Shopify Reunite 2020 happened today and it was a bittersweet moment for me. I’ve been to all 4 previous Shopify Unites (even when they were in SF!), so to not be there in person with all my colleagues and friends was definitely a bummer, but understandable in this new world we live in.
Shopify Balance was launched and my initial impression is that this will function like a company credit card/debit card where you can track your store cash flow, pay bills, etc. Feels like Shopify is setting up to get into banking for merchants and is a outgrowth of their hyper focus on merchants. Interesting side note, Amazon focuses on customers, Shopify focuses on merchants, this philosophical battle is shaping up to be a huge one for the next decade or more (they both can win though!).
Shopify Capital continues to lend money to merchants to help them finance inventory and grow their store. Shop Pay Installments is a great idea (Affirm and others must not have liked this), for example if you buy a $400 watch, you can now spread the money over 4 monthly payment of $100/each with no additional interest added. You are required to be on Shop Pay to use Installments, this is one more feature Shopify is building into Shop Pay which helps locks merchants into using it (Shop Pay is to Shopify as Prime is to Amazon). One interesting data point was that merchants that use Shop Pay see customers check out 4X faster and get 2X the conversion rate.
Online Store
The Express theme was launched to provide restaurants and small stores a simple one-page theme to get up and running quickly. Allowing customers to tip merchants directly from checkout was a great feature and really impressed me that Shopify has been able to adjust their feature set so rapidly to deal with Covid.
Localization of stores with custom currency and language has been something Shopify has been working on for a while. I liked the feature for merchants to be able to automatic FX rates, would make selling in different countries more plug and play.
Checkout app extensions were announced at last year’s Unite but aren’t quite ready and I’m not too surprised. There is a lot of complexity to integrate subscriptions into the core Shopify checkout process, but also allowing for partners like Recharge to integrate as well. Improving the subscription process would be a huge lift for all Shopify merchants since its such a critical part of the online stores we help support.
Shopify Email
30 million emails sent so far through Shopify email and the fact that it’s free and seamlessly integrated into Shopify will put a lot of pressure on Klaviyo and Mailchimp to really upgrade their email game. We don’t see a lot of Plus merchants adopting Shopify email yet, but that could change with more features here.
Shop App
I downloaded the new Shop app a couple weeks ago and found it useful for aggregating all of my shipping emails (even products from Amazon!) in one place. I also liked the ability to find local stores to see which companies were already selling online in my neighborhood.
Back Office
The purchase order functionality might be the least sexy announcement at Reunite, but could end up being one of the most popular. Merchants can track and receive inventory, set payment terms, adjust pricing and all from their phone, this could help simplify their inventory management.
Shipping
Curbside pickup and local delivery are 2 must have options, especially when you consider that average daily local orders grew 176% after CV set in. Merchants have often asked us about this feature and integrating into checkout will make like much easier for everyone.
What was Missing?
Here are the areas I was hoping to hear more information on:
No mention of wholesale channel – Shopify hasn’t been spending a lot of time/energy on their wholesale channel and that leaves out some of the manufacturing and distribution companies that I think could be a good fit on Shopify.
I wanted to hear about features that were specific to Shopify Plus. I have a feeling more information on this may come out post Reunite.
The Fulfillment discussion was thin on adoption rates, stats about merchants etc, plans for distribution centers (is Shopify going to build any?). I think there is a big opportunity here for Shopify, but I’d like to see more specifics.
Selfishly I didn’t hear as much about partners as I did in the previous 4 Unites, I know Shopify cares about us, but it’s also nice to hear! 😊
This post will explore Ambaum’s thoughts, best practices and lessons learned from multiple Magento to Shopify Plus migrations. Going through a re-platform event is challenging and to do it right you must be skilled at: project management, programming, design, data migrations, integrations, theme development and much more. This article will focus specifically on our lessons learned during the data migration portion of Magento to Shopify Plus migrations.
Before we walk through the details of our data migration experiences let’s explore the macro trends that are driving merchants to adopt Shopify Plus.
The Old Paradigm
Since the beginning of the 20th century manufacturers and brands have sold their products to customers through brick and mortar stores. Only in the late 1990’s was there a shift in how customers bought good and online ordering through the Internet became a real way to move your products. Initially the greatest new channel for manufacturers and brands came through Amazon as these companies leveraged Amazon’s established customer base. In 2020, Amazon now accounts for almost 38% of all online sales in the US so it continues to make sense for manufacturers and brands to sell on Amazon.
The old paradigm is a multi-step process for manufacturers to get their products in the hands of customers. A manufacturer sells to a wholesaler then a distributor, then to a retailer and finally into the hands of a customer. Amazon came along and became the online distributor for many manufacturers, but Amazon extracted a heavy toll of approximately 15% (or more) on products sold through their site.
Even with Amazon’s high take rate of ~15%, manufacturers could still make money, but Amazon was extracting a heavy “tax” on everything sold through their site. In addition, brands that sold through Amazon are unable to fully own their customer data and market to customers because Amazon really owns the customer. Brands on Amazon get access to millions of customers, but the brands remain renters, Amazon is the owner in that relationship. Amazon’s high take rate wasn’t sustainable for manufacturers and brands so they went in search of a new model.
The New Paradigm
Manufacturers and brands rely on Amazon to sell a lot of their products, but the trade-off is a heavy reduction in margins. The answer for most brands and manufacturers is to sell their own products direct to customers through the channel they can fully own – their website. This isn’t an earth-shattering revelation, but it’s an important distinction that has fueled the rise of ecommerce platforms in the last 15 years.
Frustrated with the large cost of general maintenance support fees/time spent by developers
Unable to easily implement and rapidly iterate on digital marketing ideas
Loss of control over day to day site updates, general pain with making even small changes on Magento
Once the decision has been made to move to Shopify Plus, merchants want to know how the following data can get safely, securely and accurately moved over:
Customer records
Products
Historical orders
Product reviews
Blogs posts
301 redirects
The rest of this post if going to focus on our lessons learned form moving over customer, product and order data from the merchant’s systems into Shopify Plus.
Magento to Shopify Plus Data Migration Example
Data migrations can be messy business. The migration must be planned out correctly, the data needs to be mapped from the old system to Shopify Plus and you need a way to test and handle exceptions in the process. After performing more than 10 migrations in the last 2 years, we have a pretty good idea of best practices as well as the things to watch out for during a data migration process.
We recently moved data into Shopify Plus from Magento and multiple legacy systems and data sources which presented data in vastly different formats. This client had three systems we needed to import data from:
Magento: ~125,000 customer records
Retail Point of Sale System: ~80,000 customer records
Mail Order Software: ~70,000 customer records
Each of the customer records was supposed to contain the following fields: customer name, phone number, email, however many of the records were duplicate or missing data. Many of the records only had a name and in order to get them into Shopify Plus we had to create dummy email addresses and if there was no phone number, we left that blank.
In the case where we had no email record, we would take the first and last name of the customer and combine with @noemail.com to create a dummy record. Because there were so many generic names such as “John Smith” we would encounter a problem with non-unique records. If there were multiple “John Smith” records, we ended up having to use their phone number + @noemail.com for their email record.
Things to Consider Prior to your Shopify Plus Data Migration
Practice proper data hygiene – there is a direct correlation with the hygiene and quality of data going in with the data integrity post-import. The GIGO acronym applies here: garbage in, garbage out
Phone numbers can live in different places in Shopify – when importing phone number into Shopify, they can place those records at different levels, depending on how you import the data.
Import via Excelify or CSV – the customer record will end up in the “Customer overview” field
Import via API – the customer record will end up in the “Default address” section
Pre-clean your email addresses – make sure they are correct format and email domains are real
Pre-clean your phone numbers – ensure there is a proper phone format, pick a phone format such as: 12063456789, +12063456789, or 2063456789 and use this format for all phone numbers
Determine the source of truth – If you are importing from multiple data sources, first and foremost determine which data set is the master and import that last (since Shopify will overwrite previous records). If you are only doing a Magento to Shopify data import with no other systems, this won’t be an issue.
Shopify will use different customer data fields to create a unique customer ID – If you have incomplete customer records Shopify checks the customer data fields (in this order) to find the:
Shopify ID
Email Address
Phone Number
For example, if your new data contains a Shopify ID that already exists in your Shopify dataset, Shopify will overwrite the new customer data on the old record. If your data is missing a Shopify ID, your unique customer email address will trigger Shopify to create a new unique customer ID. If your data is missing a Shopify ID and missing an email address, your customer phone number will trigger Shopify to create your unique Shopify ID.
Customers should be imported before orders – If you import order data before customer data, Shopify will look at that order data and create a Shopify ID so that the order data is associated with a customer. If you then go in and import new customer data you could end up with data integrity issues because you didn’t follow the proper order of operations.
Blank fields in a CSV import will overwrite existing data in Shopify – When you are importing new customer records, if your customer ID matches an ID already in Shopify and your import is missing the address field, your customer record in Shopify will no longer contain address information, it will be blank.
Shopify checks email address formatting – Customer and order records will not import if the email address is either:
An improperly formatted email address such as: danny.companyx.com
Not a registered domain name. Shopify is most likely taking each domain name and comparing it to a master list of domain names that have been officially registered.
General Data Migration Best Practices
Data formats – the data you plan to import should be in one of these formats: 1) JSON, (2) CSV, (3) XLSX, (4) XML (but this is a last resort- XML can be hard to work with sometimes)
If you anticipate that scripting will be necessary, then JSON is probably the best option for exporting data
There are online tools available for converting file formats, here is one we like to use: CSV to JSON file conversions
CSV imports are faster than the Shopify API – the Shopify API imposes a rate limit of roughly 2 records per second, so large datasets can take days or even weeks to import into Shopify via the API
Utilize Shopify metafields and tags to deal with custom data fields – For example, a merchant might have a custom field for BOGO sales, so in Shopify a tag can be created and then with some code you can look for the tag and then display a sale message on Collection and Product pages to the customer.
Leverage migration apps – Excelify is a good one that we have used and had success with, but keep in mind that apps can’t do everything. For example, Excelify is good for importing WordPress Blog Posts into Shopify but it’s not good for importing WooCommerce Orders. The Excelify developers have built the app to automatically map the blog post fields to Shopify but the app will not automatically map the order fields. Store owners can use migration tools to Migrate from Magento to Shopify Plus (including Magento 1, 2, CE, EE, Shopify, Shopify Plus) from Litextension – a company specialized in shopping cart data migration.
Migrate a test batch of data and then start analyzing
Compare Shopify data to source data and start figuring out what needs to be fixed. For example, maybe the “cost per item” showed up in the “compare at price” field or maybe all product reviews are missing their images. You’ll need to troubleshoot those types of things. Issues might need to be addressed by a custom script, an app, or some configuration in the export or import.
Keep in mind that every e-commerce platform has different fields available to shop owners and Shopify might not have a good solution for migrating all of the data. There will be some situations where you need to get creative and find a way to not only migrate the data but how to use it on the frontend. For example, one client had some data that was being used to link customers to specific magazines. We dumped all of the data into a Shopify metafield as a JSON object and then wrote some code to find the link that was needed on the frontend. It turned out to be a good solution because it provided a single source for the client to maintain the data and it was fairly easy to access the data from the frontend.
Project Management and Data Dependency Considerations
Think about dependencies. Which data is dependent on other data? For example, Orders need to be linked to Customers and Products and Product Reviews need to be linked to Products. So with that in mind, I suggest migrating Products first and then Customers. After that the order doesn’t matter but I think this would be a good order: Products, Customers, Orders, Product Reviews, Blog Posts, Pages, Discounts, and then any custom data such as QuickBooks for example.
After all of the data has been migrated then you need to take care of the redirects because Shopify has different folders structures. For example, WordPress blog URLs look like this: “domain.com/blog-post-name” and Shopify blog URLs look like this: “domain.com/blogs/blog-name/blog-post-name”. The redirects prevent 404s.
Also, keep in mind that while you are migrating data there are still customers shopping and shop owners making updates. So just before launch you will need to re-migrate anything that has been updated, added, or deleted. Such as Products, Customers, Orders, Product Reviews, and Blog Posts. Check with the client to get an idea about what has changed and be sure to work that into the timeline and budget.
Communicate Often to Keep Everyone in Alignment
It’s important to update the client regularly if you are helping perform a data migration. Merchants want to know that progress is being made and they also want to know when something isn’t working as expected. If there is an issue that you need to tell the client about, be tactful and try to present a solution at the same time.
Data can be complicated, and it pays to plan way ahead when doing a data migration. Hopefully these tips we presented in this post can help make your next Shopify Plus data migration just a little smoother!
2020 marks the beginning of a new decade and that means it’s time to rethink your eCommerce strategies. Take your eCommerce journey in a bold new direction. Dump the baggage of 2019 and create a faster, better eCommerce experience that not only engages your customers but boosts your bottom line.
Ready to make 2020 your best eCommerce year yet?
Get ahead of your competition by embracing these 6eCommerce strategies for your Shopify or Shopify Plus store.
Strategy 1: Multimedia
High-quality photos will never go out of style, but your shoppers want more, they need interactive media. This gives more context to your product, not only minimizing returnsbut boosting customers’ perceived value. This helps them convert more quickly and increases the likelihood that they’ll buy again.
Video content is becoming more popular in the eCommerce space. But keep in mind that this can’t be a low-quality YouTube rant about your product. It needs to have top-notch production quality and helpful content. Consider doing a product unboxing, sharing an unbiased third-party product overview, or showcasing the product in the real world. Shopify Plus allows merchants to upload these videos directly to product pages.
Sometimes, not even video makes the cut and customers will still say the product isn’t what they thought it would be. This leads to pricey returns, which digs into your profits. Go beyond, with truly experiential product visuals like interactive 3D or Shopify AR. These let customers experience your products as much as (if not more than) they could in-store. The experience of in-store without all that fuss of actually having to go anywhere.
Strategy 2: Personalization
Did you know that personalized homepage promotions persuade 85% of shoppers to buy? That’s pretty powerful. When you personalize a product to a customer’s interests, they’re more likely to buy. It’s a perfect way to increase value per order, too.
We know personalization is important, but how can you implement it for Shopify Plus? It’s easy: put Shopify apps to work for your site.
Use thePersonalized Recommendations app to show related products to your customers. This will help you up-sell and cross-sell with the power of AI.Simileis another intelligent Shopify app that uses customer browsing and purchase history to display personalized content.
Voice queries are different than text queries. Take a new approach for your Shopify SEO, targeting more conversational, long-tail keywords. You can check out Shopify’s voice optimization guide for an in-depth tutorial.
This is still new territory for Shopify stores, but the new Voice Search app shows some promise as a plug-and-play solution.
Strategy 4: Create a brand experience strategy
A clean, mobile-friendly website is just the beginning. For 2020, customers care about the mood on your site. What vibe do they get from your store? It’s just as important in-store ambiance. You know as soon as you walk into the store (or even at the door) whether you are even going to spend the time browsing the products. Customers need to be sold on the brand before they will even bother with the product.
Great products and quality content are no longer enough to keep customers from bouncing at first click. To make it in eCommerce, you have to present your site in a visually-pleasing package. Now isn’t the time to rely on shoddy in-the-box templates. For a brand experience that delights customers,invest in good graphic design and storytelling.
Strategy 5: AI tools
AI was once unimaginable for most businesses, but it’s 2020 and we are here for all of the technological advances that now make AI tools attainable for the merchants that need them most. Use this tech to keep your Shopify operations lean, productive, and profitable. There are AI tools available for many different aspects of your Shopify store, like AI-powered marketing oranalytics.
One of our favorite AI tools for Shopify is Octane AI, the FB messenger bot made for eCommerce merchants just like you. This tool is customer service on auto-pilot, with the ability to provide customers basic information about products, their orders, shipping, and more. Save time and boost customer satisfaction.
Strategy 6: Influencer marketing
Are influencers talking about your eCommerce store? If not, 2020 is your year to embrace influencer marketing. Don’t think influencers are in your budget? Think again. Smaller influencers (called micro-influencers) are more affordable and have engaged, niche audiences that are primed to buy. It’s all about finding the right influencer for your brand.
If you sell niche products on Shopify Plus, influencers are a slam-dunk for your bottom line. Consider hiring an Instagram influencer to promote your products organically.You can connect Shopify to Instagram so the influencer’s followers can shop your store directly from Instagram, too.
The Bottom Line
eCommerce brought in $3.5 trillion in 2019. Are you part of that sweet, sweet statistic? Stay relevant in 2020 by following these 6 eCommerce strategies, overhauling your Shopify Plus journey to earn more loyal customers.
Ready to embrace the future of eCommerce? Get in touch with us to brainstorm your eCommerce store’s strategies for 2020.
There is an astounding amount of data in the eCommerce world waiting to be collected. As an eCommerce merchant, it is necessary to use a variety of tools to capture all relevant information. Here are some of the core data collection tools a Shopify Plus merchant would use:
We will refer to these as foundational tools, used by merchants to collect information about products, marketing campaigns, sales, and customers. Foundational tools are the primary method of capturing data that have a very close proximity to an eCommerce transaction.
These foundational tools hold strategic insights into the overall health of your business. With Google Analytics you can segment your site visitors, see the average time on site, create goals to track conversions and much more. Shopify (and pretty much all eCommerce platforms) have integrated reporting and analytics that will convey your average order value, conversion rate, sessions by traffic source and details about your conversion funnel. Google and Facebook advertising platforms also have insightful data about your ad spend, conversions, ad effectiveness, cost per click and cost per customer acquisition.
How do Shopify Merchants Analyze their Data?
Foundational tools collect much of the data that you need, but the sheer amount of data can be overwhelming. To find valuable information within the data, time must be regularly spent on each tool’s dashboard. However, your time is also valuable and your focus is likely needed in many other areas of your business. This can make it difficult to dedicate your limited resources towards data analyzation.
In addition to too much data, there are attribution issues that arise between these different foundational tools. For example, if your customer clicked on a Google ad, landed on your site, went away for 2 weeks and then clicked on a Facebook ad and made a purchase, which ad gets credit for the conversion? That is just one scenario among many that may arise where it’s necessary to use attribution modeling for Google and Facebook. While attribution modeling isn’t perfect, it’s still the best method for choosing where to allocate marketing dollars.
In this era of big data, how do eCommerce businesses draw logical and actionable conclusions? We reached out to our Shopify Plus merchants. Here are their answers:
Do very little digital marketing (surprising!)
In-house digital marketing team
Use an outside marketing agency
The first approach may seem a bit shocking but is not entirely uncommon. Some of the merchants we support were born in an analog world and grew through word-of-mouth, then transitioned to online, transferring their offline customers with them. This cohort of merchants already does well enough with an outdated strategy, image how much growth they could achieve with a digital marketing team.
Some of our more digitally-inclined clients have in-house marketing teams managing their ecommerce ad spend and looking at a variety of digital tools. They employ many of the foundational data tools discussed, such as Shopify, Google Ads, Analytics, and SEM Rush to find SEO and SEM opportunities and to monitor performance. Overall, these in-house teams agree on the effectiveness of the tools as well as the lamentation of resources (time and people) necessary to properly use them.
For some eCommerce merchants, the best solution to the resource strain of data analysis is in using an outside digital marketing agency. This approach allows a knowledgable agency to sort through the foundational data tools for the merchant and deliver comprehensive and actional reports based on key metrics. The success of using an outside agency is closely related to the strength of the relationship between both parties. You want your marketing agency to care about your success as much as you do. Simple.
Data Visualization Tools that Sit on top of Foundational Tools
Even simpler? Aggregating the data from foundational tools and displaying that information in a report or dashboard format. Currently, there are many of these data visualization tools. Here are some examples that target the corporate environment (Fortune 5,000 companies are the sweet spot):
These data visualization tools are predominantly geared for industries like health care, hospitality, manufacturing, education, and financial services. They will work for eCommerce, but they are not explicitly designed to accommodate eCommerce merchants. These visualization tools have a lot of functionality but are often overkill for SMB companies on Shopify Plus.
What is Missing in the Market?
The next wave of digital tools will likely be data visualization software geared for eCommerce merchants on platforms like Shopify Plus. Leveraging foundational tools and providing real-time information and data visualization on the following metrics is the current gap in the market:
Average Order Amount
Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)
Order Frequency
Customer Churn
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
CLV with Margin
These metrics will make or break your store. It is amazing how many companies operate without really knowing their core numbers. Understanding your Customer Lifetime Value relative to your Customer Acquisition Costs is the holy grail for an eCommerce business. When you take that information and segment by customer cohort and, more importantly, by marketing source, you know whether your business is profitable and why it’s profitable.
It still feels like eCommerce is in “Day 1” and this could be the next big opportunity for companies that step in to fill this gap.
Shopify Unite 2019 has kicked off! Today was packed with announcements and features that Shopify will release throughout the rest of this year. Huge updates to the Shopify Plus experience are rolling out and Shopify Fulfillment could be an amazing option for merchants that want an integrated logistics and fulfillment experience. Shopify thinks of itself as an end to end retail operating system. There are a ton of features being released, read on for our notes.
Next week we are hosting our first trade show booth at IRCE in Chicago and Ambaum will be hosting workshops during the conference. If you are in Chicago, stop by and say hello!
Cynthia Savard Saucier, Director of User Experience
2016 introduced Sections to the Shopify home page, now in 2019 Sections will be rolled out in the entire online store
Introducing the idea of Master pages and you can edit multiple pages at the same time, you can edit a single section on a master page and have it roll through to the entire site
Apps are coming to sections, you can add an app to a page as easy as it is to add text and images
Can create a Product Master page, add product reviews and it will show up on all product pages under the Product Master page
Content portability – merchants can switch themes and all of their content will follow
Drafts – merchants can try out larger changes to their theme in a “dev” environment
Sections API – in developer preview currently
Support for new media types – video and 3D images are natively supported on product detail pages
3D Model – when a customer interacts with a 3D model they are 2X as likely to purchase
Checkout speed and performance – 20% reduced latency compared to 3 months ago
Checkout app extensions – partners can build apps that extend into the checkout
Subscriptions – allowing for subscription apps to enter into the checkout flow and customers don’t have to leave Shopify, including a partnership with ReCharge
David Moellenkamp, Director of Product
Headless commerce – requires a platform that allows for extensibility and Shopify is primed for growth here with merchants already using Shopify this way
Custom storefront tools can now support metafields, multicurrency and shopify scripts
Multicurrency – rolled out to Shopify Plus in early 2019, some merchants that have enabled this have seen a 60% lift in their International conversion rates, now multicurrency will be available to all merchants on Shopify Payments
Added currencies – Netherlands and Denmark
Multi Language API(available today for the developer community) – with these new APIs you can store translated content for blogs, products and serve up localized content for buyers around the world
Arpan Podduturi, Director of Product
Shopify POS now powers over 100,000 merchants, driving billions in sales
Shopify Retail Kit (rolled out in April 2019) – new tap and chip case (merchant’s logo can be added to case) accepts credit cards and contactless payments anywhere in the store, no more checkout lines
POS Cart App Extensions – automatically surface loyalty and promotion awards during checkout, include a customer and the extension will call a loyalty app
New Shopify POS – ground up rebuild and apps get first class treatment, home screen includes a smart grid that shows merchant specific workflows and can include specific apps
Camera based scanning and POS search uses the core Shopify search technology
Retail Staff roles – store managers can give staff a login that is tailored to their role
Buy online and pickup in store – buyers can check out online and pickup in nearby stores (currently in a closed beta with merchants)
All new POS – available later in 2019
Lynsey Thornton, General Manager of Core Product
Shipping Profiles – assign delivery rules and rates by product and location, use the API to create custom shipping solutions for merchants through the GraphQL API
Fulfillment – GraphQL Fulfillment API, add visibility, flexibility and control through the fulfillment process
Changing a Customer’s Order – order editing now exists! In the next few months every merchant will now have the ability to edit an order
Order Editing API now released – alter orders, add custom items and even send a notice for additional payment from the customer
Shopify launching in 11 more languages, spoken by 2B people in the world
Shopify Plus
Over $1B in sales from Plus merchants
New Shopify Plus Dashboard – use a single merged identity account to access information across all stores
Information and Analytics will be available in one single location
In Shopify Plus – stores are added with a few clicks, in the future support will exist for expansion stores
All staff accounts in Plus will be managed from one central place
Multi Store Tools – global customer view now in Shopify Plus, searching for the customer will bring up a single customer record across the business
Shopify Flow – 1.8B tasks automated so far in Shopify Flow, enable workflows across all stores
Launching in the next few months for Plus customers
Vanessa Lee, Director of Product
4 major goals for the app platform:
Easier to build – Shopify app command line interface and helps manage all development stores and populate a sandbox store, Shopify APP CLI
Making apps more embedded in Shopify – EASDK and POSDK overhauled with the Shopify app bridge, works with development tools: supports context bar, product picker and barcode scanner (merchants can scan barcodes with your app)
Speed – Doubling down on GraphQL, today with REST you’d have to make 11 API calls just to get the details of one order, with GraphQL it’s now just one API call and you have to parse through less data, still supporting REST but leaning in to GraphQL even more, 2,000 apps now using Graph QL (new documentation rolling out)
Stability – Admin, storefront and checkout API versioning, will roll out updates each quarter and be supported for at least a year
Craig Miller, Chief Product Officer
Merchants have numerous 3rd party logistic/fulfillment issues – complex pricing, increased inventory costs, incompatible technology, poor performance
Marketplace fulfillment – large merchants only, unfair competition, using merchant data to compete with the merchants that use them
Shopify Fulfillment Network – fulfillment centers setup all throughout the US and use machine learning to figure out where merchants’ SKUs should be located
Here’s how it works – install the Fulfillment app, select the products, get quote and then send Shopify the products
Shopify Fulfillment channel supports – retail, wholesale, social channels, custom packaging, returns and exchanges as well as kitting and supports merchant of every size even merchants sending 10K+ packages/day
Deliver to 99% of the continental US in 2 days
If you run a fulfillment center and are interested in partnering with Shopify they are partnering as well
Spending over $1B to build out the Shopify Fulfillment Network
Harley Finkelstein, Chief Operating Officer
820,000 merchants on Shopify
$41B of products sold in 2018
218M buyers have purchased something off Shopify in the last 12 months
Our Shopify Plus Happy Hour event was a hit last night! Thank you to everyone who showed up and contributed to the good vibes. A special thanks goes to Do The Extraordinary for allowing us to host the event in their speakeasy (what a cool venue!) and to The Catering Company for providing amazing food and beverages!
We had a lot of fun getting to catch up with some old friends as well as meeting new people and establishing new connections. We hope everyone enjoyed the happy hour as much as we did and we look forward to the next event!
Most Ambaum clients already have a good handle on the go to marketing channel for driving their company’s sales. Either Facebook, Google, SEO or even email marketing is the primary source of sales; and they may have tried others but without much luck. Some types of products will inherently do better on Facebook, Google, etc. However, what we find in many cases, it’s the familiarity a merchant has with a channel behind their success. We recommend branching out and practice ABT (always be testing) when it comes to different marketing and customer acquisition strategies. Here are the primary marketing channels our Shopify Plus merchants are having the most success with.
Google Product Listing Ads
Have you tried Google search and been unsuccessful previously? Does it feel like you are throwing money away, paying for clicks with zero sales? Before you give up on Google advertising you should to try a Google Shopping campaign to sell your products. Google shopping ads show a picture of your product directly in a Google search, which is crucial for getting more clicks and more sales. For example, if you sell Adirondack chairs and someone types in outdoor cedar chairs, your ad has the chance to show up with an image of the your product directly in Google search. The visual prompt quickly shows this potential customer they have found what they are looking for.
Why do email communications matter? Email is an affordable way for you to disseminate information about your company and is a great touch point with your customers to educate people about your latest products. It is an effective and non-intrusive (make sure to opt out options are set up for subscribers) way to incentivize your subscribers to purchase additional products from your store.
What tools should you use to send your emails? Shopify has purchase confirmation emails automatically sent directly, however there are many other marketing and brand messaging emails you should send. The two most popular email platforms used with Shopify are MailChimp and Klaviyo. You can find both of these email providers in the Shopify app store to test.
Shopify purchased Kit, a fantastic app for testing Facebook ads on Shopify, about 18 months ago. Kit will connect your products to your Facebook ads account and suggest different advertising campaigns to you via a SMS chat bot right to your phone. If you are advertising on Facebook you will also want to set up retargeting so the ads can follow your customers across different sites and platforms. In addition to Kit, there are a few other Facebook apps on Shopify worth testing out – take a look here to see the latest and greatest.
New to ecommerce SEO? SEO is a complex topic, but if you spend the time to learn, it can pay off with organic traffic converting to additional sales. SEO is your organic listings (rankings) for different phrases in Google and other search engines. Your organic results are constantly updating based on a number of variables, some of which Google makes public, but many are intentionally kept hidden so companies can’t game their rankings.
Ecommerce SEO spends a lot of time focused on your product detail pages. By using tools like SEM Rush you can see which sites currently rank for the phrases you are targeting. You will need to create an inventory of the pages on your site, the phrases you currently rank for and the apirational phrases. Once you have your inventory of your current rankings you can shift into action mode and create a plan to increase your SEO traffic for your entire site.
To kick off your eCommerce SEO plan of action, do your homework by reading some of the expert guides already created and even consider hiring an agency to help out. A word of advice, before you hire an agency or company to help with SEO make sure to educate yourself on how SEO works. Many businesses have hired eCommerce SEO companies without a full understanding of how it works, or they get into black hat tactics causing serious damage to their site.
At Shopify Unite in May this year, Shopify announced the upcoming plans for offering multi-currency functionality for their stores. This was a very big deal for a couple reasons: many other eCommerce platforms already offer this and secondly there were workarounds to make this work for your Shopify stores, but they were very clunky. For example if you wanted to sell in multiple currencies, you could create multiple versions of your store (in different currencies and languages), but there was no way to sync all your reporting and data between them. When this goes live for Shopify Plus stores in December this should be a huge benefit to everyone that wants to offer products in the 9 currencies listed below.
If you have any questions on how this could work for your store, don’t hesitate to reach out and we’d be happy to chat! Here are notes from a recent Shopify multi-currency webinar that happened earlier this week:
Currencies:
Great British Pound (GBP)
Euro (EUR)
United States Dollar (USD)
Canadian Dollar (CAD)
Australian Dollar (AUD)
Hong Kong Dollar (HKD)
New Zealand Dollar (NZD)
Japan Yen (JPY)
Singapore Dollar (SGD)
Additional Notes:
Only for Shopify Payments customers, but still in beta and not live yet, but planning to go live before end of year (will be after BFCM)
Initially just for Shopify Plus customers
Currency selector in top right-hand corner
Selector can automatically detect country and will default to shop currency
You can apply rounding to prices
If a customer selects another payment option like PayPal on checkout it will default to shop currency
In the Admin panel to go settings and then within the Shopify payments section there is a new section for Shopify currencies and you can toggle on and off different currencies
On the product page in Admin you can see exchange rates for different currencies to give you an idea of your products price in that currency
Flow can present the currency code displayed to the buyer
API: presentment currency – currency shown to customers and the shop currency – currency used by merchants
Debut theme is updated to allow multi-currency
Shopify scripts will also allow multi-currency
Multi-currency migration guide soon to be released
Long term the intent is to allow merchants to be able to set individual prices (in different currencies) per product
Currency rate check happens approximately every 15 minutes
The event on September 20th, was a lot of fun! I really appreciate everyone that made it down to Code Fellows and a special thanks to our speakers! The following companies and people presented:
After I gave a brief introduction to Ambaum and our services, David Stober from Guided came on stage and we hosted a Q&A session that walked through David’s experience as one of the first companies ever on Shopify Plus. David went through the apps he’s tested and tried – some examples: Kit.com, Intercom, Product Reviews and many more and explained how they each help his business on a daily basis. David was very open about his business and walked us through how Shopify has helped him increase sales!
Janice Yao presented and discussed multi location inventory and multi-currency updates that will be rolling out very shortly to Shopify stores that are currently using Shopify Pay. She also gave some examples of Shopify Flow and automating tasks within your Plus store, this is an untapped area that a lot of Plus merchants should start using. She also gave us a explanation of Transporter, a new tool for importing customer records, orders and even bulk product loads. It was Janice’s first time presenting and she did fantastic!
The final presenter was Brian Mackin from Avalara and he walked us through all the new tax laws that are rolling out over the next year. There has a been a big shift in how states are going to collect taxes, moving from the old system of primarily using physical location as the primary rationale for collecting taxes to the new way of economic nexus – which many states will use a threshold of $100,000 or 200 transactions a year in that state as the baseline. There are many different rules on a state by state basis and the big takeaway is that if you are selling products all over the US you should really consider using Avalara to help you manage a very complicated compliance process!
Shopify Plus is Shopify’s enterprise software that is ideal for merchants doing $1.5M a year or more in online sales. Shopify Plus offers a ton of additional features above and beyond the “core” Shopify plans. With Plus you get dedicated support, discounts on apps, access to Shopify Scripts, Shopify Flow, access to Wholesale ordering and much more.
Brief History of eCommerce
Historically the ecommerce platform space has been extremely fragmented with no company powering more than 11% of online stores. The top 4 leading companies in terms of # of stores (a different metric than platform gross merchant volume) are: WooCommerce, Magento, Shopify and Big Commerce. The first 2 platforms on the list are self-hosted platforms, the final 2 (Shopify and Big Commerce) are fully hosted SAAS solutions. If you want to learn more about fully hosted vs self-hosted ecommerce solutions, take a look at this post from earlier in the year.
Self-Hosted Solutions Require Extra Work
When you opt for a self-hosted solution you are required to manage your own servers and deal with infrastructure issues like: PCI compliance, credit card security site uptime, CDN’s and much more. To power Magento Enterprise or WooCommerce you need a programming team that can design and build your site, but they also need deep technical skills to power, manage and maintain your servers. If you think of the technology stack as a pyramid, self-hosted solutions require you to manage the bottom layer of the tech stack that is no longer value add for companies in the $1.5M – $50M space.
The Transition Period
Merchants have begun to realize that managing the bottom layer of the tech stack isn’t going to help them grow top line sales. Now the arms race has shifted from server administration to growth, how can merchants test new customer acquisition strategies, landing pages, products and apps that will help them grow their business.
Ten years ago the dominant player in the SMB space was Magento, but with the launch of Shopify Plus over 4 years ago there is now an enterprise level SAAS solution targeted towards businesses doing between $1.5M and $50M a year online. The introduction of a SAAS based enterprise solution has started a mind shift in merchants and they are rapidly moving towards fully hosted platforms.
Shopify is Pulling Ahead of Other SAAS Solutions
Five years ago, Shopify and Big Commerce both had approximately 40,000-50,000 stores on their respective platforms. Now in 2018 Shopify is at 600,000 merchants and Big Commerce is close to 80,000. Shopify is gaining momentum in total merchants, gross merchant value and most importantly the Shopify features have caught up to and surpassed many of the SAAS solutions. Shopify has been heads down creating augmented reality features, multi-language support, POS updates and making things simple for business owners. The announcements at Shopify Unite 2018 were an impressive list of advanced features that Shopify has on its roadmap for 2018.
Shopify Plus is Easy
Fast forward to 2018 and there are now more than 3,600 Shopify Plus stores. Shopify realized early on that small merchants don’t want to remain small, they want growth and a path to get there. Shopify Plus has many great features that allow for growth: customization of the checkout page, Shopify Scripts, wholesale channel, Merchant Success Manager, Shopify Flow and so many other great growth enablers.
“Something that potential investors must understand: we do not chase revenue as the primary driver of our business. Shopify has been about empowering merchants since it was founded, and we have always prioritized long-term value over short- term revenue opportunities. We don’t see this changing.”
Tobias Lutke, Shopify CEO illuminates the long-term vision he has for Shopify and the fact that Shopify is a purpose driven enterprise. Tobi has a mission to bring ecommerce tools to merchants everywhere and that resonates through his public presentations and give us the playbook to where Shopify is headed.
Rapidly Iterate on Customer Acquisition Strategies
On Shopify it is extremely easy to add functionality to your store without requiring extensive programming knowledge. There are over 2,400 public apps in the Shopify app store that you can quickly install on your site and test new features such as: loyalty programs, email capture, social media, shipping, customer service and much more. Connecting your social media and advertising channels through your store is simple and allows you to test out new ad copy, landing pages and other ways to bring new customers into your purchase funnel.
You can create custom designed landing pages and promote a special offer or giveaway to attract new customers. Implement Google Analytics and use the native Shopify reporting to gauge the quality of traffic to your site. Test many different traffic sources, does Facebook convert the best for you? What about Google product listing ads? Are you having a lot of success with content marketing? Dive in, iterate quickly and then drill down farther on the traffic that converts best for your store.
Shopify is the Future for SMB
Shopify announced support for multi-language, multi-currency and multi-location inventory support at Shopify Unite in May 2018. These 3 features were critical infrastructure updates as they set the stage for future Shopify Plus features. A common request from Shopify Plus stores is for multi store dashboard and analytics support and now that there is the ability to track inventory across different locations I wouldn’t be surprised if Shopify announces support for organizing data across many stores.
Shopify is now over 3,500 employees (in comparison WooCommerce has ~100 employees) and with these resources Shopify can tackle a multitude of new features each year. With Tobi as Shopify’s CEO and his commitment to making eCommerce simple for merchants, it makes my life easy recommending Shopify Plus to our SMB merchants.
