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While the school bell may not be ringing for everyone this year, virtual learning will be the new norm for some students and teachers.

Being in the technology space, we wanted to showcase a virtual learning platform, share technology supplies and tools to help virtual learning, and suggest ways you can help support local schools.

Notion for Students and Teachers:

As our agency is in growth mode, we collectively decided to use Notion to organize our business. Notion is a single consolidated platform for all team members to utilize and collaborate together. Within Notion, there are many different standard templates available to help organize a business, and that’s when we came across the Education section of templates.

While there are quite a few virtual learning platforms, Notion is a great way for schools trying to consolidate into a single platform, and is available for free for both students and educators.

Teachers can use Notion to manage attendance, create lesson plans, calculate grades, and track student progress.

Remote learning can lead students to additional distractions since they are in a different learning environment. Students can use Notion to help them with overall task management, staying organized and focused. Notion has a template for note taking, gears students to stay focused with a daily agenda, and a section to manage and publish homework.

Student and Teacher’s Virtual Learning Tools:

Listed below are a few supplies to help both students and teachers with remote learning:

• Blue Light glasses will help with staring at a computer screen all day and here are a few on Amazon and some additional glasses recommended by parents for kids
• Earbuds vary in price however here are some recommendations, all under $50
• Lap desk options ranked by CNN and also Amazon’s top lap desk picks
• Mouse and mouse pads may be helpful for those who are not familiar with using a trackpad
• Google chromebooks are a great option for those who need to purchase a laptop individually, and they offer educational promotional discounts

Supporting Education:

There are many ways you can give back to your local schools, however we chose to support the STUFF the BUS initiative in our area. This school year you can support the Stuff the Bus program by financially donating, or fulfill a wish list of supplies for schools in need in your local area.

If you are a merchant on the Shopify Plus platform there is a strong probability that subscriptions are a component of your business. We find that ~40% of the companies we support on Shopify Plus have subscriptions built into their operation and most of them are using the ReCharge app from the Shopify app store. You can find ReCharge in the app store and it is one of a handful of subscription apps: Bold Recurring Orders, Pay Whirl Recurring Payments, Spur IT Recurring Orders to name a few. Ambaum is a certified ReCharge App Partner and a Shopify Plus Partner, we have worked with many of the different subscription options and recommend Recharge to our clients for it’s ease of use, flexibility, APIs and Theme Engine which comes with the ReCharge Pro Plan.

How Recharge Works

When you setup ReCharge with Shopify Plus, you need to think about your sales funnel: home page – collection page – product detail page – cart – checkout and where along that path you give customers the option to subscribe to your products. The most common implementation is integrating subscriptions as a purchase option directly into your product detail page. We provide development support to Bulletproof Coffee and have helped them with their ReCharge implementation, here is an example of how they integrate ReCharge into their product detail page.

You can see that the subscription option is right next to the one time purchase, you may want to A/B test locating subscriptions above the one time purchase as the default option.

Checkout Process

It is important to know that when you use ReCharge and a customer moves from the cart to the checkout page that the transaction will be handled outside Shopify. If you are using Shopify Payments for your store and you sign up with Recharge you will end using another payment processor (most end up using Stripe which is what powers Shopify Payments). Recharge has mirrored the look and feel of the Shopify checkout page so from the customer’s standpoint it will be a seamless experience, but if you look closely at the image below, you can see that the URL has changed to checkout.rechargeapps.com from your primary URL.

Shopify Reunite 2020 just happened and they announced the following: “In working on subscriptions, we’re working on making the checkout process more extensible and customizable, allowing apps to integrate more easily into the checkout workflow.” We expect that in the future the checkout process for subscriptions will be more tightly integrated into Shopify’s overall process, but the launch for this is still TBD.

ReCharge Professional Plan & Theme Engine

ReCharge offers a professional plan for companies that want to fully update the customer portal using ReCharge APIs. When you upgrade to the professional plan you get access to ReCharge Theme Engine so you can make updates to the portal directly in the source code.

The professional plan is $300/month + (1% + $.19) per transaction, here is what you get with Pro:

• Theme Engine V2
• One-Time Products(included in Theme Engine)
• Developer Support in Slack (API & Theme Engine Channels)
• Custom Domain so you can own the checkout URL
• Enhanced Analytics
• Avalara (Pro Integration)
• Octane AI (Pro Integration)

Here is more information on how to update your ReCharge Customer Portal:

• How to empower your customers via the Customer Portal
• Why Investing In Your Customer Portal Can Improve Retention
• How to use data-driven insights with ReCharge Enhanced Analytics

Theme Engine allows you to fully optimize the customer portal to manage accounts and setup one-time product purchases for customers that already have a subscription. If your business is doing close to $100K/month in subscription revenue you should strongly consider upgrading to the Recharge professional plan.

Manage Subscriptions (Standard Portal)

Manage Subscriptions (After Theme Engine Implementation)

You can see from this example that with Theme Engine you can make substantial changes to your ReCharge customer portal, further empower your brand and tailor to the needs of your target audience. For example, this version drastically reduces the number of clicks by allowing your customers to customize every aspect of their subscription in one page, whereas the Standard Portal will take them to different pages to perform certain actions. This is a critical area because small tweaks like this to your customer portal can lead to significant increases in your conversation rates.

Adding a one-time product

Allowing customers to add one-time products is a no brainer to increase your average revenue per user. This is a major benefit of upgrading to the ReCharge professional plan and is one of the primary reasons Ambaum gets involved in these customizations.

Things to Consider Prior to Customizing Theme Engine

This section is going to get into the details of how we approach a theme engine build, read on if you want to get “under the hood” of one of our projects.

1. Create a test customer account
2. Create ReCharge subscription products
3. Enable the one-time products setting

Theme Engine Development Best Practices

When you are editing the ReCharge Theme engine code, here are some best practices that have helped us with our projects:

1. Do not edit the Base Theme directly. Theme Engine comes with a Base Theme that ReCharge provided with, this theme is considered stable and should be used as a fall back or for reference.
2. Avoid editing the live them, all work should be done via a development theme. It is best to duplicate the Base Theme and edit it to match your brand and the functionality you require.
3. Understand that theme engine is not the same ReCharge API, refer to Theme Engine doc to understand what’s doable. ReCharge tech support is also available via Slack and are very responsive.
4. Preview customer portals using test customer account, by default, customer portal opens a preview using an existing customer account, this makes testing hard.

To preview a specific customer account, follow these steps:

1. Preview a theme in Theme Engine
2. Recharge > Customers
3. Find and select customer (pic 1)
4. Mouse over the link icon next to customer name on top (pic 2)
5. Copy the hash in the URL after ?token=, i.e. https://DOMAIN.com/tools/recurring/portal/428203138365f76f0e58e704/subscriptions?token=6a9d96ce8f2b40139f36cea6a9c2bb80
6. Replace the token value in the preview URL with this value

Version control is highly recommended

• It is best to have version control to keep track of changes made to the customer portal. Although inconvenient, a theme can be downloaded from the dashboard and push to a repository.
• Alternatively, you can duplicate and name theme with appropriate work being done.

Maintain brand consistency

Here are list of things of things to keep in mind style wise when customizing the Customer Portal:

• Typography – color, font size, font family for headings, and texts
• Form fields like text input, radio button, select, quantity adjust
• Buttons & CTA
• Spacing

We hope this post gives you a clear understanding of the benefits of ReCharge and Theme Engine, for growing Shopify Plus brands this is a must!

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.

Each year I do a recap post of Unite, but this year is going to be a bit different. Since the entire show was online, Shopify has already provided a wonderful summary of all the new features they announced. I would recommend starting out there to recap everything and then jump back here to this post where I will provide my commentary.

Money

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! 😊

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.

To start your Google Shopping campaign, first create a Google Merchant Center account. Your Google Merchant Center account will be the repository for your products – you can use a 3^rd party app or setup a manual process to sync your Shopify Products to the merchant center. It’s important to for your product feed setup properly so when you add a new product to your store it automatically syncs to your Google Merchant center account.

If this is all new to you, check out this in depth guide from Google on creating a Google Merchant Center account. Or simply reach out to us here at Ambaum, we are happy to walk you through some dos and don’ts of getting started with Google product listing ads. You can also hire a professional Google advertising agency – this guide will help you.

Email Marketing

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.

Check out this comprehensive post from the Shopify blog and the email marketing case study they performed on Birchbox for ideas.

Facebook & Instagram Ads

Facebook ads have been around for a long time, and many Shopify Plus merchants we support have found a lot of success converting customers on Facebook. To start testing, you will sign up for a Facebook business account. Take a look at this Facebook page dedicated to retail and ecommerce companies for some examples. If you want to learn more about connecting Facebook and Shopify, here is a great guide Shopify created.

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.

Instagram ads are a relatively new frontier for most ecommerce companies. The companies with an strong social presence have had the best luck transitioning to advertising on Instagram. It should be obvious, but Instagram ads are heavily dependent on the quality of the pictures. Photos mean everything! The quality and variety of your image ads on Instagram are critical to the success of your clicks and conversions. If this is all brand new to you, check out this article with some helpful tips on how to optimize your Instagram account.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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.