Shopify Expert Insights

In 2013, our top 3 ecommerce clients received over $10 million in revenue from online sales. That wasn't an accident and they didn't get lucky. It was a lot of hard work, risk-taking, and some trial and error, but it paid off big. I'm going to share with you their top five traffic sources, sorted by conversion percentage. Keep an open mind and learn from their success.

1. Google PPC ads
This is where your time and resources should be being spent. Pay per click ads aren't sexy and fun like social, but they're sure as hell effective. My top 3 clients are spending 50-75% of their marketing budgets on PPC advertising and it's absolutely driving wallet-out-ready-to-buy customers to their stores. In fact, 1 in 3 sales for all of my clients are coming from Google AdWords. The success of your store depends entirely on the efficacy of a Google AdWords campaign. The best part is its easy to implement. Anyone can setup a basic campaign.

2. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a nifty concept. Like AdSense, you let anyone advertise your products, but unlike AdSense, you only pay them if you make a sale. The leader in this niche is the eBay Enterprise Affiliate Network (formerly PepperJam.) Price shopping comparison engines can also work well as marketing affiliates. PriceGrabber is the clear winner here.

3. Google organic search
While this is the third highest referrer, I wouldn’t spend time on traditional SEO beyond making sure your site and meta tags get indexed. Call this the death of SEO if you want but competing for ranking position is a dangerous game. Since you have very little control over where Google decides to place you, and can change that placement without warning, any business that relies on organic search is on borrowed time.

4. Cart Recovery
There's no reason you shouldn't be trying to recover cart abandonment recovery on your site. It serves two important purposes. The first is passive revenue generation, but the second is customer service. You're establishing communication with the customer and asking them "Hey, why didn't you buy this?" You'll quickly find that many customers reply and tell you what the barrier to their purchase is. Consider that you're conversion optimization to-do list.

5. Email Marketing
I absolutely love email marketing. It's easy and incredibly inexpensive. While it doesn't generate huge traffic, the return on investment is massive. Want to make more money? Send emails to your existing customers. It's much easier to sell to existing customers than it is to new visitors on your site. I personally like MailChimp for implementing campaigns. Try sending an email to your customers (who have opted-in, don't spam, nobody likes that) once a week. Announce new products, sales, coupons, and even company news. If you need inspiration, I bet you're already subscribed to at least dozen ecommerce newsletters.

Did you notice what's not on the list? Social. That's because social is less than 0.5% of my client's sales referrals. My knee jerk reaction to this was "social is a bullshit shell game" but then I calmed down. Social is not about selling direct to consumers, it's about brand building and staying top of mind. It will augment an integrated marketing strategy but will not in itself sell anything. If you have limited resources, I wouldn't waste them on social media. I'd spent that time on the original social media: email.

eCommerce isn't easy but I promise that you can implement all five of the above strategies within 30 days and be making more money in your business than you were before you started. Remember, with ecommerce there are fundamentally only two kinds of strategy to grow your business: get more traffic and sell more to your existing traffic.

A local retailer asked me for advice on maintaining his social media presence. He knows its important, has had some success with Facebook, but has trouble knowing what specifically to do. After all, theres no limit to the amount of time you can waste online. Heres how to do social media for your business, simplified.

Social media marketing has only one golden rule: engage your followers. It doesn't have to be difficult or time consuming to be the voice of your company, nor should it be. In fact, you already do it by talking to the people coming in through your door: customers. Followers, subscribers, and "like"rs are nothing more or less than future customers. Treat them as such.

My simple guidelines for social success:

1. If your blog has only been updated once since the Clinton administration, get rid of it or change its title. Expectations can be set by what the content is called. Blogs should be updated with a full post at least once a week. "Articles" don't need to be on a schedule, and generally should have content that doesn't go out of date quickly. Call it "News" if you just want to throw press releases up and only plan to update when something noteworthy happens in your business or industry.

2. Take stock of all your social accounts. If fallow, migrate the content elsewhere and delete them entirely. Having 5 followers on twitter and 1 tweet a year means you should abandon it. Few hundred likes (or more!) on Facebook and many posts with comment discussions means you're doing it right.

3. Forums can be the best way to connect to a community. Find the biggest online forum that serves your industry and specific niche, search for your business name, and respond to any recent posts that come up. Occasionally start threads, even if they're nothing more than "Hey, it's Friday! What's going on in your neck of the woods this weekend?" They directly give your business a human voice. You're not faceless, and you're interested in your customers. Engage the forum members as these are the people who will become your most rabid and vocal brand evangelists. They'll fight to the internet-death on your behalf, for free! It's like having a customer service honey badger. They can smell when someone is being mean about your business, and they don't like it.

4. Don't get bogged down in squabbles. If a paying customer complains about you publicly, publicly reply with an offer to help solve the problem, as well as contacting them privately. Any further communication on your part should be private only. If you can't offer a solution in the first place, walk away entirely. You getting involved in a flame war on Facebook or in a forum is only going to make your business look bad, just like getting into a screaming match with an unreasonable customer in your place of business. Any negativity about your business is amplified by your public involvement with said negativity. (Note: none of this applies to recalls, safety problems, or the like. Be as forthright, responsive, and proactive as possible in those cases.)

5. If you're not having fun, reevaluate what you're doing. This isn't writing emails to your vendors on Monday morning, and it shouldn't feel like it. You should be enjoying interacting with your subscribers, sharing cool stories and links with them, like you do with your favorite customers. Not overanalyzing and obsessing over how your likes will increase if you post this news tidbit vs that one. You might be surprised at just how much personality comes across on social media, and no one particularly cares what a soulless stats-robot posts.

The Heartbleed Bug is a critically serious vulnerability in a popular SSL software library that powers a majority of web servers. The vulnerability allows an attacker, with surprisingly little ease, cause a server to return the content of its memory to the attacker, with no encryption whatsoever. This is the worst kind of breach. The attacker can view traffic, data, passwords, impersonate users or even services, and even worse, leave no trace in the process. Yea, it's really that bad.

The same day the exploit was announced, we patched all of our affected servers. No Ethercycle service is presently affected by the Heartbleed bug. You can test your server here: http://filippo.io/Heartbleed/

You can't be too cautious. You can protect yourself now and in the future by...

1. Changing your passwords on affected services.
2. Using unique passwords on every site
3. Enabling two factor authentication whenever possible.

We recommend using LastPass password manager. It will check for duplicate or weak passwords, and identify sites affected by the Heartbleed bug.

Over the past year I've seen a big increase in projects that demand "Twitter Bootstrap experience" and devs claiming that they are "versed in Twitter Bootstrap." My colleague Bernard has even started seeing it in his intern applications:

People applying for internships sure like to list Twitter Bootstrap on their resume these days. >.<

— Bernard Yu (@thebestsophist) April 1, 2014

Newsflash to all you kiddies out there: Bootstrap isn't a language that you know. It is not a skill that you have acquired. In fact, if you feel that Bootstrap is a noteworthy "skill" to have, it's going to make me question the actual depth of your knowledge of front-end development. Bootstrap is a tool to use and don't get me wrong, it has it's uses. If the most important thing is a basic design and a quick deployment, Bootstrap can be really helpful. It's got snazzy buttons and neat animations and you can make all that stuff happen with a minimum of effort. Sweet!

But if Bootstrap is one of your "skills", what does that say about you? You can unzip a folder and upload it? You know the classes to apply a bunch of pre-made styles onto a (now) generic-looking template? You can pile a bunch of javascript extensions onto an already bloated framework?

Claiming Bootstrap as evidence that you "know" development is like claiming that changing your oil means you "know" automotive engineering. Sure you can navigate your way though basic things, but this doesn't mean that you have an understanding of the mechanisms at work - and that's what's truly important.

Development involves testing of your problem solving abilities - how can I make this thing happen in the most efficient way? You can't do that if your knowledge of HTML/CSS/JS consists of plug-ins and templates. So break out of the walled garden of Bootstrap "skills" and make something happen from scratch. Your brain (and future employers) will thank you.