Shopify Expert Insights

E-Com Advice from our experienced in-house team

This is a guest blog post by Owen Andrew, an ecommerce journalist.

Before ecommerce became a borderline necessity for doing business in the majority of verticals, small business owners and their employees were limited to doing to their marketing in mostly localized ways.

A sign in front of the store, in-store signage and front window displays, and perhaps an ad in the citys newspaper or phonebook; if they were lucky, perhaps a regional or even national publication may write them if their story or products were particularly compelling.

How Globalization Affects SMBs

However, now most businesses can easily and nearly seamlessly access the other side of the world through technology. Ecommerce is thriving in places like India, Russia, China, Brazil, and more; and mobile is quickly taking hold as well thanks to the increasingly widespread availability (and relatively affordability) of high end smart phones.

One could say that mobile is changing ecommerce in similar way to how ecommerce altered brick and mortar retail - so SMBs owe it to themselves to learn the technology and understand which ecommerce portals are the most effective for their market.

Empowerment Via Technology And Careful Research

In fact, mobile commerce (or m-commerce) is becoming the standard everywhere, and executing it successfully can set a small business marketer apart from larger competitors. People around the world generally want to make purchases in the way that is easiest and most cost-effective for them - and via a localized interface they already use and understand.

Therefore, doing your research on the digital habits of your audience is key - different cultures and countries use the internet in very different ways, so what is basic or intuitive to you might be completely foreign in another country, and vice versa.

And it is not all about mobile or even the common marketing tactics like paid search, Facebook, and more. Think outside of the typical big names (especially the ones popular in the U.S. or your home country) and try niche networks specific to each target audience or location. An added bonus? Smaller platforms and markets can lead to easier, more budget-friendly market entry - which is nearly always a positive.

Downsides Of Globalization

Supply-chain management, customizing products and marketing campaigns to suit the idiosyncrasies of each target market, and determining how to send and receive funds can all present challenges for SMB marketers. Currency rates and local/country-specific taxes can also present problems - but all of these have solutions that can be less complex and costly than you think.

Knowing when the key holiday seasons are along with any special dates or events, and preparing your ecommerce site is essential as well. Lastly, what people tend to purchase when is important as well - especially for business owners who sell across hemispheres or to widely different cultures.

Understanding Your (New) Global Business

Lastly, understand the types of devices (even brands and models) and optimize your global strategy accordingly, along with your analytics so you can enable precise tracking for your global audience - but this advice applies to SMB ecommerce overall!

At the end of the day, many of the difficulties of globalization can be combated through strategic deployment of SMB-centric technologies. Even better, the sheer variety of possibilities for ecommerce and mobile commerce growth are growing every day, making it an important aspect of growing your small business internationally.


Author Bio: Owen Andrew is an eCommerce journalist who spends free time studying online marketing practices and attending EDM concerts. He hopes you enjoy this post, and would like to thank ethercycle.com for hosting him!"

I talked with Charles Fitzgerald about his Shopify store, The Kewl Shop, and came away with loads of actionable insight.

Started in late 2012, The Kewl Shop have quickly grown to become one of the top 150K web sites in the world. Founded by Charles, their focus has narrowed into the supply of top quality bandage dresses, shoes and leggings– areas of immense competition in the online world.

So how do they stay ahead of their competition in an a fiercely competitive niche? Listen and find out. :)

This is a guest blog post by Owen Andrew, an ecommerce journalist.

Over the last few years, it seems that stores have their Halloween decorations on display before you've even had your Labor Day barbecue. By the time September comes to a close, candy canes, snow globes and red and green M&Ms can be found on the shelves.

Retailers now spend months preparing for the holiday rush, and although procrastinating consumers can ignore them and wait all the way until Christmas Eve if they choose, eCommerce businesses don't have the same luxury.

Whether you know it or not, your entire business may depend on its performance during the holiday season. As discussed in the article "What Your Startup Needs to Know to Get Through the Holiday Season," your first step to success must be an attitude adjustment. You have to embrace the holiday shopping season no matter what your personal feelings, and you absolutely can't afford to treat it as business as usual.

It's coming. Have a plan.

Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the Fading Online/Retail Line

Black Friday is the traditional launch of the holiday shopping season for brick-and-mortar retailers. In 2005, the term Cyber Monday was coined after analysts noticed a spike in online shopping sales the following Monday. Research gleaned from 2013, however, indicates that those divisions may no longer be as concrete.

Three percent of previous Black Friday shoppers stayed home last year, leading to a 3 percent ($1.7 billion) decrease in physical sales. A record 66 million people, however, shopped online — not on Cyber Monday like they were supposed to, but on Black Friday. In fact, Black Friday was the season's first billion-dollar-plus online shopping day, raking in $1.2 billion when the dust settled.

What does all this mean for your website? Your success depends first on breaking out of the traditional mindset that Black Friday is for the wild masses pushing and shoving and occasionally trampling each other to death at the mall, and that the following Monday is for online shopping. Waiting for Monday means big-time losses. Pretend you're KMart — you're on deck as soon as the turkey leftovers are put in the fridge.

eCommerce is Mobile Commerce

Recent research proves what you already should know — mobile sales dominate more and more of the online market every year. This is never more so than during the holiday season. If you don't have a strong mobile presence, now is the time to establish one. In 2013, mobile sales jumped an astounding 55 percent from the year before. 12.7 percent of all online sales came from tablets and 5.6 percent came from phones.

  • Utilize responsive web design (RWD) or some other strategy to make sure that your awesome website looks equally awesome on mobile devices.
  • Revisit your social-media marketing strategy — social media drove $148 million in sales last year between Black Friday and Cyber Monday alone.
  • Make a final push! Push notifications increased 77 percent between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday.

Other Actions to Take this Fall

Forbes reminds us that the busy holiday season is the perfect time to institute or revamp a stellar search-engine optimization (SEO) campaign as well an equally amazing pay-per click (PPC) strategy. SEO and PPC are complicated concepts that require research, investment and action. But if you're uncertain about the brawn of either when it comes to your website, don't wait until Thanksgiving to move.

As Kurt Elster illustrates in his "12 Days of Ecommerce," the simplest, yet most effective ways to prepare for the rush is to create a holiday-themed landing page. This serves three functions: it boosts the chance of your site being found through an organic search, it builds anticipation for sales and promotions and it makes your site more likely to be shared.

If you sell online, the holiday season is massively important to you, whether you like it — or know it — or not. Between 20 and 40 percent of all annual purchases happen between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The time when most of the money changes hands is right around the corner — give yourself the gift of preparation.


Author Bio: Owen Andrew is an eCommerce journalist who spends free time studying online marketing practices and attending EDM concerts. He hopes you enjoy this post, and would like to thank ethercycle.com for hosting him!"

This is a guest blog post by Owen Andrew, an ecommerce journalist.

The conversion funnel may as well be a great unsolved mystery to many businesses. They know they want to get their customers to the end of the funnel (a sale) like everyone else. What they don’t know is the steps along the way that lead a customer down that path of having no knowledge or interest in a product right to the cash register to purchase it.

These businesses have no understanding of how to hook their potential customers at the various points along that funnel as a result, and it’s greatly limiting their effectiveness in appealing to those customers in a meaningful way.

The first step to removing the shroud of mystery that cloaks the funnel is to understand each of the steps along the way. These are the same for virtually any business and customer, and are therefore relevant to every business owner and marketer.

For the purpose of our analysis, let’s create a business together. Let’s keep it simple and start an online T-Shirt retailer, which is an infinitely present niche with theories applicable to other niches.

So what about those steps along the way, and how do they apply to our new business? Adria Saracino breaks it down in her Kill It in Content Creation piece for Distilled.net in five steps:

  • Discovery – This is the very first step towards landing a potential new customer, one that has just discovered a specific product or service for the first time. Depending on the niche, this customer may be very rare or, perhaps even non-existent. In our case, our customer knows he or she wants a T-shirt, we just either A) need to offer a design or theme not offered elsewhere, or B) need to convince our prospective customer they should purchase with us instead of a behemoth retailer. As Richard Lazazzera puts it in his article on starting a T-shirt business, ever-slimming margins means you need to get your conversion funnel gameplan correct from the get go.
  • Interest – The next step is their developing interest in that product or service as something that could be of worth to them. At this stage they are still not committing to purchasing anything from anyone in particular, but are broadly interested in the idea as a whole. Again, with our T-shirts, we need to offer something on our site that no one else is offering. Even the subtlest difference can give us the upper hand.
  • Conversion – This is the stage where they’re transitioning from mere interest into a full-blown desire to purchase the product or service, and are now researching brands and comparing offers and prices. Even if they were led to this point by one company, this is where they could go astray and be poached by the competition, making it the single most important step in the process, and one that should be researched thoroughly.
  • Purchase – The purchase. That glorious moment when the previous steps have led a customer to invest both their money and their trust in a product.
  • Loyalty – As you can see, the purchase is not in fact the last step. Maintaining the loyalty of those purchasers is, and that is accomplished through honoring their trust with a quality product, exemplary support, and rewards for that loyalty. If we continue to have reliable delivery times, consistently updated T-shirt options and great customer service, why wouldn’t this sale come back for more?

Avoiding the Rabbit Trails and Building a Superhighway from Discovery to Loyalty

Now comes the tricky and fun part; crafting an all-encompassing marketing strategy that deftly finds your customers at one of the early stages of their purchasing journey, and guides them firmly but lovingly through the funnel and out the other side as a newly loyal customer.

This begins by determining where best to find those customers that could have interest in a specific niche, but have yet to hear about it or put much thought into it. Depending on the niche this may be quite difficult or readily apparent. A prime directive should be to determine the likes and dislikes of the existing customers of that product. These same tastes will likely translate to other potential customers as well, providing insight into where they are likely to be found or not.

Actually reaching out them can be accomplished through methods such as host-beneficiary relationships, whereby a partnership is formed with a leading figure in one of those industries that are generally liked by the target audience.

From there it’s a matter of building upon the established interest and pushing them towards a purchase by offering incentives and regular updates on how good the product is and how much they need it. This can be accomplished in tandem through a combination of social media, e-mail campaigns, and webinars.

Lastly, ensure you have a proper reception waiting for them on the other side of the funnel by thanking them for their business and offering them loyalty rewards and bonuses for remaining a customer.

With this, you turn browsers into buyers.


Author Bio: Owen Andrew is an eCommerce journalist who spends free time studying online marketing practices and attending EDM concerts. He hopes you enjoy this post, and would like to thank ethercycle.com for hosting him!"