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 #58 - Theme sections, Loyalty programs
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...
Shopify Dispatch Issue #57 - Recover from DDoS, Steps to prepare for Black Friday
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...
Shopify Dispatch Issue #56 - Sales tax nexus, Simplicity
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...
Shopify Dispatch Issue #55 - Email campaigns, Apps
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...
Shopify Dispatch Issue #54 - Build vs platform, Black Friday resources
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...
Shopify Dispatch Issue #53 - Shopify App, Customer data
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...
Shopify Dispatch Issue #52 - Ecommerce platform migrations, Boosting CLTV
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...
Shopify Dispatch Issue #51 - Multichannel 101, Pricing strategies
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...
Shopify Dispatch Issue #50 - RFM analysis, Winback campaigns
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...
Shopify Dispatch Issue #49 - Product pricing, Customer research
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...