We have four seasons here in Portland: Winter, Spring, Construction, Fall It being Construction season now, there’s some heavy equipment or road blockage every other block. A bit of an inconvenience and noise but no big deal. But during my walks I see plenty of head-shaking decisions. Enough to fill these daily emails for the …
Tag: optimization
Solving the “which task to work on” problem
If you’re struggling with planning what to do with your Shopify store for the holiday season, here’s one way to focus. Plan out what one thing you’re going to do each week. This one thing should be about 2-4 hours of focused work. Something that you can do in half a day or during one …
Deciding where in your Shopify store to invest resources and what to ignore
While there are times to watch your expenses and conserve cash, there are a few areas where it makes sense to invest whatever you can. Those areas will be different from business to business but usually involve bottlenecks and constraints in your core value delivery. Your value delivery is the series of actions that your …
Step-by-step, day-by-day
With summer over and the kiddo back in school, I’ve finally started to get back into my regular routine. Much of my business has been built on routines. They are one of my Secret Weapons Of Success (TM) (C) (R). Much of that is intentional. My marketing channels, processes, and development all revolve around making …
Make your Shopify homepage start converting customers
Your Shopify homepage is the first or one of the first impressions on new customers. It should clearly convey what your store is and who it serves. And no, everyone is not a valid answer unless you’re willing to go toe-to-toe with the behemoths like Amazon and Walmart. There are four areas to focus on …

Take a timeout for infrastructure improvements to your Shopify store
I’ve used the past week to work on something that should have almost no visible impact for my customers. It’s a series of infrastructure improvements. For me that involves software upgrades and rewriting some code. So far everything has gone well, which means that nothing looks different to customers. Sounds like a waste of time …

Data-driven gems that can be mined from a customer purchase latency analysis on a Shopify store
In my Repeat Customer Insights app there is a report called the Customer Purchase Latency report. It’s a compact report but it packs a lot of customer analysis into one page. Sometimes I’ll get questions about how to read the included metrics, so today I wanted to share this with you. If you haven’t installed …

Product image compression and optimization on Shopify
Fast websites attract more customers, sell more, and are treated better by Google in SEO. I’ve looked at hundreds, maybe thousands, of Shopify stores. One ongoing speed issue is using too large of images, especially for product photos. A customer Matt wrote me a question about image optimization and now I’m going to share my …

When even tiny changes are worth the investment
This past weekend I’ve started to pack up our things to move. We’re only moving about a block from where we live now, but the new house will be better for us in a lot of different ways. Some of those ways sound almost trivial: a garbage disposal in the kitchen, a ceiling fan, a …