoS attack on a DNS provider that effectively crippled many Shopify stores. While attacks are unavoidable, there are ways to recover lost sales afterwards. The Step-by-Step Guide to Prepare Your Store for Black Friday and Cyber Monday … Read more

Nexus: The Hidden Sales Tax Pitfall That Puts Your Profits At Risk Death and taxes… and more taxes. While they serve a purpose, sales taxes can become a significant burden to ecommerce stores. If you’re not careful and informed, they could even sneak up on you too. Enhance Ecommerce UX With The Laws of Simplicity … Read more

Black Friday Deals: 10 Tips to Send High-Converting Holiday Sales Emails With the holiday season approaching, it’s time to dust off your email campaigns and start optimizing them. Segmentation and personalization will be important once again if you want to get customers to respond to your emails. 7 Shopify Apps That Will Help You Sell … Read more

Build Your Own Website or Use a Hosted Platform? CartHook has broken down the decision of building your own ecommerce store versus using a hosted platform into a set of pros and cons. A get asked about this a lot and one major point is deciding if the control you get from having a fully … Read more

Introducing the New Mobile Shopify App Shopify released a redesigned Shopify app for iPhone, iPad, and Android. Hopefully they can use this redesign to start rolling out new features. I’d love to see Shopify Apps come to their mobile app. 5 Interesting Uses of Customer Data for Ecommerce Marketing I’m a big proponent of using … Read more

Migrating an Enterprise eCommerce Website to a New Platform Switching ecommerce platforms is a major decision for your store. Ideally you’d never have to do it but as your organization grows, you might need to consider switching if your current platform is causing you too many problems. Boosting Customer Lifetime Value: Turn One-Time Shoppers into … Read more

Multichannel 101: Bringing Order to the Chaos of Managing all the Channels Once you start growing your channels, you’ll need to start looking into Order Management Systems in order to keep everything in sync. This article by Sangram Kadam gives a good introduction to how those systems work together. 5 Key Learnings From Analyzing Top … Read more

Digging into RFM segmenting in Shopify Segmenting your customers using RFM is a great way to find your VIP customers. Unlike other segmenting methods, RFM use three key pieces of data to improve your results. How to monetize dormant customers with a successful winback campaign Over time you’ll lose customers as they forget about you. … Read more

Why finding the product pricing sweet spot is about more than math As much as we’d like pricing to have a single magic formula, it’s still very subjective. This can be a good thing though. By not having only one price we have room to maneuver and can try out multiple prices. Kali Hawlk shows … Read more

How to Write Copy That Converts Writing sales copy for your store is just as important as any design decision. William Harris has seven tips and 3rd party resources on how to write copy that converts. The segment of customers who just can’t get enough Segmenting your customers before you send them marketing messages is … Read more

How to Maximize Sales with a Successful Cart Abandonment Email Strategy Adding even a simple cart abandonment email to most stores will improve your revenue, almost immediately. Shopify shares some cart abandonment campaigns but even a simple plain text one that goes out after 6 hours is a huge improvement over nothing. Create your first … Read more

What’s the most important factor to the success of an e-commerce business? FE International collected responses from dozens of ecommerce experts who all answered the question: What’s the most important factor to the success of an e-commerce business?. Marketing Your Shopify App: The Details We Overlook I tell my clients all the time that launching … Read more

Speed Up Your Shopify Store Once you get a decent amount of traffic, speeding up your Shopify store should boost your conversion rate. Even simple things like optimizing images can have a dramatic effect on your store’s performance. How to Build Your First Shopify App If you’ve wanted to build your own Shopify app, Levin … Read more

3 Key Metrics for Repeat Customers Once you have customers buying from your store, it can be confusing to decide what to do next to keep them loyal. The best way to decide is to use data to guide your thinking. In this article, you’ll learn what metrics to watch with repeat customers. How To … Read more

The Beginner’s Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization Once your store grow reaches a critical mass, you’ll want to grow revenue by focusing on conversion optimization (CRO). While there’s a huge body of knowledge around it, you can get started with a simple guide like this one from Shopify. The Small Business Blueprint to Marketing on … Read more

5 Tips for Increasing Customer Lifetime Value on your Shopify Store There are many ways to increase the customer lifetime value of your store but they come back to #2 on this list: Build relationships. The store/customer relationship is the foundation for any future business and a strong one will improve most of your business … Read more

A Short Tutorial for Running A/B Tests in Shopify with Optimizely A/B tests can be a great way to optimize parts of your store for conversions and purchases once you have enough traffic. This tutorial on setting up Optimizely to A/B test a Shopify site is a good introduction to how to wire it all … Read more

50 E-Commerce Stats You Need to Know While it’s important not to stress over too many metrics, reviewing larger trends in how things are doing can be useful to adjust your own strategies. Richard shares a collection of recent ecommerce stats around common areas. Planning for a Private Shopify App: 4 Steps That Will Save … Read more

How to Calculate Customer Lifetime Value Kevin has a great article on segmenting your Shopify customers using an RFM analysis and then finding their customer lifetime values. Super secret (but not really a secret): this week I’m planning to submit a Shopify app to the App Store that does this RFM analysis and segmenting automatically. … Read more

How to Build Your First Shopify App (Webinar) Over the past couple of months I’ve built three public apps and gotten two into the Shopify App Store (the 3rd is on it’s way this week). If you’ve been wanting to learn how to build your own apps, Shopify is hosting a free webinar on building … Read more

Introducing the Shopify Retail Blog This week Shopify announced a new blog dedicated to retail stores. I’ll be including articles from it in future editions. Starting your customer retention process In order for any process to work correctly it needs some kind of trigger or point that says "time to begin". This includes your store’s … Read more

How much additional revenue do repeat ecommerce customers contribute? 10%? 20% 40%? Everyone likes more repeat customers. In this article you can see how much revenue your repeat customers actually contribute. Design a loyalty program that will keep them coming back Loyalty programs are one tactic to increase your repeat customers. CartHook has an article … Read more

Lifecycle emails for Shopify stores Lifecycle emails are a powerful technique to map your customer relationship over time using email campaigns. This article from ShopStorm describes 5 different types of lifecycle emails a Shopify store can use as well as some apps to create them. Simple Shopify customer retention using an outreach email A simple, … Read more

Getting Started with Shopify Scripts Even since Shopify Scripts were announced, I’ve been wanting to learn more about them. Gavin Ballard has a great introduction to Shopify Scripts and how he recently used them for a client. The Quick Guide to Boosting Customer Loyalty and Repeat Business I’ve been doing a lot of work around … Read more

How to Start a Loyalty Program for Your Online Store Creating a loyalty program for your store can incentive and increase the number of repeat purchases. In this guide by Alex, he outlines How to Start a Loyalty Program for Your Online Store. Marketing Your Shopify App: Networking and Partnerships From store owners to app … Read more

17 Tactics for Ecommerce Growth Hacking Buzzwords aside, there are many marketing tactics you can take from this article and apply to your ecommerce business. Even one or two tactics might be more than enough for you. App Development Trends Favor Custom Ecommerce Platforms Armando Roggio highlights what a build-it-yourself approach to your ecommerce store … Read more

How to Grow an Ecommerce Business with Email Marketing Shopify has written a new free guide, "How to Grow an Ecommerce Business with Email Marketing". Email marketing is one thing that every business can do better with, and see a significant impact on revenue. 10x Your Revenue: Increasing Customer Lifetime Value With so much marketing … Read more

6 Principles for Small Business Automation A little bit of code can go a long way when it comes to automation but only if you understand what you’re trying to accomplish. Armando Roggio writes about principles to remember when you’re considering automation. Breaking into Data Intelligence: Making Sense of Your Data for Revenue With the … Read more

Shopify Introduces a Better Way to Communicate With Your Customers Using Facebook Messenger Shopify has just released a new channel which allows your customers to get Shopify notifications through Facebook Messenger. While I don’t see this replacing email, it will be valuable to have another method of reaching customers and allowing them to reply back. … Read more

How to Use Niche Marketing to Grow Your Business When you focus and cater to a specific niche of customers, you'll make a much larger impact than a more generic message. Marketing Your Shopify App: The App Listing Page For Shopify app developers with public apps in the App Store, attracting new customers is one … Read more

Shopify UNITE recaps With UNITE happening last week, there have been a lot of official resources coming out from Shopify. Here’s what happened since last week: Unite 2016 Recap: Enabling Commerce Everywhere (shopifypartnerblog.myshopify.com) Here’s Everything We Announced at Unite, and What It Means for You As (shopify.com) Introducing Shopify Scripts: A Giant Leap Forward For … Read more

Shopify Helps You Sell Where Your Customers Are Announced yesterday at Shopify Unite is the new Sales Channel SDK. This development kit allows app developers to integrate Shopify purchases into other channels, similar to Shopify’s own integrations with Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Build an Ecommerce Store On Any Website or Mobile App Also announced at … Read more

Introducing Shopify for WordPress Following up on last week’s news about a Shopify specific WordPress theme, is the release of two more WordPress themes and an official WordPress plugin from Shopify. This is going to make it even easier to integrate Shopify into non-traditional ecommerce stores. How to Run a Proper Online Contest Online contests … Read more

Ecommerce content marketing Content marketing can be an investment that slowly builds up your store’s revenue over time. This guide outlines many of the ways to use content marketing with your ecommerce store. How to Integrate Shopify into WordPress with Zillacommerce If the focus of your website is its content and you’re using WordPress, Zillacommerce … Read more

Private Apps: Your Ticket to Moving Your Shopify Store from ‘Good Enough’ to Outstanding Sometimes a store settles for a "good enough" solution to a problem which causes more trouble than it’s worth. There is another way. Shopify private apps can be used to create a custom, perfect-fit solution for the store instead. How Google’s … Read more

The Different Types of Shopify Apps Not only is Shopify’s App Store growing rapidly, but there are two entire segments of Shopify apps that aren’t even listed there. Learn about the three types of Shopify apps. Shopify 2015 Year in Review It’s been a busy year for Shopify. Some interesting stats pulled from their 2015 … Read more

Order Communication and Collaboration in Shopify Shopify added the ability for your team to post comments to your orders. This will make it easier to talk about an order in one place and stop sending those dozens of emails. 2016 Ecommerce Marketing Checklist Marketing can feel difficult if you don’t approach it with a plan. … Read more

How to Set Retail Discounts, for Ecommerce Too often I see discounts created without any thought behind them. A merchant will decide that today 15% sounds good and next time they’ll make it 20%. Armando Roggio shows how to plan out your discounts so it matches your business reason for the discount, while also measuring … Read more

All Shopify Stores Now Use SSL Encryption Everywhere Trust is the #1 factor when a customer is deciding about buying from you, versus a competitor. Even if you have an amazing price, if they don’t trust your store, you won’t get the sale. Security and SSL is one aspect of this trust and now all … Read more

Calculating your customer purchase latency Knowing your reorder metrics are important. How much they spend is commonly used. One oft-overlooked metric is the Customer Purchase Latency, the how long it takes a customer to reorder. By building campaigns around this metric you can speed up reorders. How To Turn Your Negative Reviews Into Lifelong Customers … Read more

Getting repeat sales using purchase latency Knowing your customer purchase latency can help you build a strategy to get more repeat sales from customers. Though it can be difficult to track and manage, the payoff may be worth it. Small Retailers Better Able to Adopt Unified Commerce One area outside of ecommerce that has grown … Read more

Pricing out a Private Shopify App Creating a private Shopify app can be a valuable project for many merchants. Having the flexibility to customize and control how your store functions can give you automation potential that topples public App Store apps. But make sure to budget enough to keep the app running from month to … Read more

How to keep driving sales after holiday season Just because the holiday season is over doesn’t mean you should slow everything down yet. You deserve a break for getting through the end of the year but make sure to use the first few months of 2016 to keep driving sales. Even if you do just … Read more

It’s been a light week content-wise. Everyone is recovering from the holiday season and wrapping up the year. Don’t forget to do a final promotion before the fiscal year ends for businesses. Telling a story with your content marketing I’ve used stories with my content marketing several times but it can be difficult to find … Read more

Maximizing your email marketing While not all of Nick’s advice here will work for everyone (what advice does?), he includes some great email marketing tips for ecommerce merchants. Depending on your pricing and level of service your customers expect, you might find building a relationship is required. Though offers and deals will always perform well. … Read more

App Integration Will Benefit Your Ecommerce Website Spending time (and thus money) keeping all of you business data up-to-date sucks. Sometimes it’s a must-do, like making sure your customer orders are sent to your supplier. Other data updates are a should-do, which… let’s be honest here, get put off until later. One way to solve … Read more

Sales Report: 2015 Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday More data has come in on the 2015 Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday sales and three things stand out to me: Online orders are up Mobile orders are up (a bunch) Extending the shopping season to Halloween or even just during hours your retail store … Read more

In-Store Retail Sales Decline on Black Friday Weekend While it’s only counting brick-and-mortar retail, 2015 sales over Black Friday appear to be down. I’ve seen some sources saying online has taken a larger share of sales and there are always reporting problems in these statistics but this is a rough indicator of the start of … Read more

3 2 1 Launch… checklist I’ve created and used launch checklists for years with clients. Launch can be a stressful time and without a checklist in hand, as it’s easy to forget things. This Shopify Store Launch Checklist is a great start but don’t be afraid to add your own tasks to it. Curated content … Read more

Advanced email tactics Carolyn Nye has several tips that can be used to improve your email marketing for Cyber Monday (or anytime really). The best part is that you can set these up ahead of time. Where’s the Lede? Some of the best content marketing gets to the point quickly. This is even more important … Read more

Don’t spread, focus All too often people spread themselves too thin. Maybe they have 10 stores, when 2 would work better. Or 5,000 products, when only 4 are strong sellers. Nick Whitmore writes about how he approaches new ideas and focuses on one at a time. Grow your blog, grow your customer base Content marketing … Read more

Failing moves Things don’t always happen as you expect. Even your business as a whole might, one day, start dying and it’s up to you to revive it. There are many ways you can try to save it, but you have to be willing to attempt something different. Mobile ecommerce design All signs are pointing … Read more

Third-party warehousing and fulfillment Much of the advice you’ll find about ecommerce is about the online side: setting up your storefront, marketing, taking orders, etc. Sometimes fulfilling those orders is regulated to busy work that you dread. Casandra Campbell writes about how you can use third-party warehousing and fulfillment instead of doing it yourself. Promo … Read more

All about the cash I’ve watched a few businesses implode. Running out of cash is the top cause. They might be profitable, selling lots of products, and growing but then they don’t watch their cash flow and all of a sudden can’t make payroll and rent. Casandra Campbell has written about how to get started … Read more

Automate your email marketing Email marketing is one of the most powerful forms of marketing available. It’s a direct connection to your customers at a fraction of the cost of other forms of advertising. John McIntyre outlines several ways you can setup email campaigns to reach your customers in this comprehensive post. Negative reviews can … Read more

Be Prepared Black Friday and Cyber Monday have the potential to make or break your year. You’re going to start seeing a lot of advice around how to get ready for it but the best advice is to be prepared and have options. Things will go wrong and how you deal with them will matter … Read more

Welcome to the first issue of Shopify Dispatch, a weekly curated newsletter with links and resources for Shopify merchants about Shopify and ecommerce. Missing out on some growth? Neil Patel has put together a resource to help look at where your store is flagging and what you can do to help it grow it. Even … Read more