Shopify Expert Insights

We have a client who wanted to automatically archive their orders in the Shopify Admin when all items in the order were fulfilled AND delivered.

That sounded to me like a challenge for Shopify Flow. (It's free on most plans: Shopify, Advanced, and Plus.)

1. First we need to find out when a package is delivered. To get that info, we're using the free Track123 app from the Shopify app store. When the shipment status changes in Track123, that's triggers our Flow to start.

2. A shipment update can be for more multiple reasons, so we check if the status is "Delivered" before continuing.

3. We might be able to archive our order now and be done, but what if an order was in multiple shipments? We gotta check for that by using another conditional statement to see if our order status in Shopify is "partially fulfilled".

4. If our order status is partially fulfilled, we ad the order tag "Partially Delivered" for ease of filtering in the Shopify order admin, and stop.

5. If our order status is anything other than "partially fulfilled," we do another conditional check to confirm that fulfillment status is FULFILLED.

6. If our order is fulfilled, now we can remove our "partially delivered" tag if present, tag the order Delivered for reference, and finally archive our order.

I 💚 Automation. Work Smarter.

In the ecommerce space, everyone wants data driven decisions.

…Or at least, that’s what we hear a lot of people say.

“I want data-driven decision making. What does the data say?”

And then, of course, they go with their gut. They read articles, advice, and best practices, then implement whatever they think is best. When it goes well and conversions and Average Order Value (AOV) ticks up, they decide that their hypothesis is correct. The decision they made is now supported by their data.

This is something we consistently see, except in one instance - split testing.

For whatever reason, split testing is a very particular kind of data that everyone seems to respect. And for good reason, it’s extremely effective. You can read and implement all the best practices you like, but if you really want to see results you need to test. Test, test, and test again.

Let’s talk split testing, why you should love it, and what tests you can start running right now that will have a real impact on your store come the Black Friday and holiday season.

What is split testing?

When you make a design change to your site, oftentimes you’ll be going with your gut. What looks better, what feels better. In this case, you don’t have an idea of what the real impact of that change is. Say you add a bunch of press logos to your homepage, thinking that it’s going to add legitimacy and give customers an extra bit of convincing that your product is worth buying. Is the impact good, or bad? You don’t really know.

That’s where split testing comes in.

Split testing is where, for example, you show one group of visitors the homepage with press logos, and one group without. You then monitor and measure against different KPIs and metrics to determine the effect that change has made. Do more visitors who see the press logos place an order, versus those who didn’t? In some cases, you may even notice no impact at all.

In short - group A sees one thing, group B sees another. Compare, contrast, analyze, learn, implement. This allows you to make effective, truly data-driven decisions about your store that will lead to more conversions, higher AOV, and more.

The other key pillar in split testing is segmentation.

You may have heard of segmentation or even used it in other areas of your store, like email marketing. This is where you siphon off a specific group of customers or visitors that meet certain criteria, for example new vs returning customers, or mobile vs desktop. This is going to take your split testing to the next level, because you can see how it’s impacting different types of visitor or customer.

It’ll also help you to make better decisions based on the results of your split testing. For instance, if you’re testing the effect of having a “recently viewed” section on product pages. Prior to segmenting your test group, you may find that it has little or negligible impact overall. However if you look at new vs returning customers, maybe that section has a pretty significant impact on sales with returning customers, and the overall data was skewed by it having little impact on new customers.

Split testing and segmentation will give you the power of data behind your BFCM and holiday strategy. You’ll make effective decisions on lots of different elements of your store, and you’ll see more success. Or at the very least, you’ll better understand your store, your customers, and their behavior.

What tests should you run? Everything.

Well, not everything. That would be impractical. So let’s look at five tests you can run ahead of the holiday season.

Note before we get started

It’s worth stating now the tools you’ll need to actually run split tests. I recommend using Google Optimize, but for some tests you’ll need to look at other solutions. For example if you’re testing shipping, you may want to look at ShipScout or Intelligems.

5 split tests to run for your store

#1 - Should price appear on collection grids?

Where you place pricing on your store can impact customer experience and conversions. One which is worth testing, is whether or not you should display the price on collection grids like so:

There are a lot of considerations and potential outcomes to including the price on the collection page or not.

Let’s say you don’t include them - the customer is going to see the product on the collection page, and make a value judgement there and then before they click on the page. They know in their heads how much they think that product may cost. If the actual price is lower than their expectations, it seems like a good deal and therefore they may be more likely to buy. On the other hand, that may also work against you and they perceive the value of the product as being much lower than the actual price. Once they head to the product page, it may come off as overpriced.

Alternatively, including them may help to set expectations and reduce the number of customers landing on product pages who won’t ever make a purchase due to price. Every customer who lands on a product page is doing so being fully aware of the cost, and wants to know more.

You want to be able to better understand the behaviors of your customers when you do or do not include pricing on the collection page. When we ran tests, including the price increased revenue per session by about 23.6% with 97% confidence.

If you wanted a short answer to “is it worth including price on collection pages?”, it would be “maybe”. Which is precisely why you should test for your own store, rather than simply looking at someone else’s results and taking them as a best practice.

#2 - Is font size important? (spoiler: it’s more than font size)

Font size is something that commonly comes with UX and UI, however it’s just one piece of a much bigger, more important puzzle called readability. I’ve attempted to split test just font size, and couldn’t get anything conclusive or statistically significant, which goes to show you can’t reduce readability to something so specific as font size.

Baymard Institute regularly conducts large-scale usability studies, and through these we learn a lot about readability and guidelines around it. According to them, line length is actually the most important factor, rather than font size. There’s also color and contrast - if you’ve ever seen bright red text on black or something equally as painful on the eyes, you’ll know how important this is. There’s how large paragraphs are, how easy it is to click on different page elements, how easily understandable your language is. And there’s also font size.

#3 - Are hero images on collection pages worthwhile?

So, here’s the thing - hero images on collection pages look really smart. With a lot of design elements of your store, a huge part of the decision making focuses on the aesthetics and what looks good just by nature of what web design is.

However, in split test we ran for a store, getting rid of the hero image on the collection page increased revenue per session by 16% with 92% confidence. Even after running the test again on mobile versus desktop, new versus returning visitors, the numbers changed a little but in all cases it was always better without the hero image.

I’ve used hero images as a way to illustrate that you should test these design elements that you subjectively think look really good but may actually have a somewhat negative impact. Testing design elements is always going to be worthwhile. Just because it looks good, doesn’t mean it’s the best decision for your store.

#4 - Is free shipping a must have?

As we approach the holiday season especially, shipping becomes a hot topic for ecommerce. With brick-and-mortar stores, you can just physically go to the store and buy something the same day. Whereas with buying online, you need to rely on shipping and for some customers this can make or break their decision to purchase. To remedy this, many merchants turn to free shipping.

But how do you choose your threshold for free shipping? $25? $100? Or across all your orders as standard? You need to find the balance between what’s actually going to entice customers, and what makes sense for your profits. After all, you may think initially you need to offer it on all orders with no threshold, but through split testing you notice that there’s actually relatively similar pickup on free shipping when the threshold is $25. Maybe instead of just free shipping or $10 shipping, you add in a “budget” option that’s faster than free, but slower than express, to see if customers would rather pay for a slightly better shipping experience.

This is going to be a big one you need to test before BFCM and the holidays where fulfillment and post-purchase is even more crucial than the rest of the year. People know from watching the news when there are delays and supply chain issues. It’s more important to them that they know their order will absolutely arrive, rather than they save a bit of money in shipping costs. The idea that free shipping is the must-have, especially around the holidays, is no longer the case. It’s still important, but you can experiment with the threshold to find a balance where it works for your bottom line, and actually drives sales. You need to figure out what’s going to work best for your customers.

#5 - Should you always include a “recently viewed products” section?

We’ve all seen this section on so many ecommerce websites. You’re browsing a store, viewing lots of different products, trying to decide which to buy. You want to easily get back to that product you viewed a few pages earlier, and there it is handily on the page in the “recently viewed products” section. Maybe you go to your cart and you spot a product in that section on the cart page that you’d forgotten about and decide to add it. In theory, this keeps people on your store, and it helps to capture their attention and increase average order value.

But does the theory hold up? Kind of, but maybe not in quite the way you might expect.

We tested for this, and it did have a positive result overall. Great! That means it’s worthwhile, right? Well, we decided to segment it with new and returning customers. We reckoned that maybe this result would look very different for each segment, because if you’re a new customer then “recently viewed products” may be less important to you. Whereas if you’re a returning customer, it’s more relevant to you.

In our test, including this section decreased the conversion rate by around 9% for new visitors. For returning visitors, it increased by 33%. That’s a big difference. So, therein lies an opportunity to personalize the user experience; hiding the widget for new visitors, and leaving it be for returning visitors.

Personalization is huge in ecommerce, and it’s why it’s so important that when you’re split testing you’re also thinking about segmentation. Doing so will reveal any opportunities you may not initially realize to enhance customer experience and boost conversions.

——

Split testing is the key that’s going to unlock so many more sales and opportunities for your store. We’re seeing now channels like Facebook ads are less effective, and the more channels are changing the less clear it is which acquisition channels are actually worthwhile. So, an effective way to decrease costs and reliance on these other channels is to find the opportunities that may be lying in wait on your own site.

Run the tests, find the gold, and set your store up for success this holiday season.

Move over Unite, the big announcements are now happening twice a year with Shopify Editions, Shopify’s new semi-annual showcase.

CEO Tobi says,

“With Shopify Editions, we’re sharing our big bets and latest innovations in commerce so that those ambitious enough to try their hand at entrepreneurship can start and scale faster than ever before.”

hell yea, show me what you got, TL!!

The theme of this first Editions is speed of innovation. Let’s dive into the three announcements I’m excited about...

B2B: New Whole Experience on Plus

We’re starting off with a Plus-exclusive feature, but one that’s going to be very Welcome by existing Plus merchants and those looking for an excuse to upgrade… a revamped wholesale experience.

We’ve set up wholesale solutions dozens of times, and this sounds like the wholesale channel we wished we had. Native support for net terms, company profiles with different payment terms, self-serve portal, etc. We haven’t tried this one ourselves yet, but it could be a killer feature for Plus worth upgrading for.

Announcement | Learn More | Read the Blog

(We heard there are other big new Plus changes in the works, maybe we’ll see those at the next Editions.)

Shopify Functions: Long-term game-changer

Shopify Functions is new, technical, and going to be a little tough to conceptualize at first. Functions will allow developers to “extend or replace native Shopify server-side business logic to meet the unique business needs of our merchants.”

Available to all merchants, Functions are “...deployed with an app, and configured directly in the admin.” Long term, Functions has massive potential. It opens up a development path on Shopify that makes the platform extensible. A lot of kludgey apps may get replaced by more performant Shopify Functions.

Functions feels to me like a grown-up version of Script Editor. We use Script Editor several times a week to solve bespoke checkout-related issues for clients without apps or hacky workarounds. If Functions brings that same energy to more of Shopify, then the future is looking pretty bright.

Announcement | Learn More | There's a Discord too.

Discount Combinations

*“Finally–now you can combine discounts on the same order...”

No more Script Editor or app workarounds either. Y’all can quit asking me about this one. 😅

As one commenter in our Facebook group wrote, “Multiple automatic discounts at one time, praise the lord!!”

*This feature will be rolling out to all merchants over the next few weeks.

Plus 100+ more feature and updates

Editions is everything new year-to-date, today, and launching the next several weeks. There’s a lot to unpack.

Check it out: shopify.com/editions/summer2022

We’ll discuss it on an upcoming podcast episode too.

huzzah!
-k.

Create a Wholesaler Link on Your Website

You’ll notice a lot of websites have a wholesale link in the footer. It creates an easy access point to start a dialogue. To weed out the tire kickers, you’ll want to ask questions like:

• How long have you been in business?
• Do you have a physical store?
• Do you sell online?
• Why do you want to carry our product?

Incentivize Them and Make it Easy to Buy

If you are on Shopify Plus, there is a wholesaler portal built in that will run all the discount pricing scripts automatically. If not, there are a lot of good apps to checkout like Wholesale Helper, Bold Customer Pricing and Wholesale Gorilla. These apps will help manage access to incentivized discount pricing and streamline them into your fulfillment workflow.

Help Them Sell

This is the opportunity that so many people miss! Don’t treat your wholesale customers like regular customers and forget about them. Create a newsletter just for your wholesale customers. Segment them into their own list. Put together marketing materials and promos that they can then use to sell your product. Help them sell your stuff and you will be rewarded.

We’ve all been here at some point. It feels like you can’t stop working, or things will just stop, but you don’t make enough yet to fully outsource. You created a business to have freedom and be your own boss, but before you know it it feels like you’re in this non stop hamster wheel. I’ve been there myself and these are the things I like to do to help manage it.

Get in the Right Mindset

I immediately start taking inventory of the things I’m grateful for. I think of all the wins no matter how big or small. Then, I run through my short and long term goals. When I remember the why’s behind my business it helps get me motivated.

Utilize Contractors to Outsource Important Tasks

In the beginning, you may not be making enough to hire full time employees. Contractors are great because you can outsource certain tasks, without taking on full time employee costs. Outsource tasks that are essential for your business to function, but that you don’t enjoy doing. When you take time to pause and really break down all the tasks you are in the hamster wheel doing, you may realize there are a lot that are sucking up time, but not adding much ROI.

Take a Day Off

Your business won’t blow up if you take one day off. You don’t even need to ask permission or forgiveness, because it’s your business! That’s the magic of it. Shaking up your routine and stepping back, even just for a day can help clear your perspective.

A homepage is an opportunity to nail a first impression with your customers. Some must have elements for killer homepage are:

A Hero Video

A well done professional video that shows people how cool they will be when they buy your product is a must have. It sets you apart from competitors and gives the customer an engaging interactive experience. Highlight the features of your product and show all the rad stuff it can do.

About

Below the video, have some text about who you are, what do you do, why do you do it, who makes your product etc…Utilize the positioning and messaging you created as your cornerstone here.

Top Collections

Highlight a couple collections to help move people through the product funnel. Also feature your best selling products.

Email Opt In

Make sure you have a way to collect people’s email addresses if they get to the bottom. Give them an opportunity to opt into your newsletter.

Paid ads attract top of funnel traffic. It’s usually a cold audience that isn’t at the buying stage yet. It’s just an entry point to your brand. Sometimes I see people send their paid ads to a collections page, which isn’t an ideal user experience. Personalized and targeted strategies perform much better.

For example, after someone clicks on your ad, send them to a landing page. A landing page made specifically for people that clicked on that ad. It needs to look and feel like a continued experience including headlines and photos. Then, get the clicker on some kind of hook. Use positioning and messaging that makes them feel like this is the product for them. Show the product and show social proof.

If you are getting people to click on your ad, right there that’s a win. Now, what are you going to do to help them move down the funnel buying process? You’ve whittled your audience down so retargeting and increasing the number of touchpoints will be essential.

Key takeaway: Facebook and Instagram aren’t going to typically be one click sales conversions. They are seeds for future sales.

It’s easy to get caught up in all the aps, flashy content and new softwares that can make you think - if I just do this one thing, that will be the turning point for my store. The best brands focus on one thing initially to scale - fundamentals. Don’t overcomplicate things.

Key Fundamentals Checklist:

Customer Service

Excellent customer service is what gives customers a great shopping experience and builds repeat business loyalty.

• Make sure you have a returns manager - Bold Returns Manager is a great option.
• Write up some FAQ’s and have them easily available.
• Utilize support ticketing software to track and follow up on issues.

Positioning

Positioning is vital for your business and story to extend beyond just a product or service offering. It’s what your customers will identify with.

• Talk with your customers and do a customer survey. It’s amazing how many businesses forget just how important this is. You might know why you’d buy, but what are your customer’s resonating with?
• As your business grows, keep coming back to your positioning to be sure it makes sense and still aligns.

Messaging Copy

After you nail your positioning - this will be the cornerstone of your marketing copy. It will tell a story and align across various channels.

• Write marketing messaging copy that is tonal and tells a story.
• Review your products performing in the top 20% and re-write those descriptions.
• We recorded a whole podcast episode on just this topic: Your Most Important Page is Product.

Welcome Email Series

Once you get your welcome series dialed in and performing right, it will print money. It’s one of the most important email series because it gives people the opportunity to understand the value you are offering.

Check out an article of mine for more information on this topic: Improving Your Klaviyo Email Welcome Series With These Tips.

Pagination is the process of breaking up your website into different sequenced pages. In this case, infinite scroll is exactly what it sounds like. A long never ending scroll page. While a nice scrolling home page is good, pagination is typically the way to go. Infinite scroll is prone to breaking, especially in browsers like Safari.

Industry knowledge tip: The Baymard Institute is a research center that uncovers what designs cause usability issues, how to create the best user experiences, and measures how your UX performance stacks up against leading e-commerce sites. They recommend pagination as well and they are a great resource for benchmarking knowledge.

The best way to organize your store’s navigation is by having five or so overarching product groups that break down into their own mega menus.

For example, a clothing store might have tops, bottoms, accessories, shoes and sale items. Then, each of those categories may have their own spin off menus to break it down further.

The key here is to have a really great search function and sidebar navigation. To do this well, you’ll need to put in a little heavy lifting on the product information management side, but there are tools available to help make that easier. One of my favorite apps to help clients with large catalogs is Booster Product Filter & Search.

Pro tip: If you aren’t sure which product groups to start with, use Shopify Analytics or Google Analytics to find out what your top selling products are.