I ruthlessly unsubscribe from almost all newsletters. Eric’s one of a select few that I look actually forward to opening because it has proven itself consistently valuable for Shopify merchants.
— Kurt Elster, Ecommerce Strategist, founder of Ethercycle, and a top Shopify Plus Expert.
Past issues
Shopify Dispatch Issue #207 - Heat Maps
Heat Maps: What they are and how to use them Kelly Vaughn writes about how to use heat maps in your store to better design your pages for conversion. Click Maps have been especially useful for me and my clients to find conversion improvements. Plus they are simple to understand...
Shopify Dispatch Issue #206 - Content marketing, Coming soon pages
What content marketing means for eCommerce Content marketing is a huge topic with books and books about it (some good). Sam Greenspan adapts some of that generic advice and writes about how content marketing can work for ecommerce using examples from several well-known brands. Every Shopify store of any size...
Shopify Dispatch Issue #205 - Text-heavy emails, Email campaigns
How to succeed at email marketing with minimal design In this article Matt Maggiacomo goes through using text-heavy marketing emails and why they might be better for your Shopify store. These are the types of emails I've used for years with great success, I call them plain text-ish email. 10...
Shopify Dispatch Issue #204 - Shopify Chat, Bad banner UX
Shopify Chat: Close More Sales Through Real-Time Conversations Shopify released Shopify Chat, an on-site live chat service. It seems to require Apple's iOS for responding to messages so it might not be ready for every store. Mobile E-Commerce UX: Deemphasize 'Install App' Ads or Avoid Them Entirely The Baymard Institute...
Shopify Dispatch Issue #203 - Beeketing apps removed, Shopify as a platform
Beeketing and BoostFlow uninstall instructions and alternative apps Shopify is removing all Beeketing and BoostFlow apps from the App Store and from stores they've been installed to on August 27th. Shopify and the Power of Platforms Though it came out last month, this article has been making the rounds again...
Shopify Dispatch Issue #202 - Humor in marketing
How to employ humor in email marketing The most difficult part of marketing is getting noticed in the Sea of Sameness. Matt Maggiacomo writes about how to add humor to your email marketing to help it stand out, without having it backfire. Segment your customers for fun and profit (but...
Shopify Dispatch Issue #201 - SEO text
SEO: That Blob of Text May Not Be Helping Armando Roggio explains how adding a bunch of text in a small font that no one reads could confuse Google and hurt your rankings. That's why I recommend trying to write a story about your product if you get stuck creating...
Shopify Dispatch Issue #200 - Customer acquisition, Prime Day 2019 breaks records
Customer Acquisition: How to (Profitably) Gain New Customers for Your Business Mary-Rose Sutton at Shopify contrasts different customer acquisition strategies. It's best to focus on one or two of them, ideally one that attracts new customers and another strategy that retains them. Amazon Prime Day 2019 Breaks Records; Other Merchants...
Shopify Dispatch Issue #199 - Order reviewing, Moving goal posts
5 'Order Review' Implementations That Make Office Depot Best-in-Class Baymard digs into Office Depot's order review and shows how it compares favorably to other stores. Simple tweaks and changes aren't as sexy as redesigns but they can be just as profitable. Moving The Goal Posts Kevin Hillstrom writes about how...
Shopify Dispatch Issue #198 - Profit, Abandoned cart segmenting
Profit As much as I love metrics, not much beats profit. If you're not using it to help make business decision, you're risking a lot. Why you should segment your emails by cart size Dani Fankhauser describes the strategy behind segmenting abandoned cart emails by cart size. I never considered...