Shopify Expert Insights

Recently, Shopify added a tool showing store PageSpeeds, so we have been having even more people reach out worried about this one. Let me be clear, PageSpeed is NOT a good way to measure speed of a store. For example, on my podcast, we ran a page speed test for Gymshark. They scored a six on mobile! A store with a PageSpeed score of six has an obscene amount of cash on hand and is extremely successful by all measures.

There are bigger fish to fry in your business, where you can see more return on your money and energy instead of worrying about PageSpeed. If you put together better email sequences, that’ll get you ten times as much money as lowering your PageSpeed score by a second.

A good and fast site doesn’t hurt. A slow site doesn’t help. I don’t think it is the be all, end all, that it’s been made out to be. Just don’t over-prioritize it at the expense of other higher ROI activities.

Rule of thumb: If your homepage is less than five megs and loads in less than three seconds that’s great!

I anticipate that everything will be happening way earlier this year. People are at home and shopping online vs retail. Shipping is at its peak and there are already delays within the logistical process. Think about your production, inventory and shipping times as we approach the season.

A good target is to start November 1st.

Week 1: dry run your Black Friday cyber week sale for your VIP customers
Week 2: expand the sale to a broader audience
Week 3: tease the sale to your who email list
Week 4: run your sale again

Overall you’ll run your Black Friday sale multiple times in November, but you are doing it through email segmentation.

Klaviyo email automation tip: Decrease the time between your browse abandonment and abandoned cart email sequences. Fire those out a lot faster so that they get it quick and then your abandoned cart sequence will kick into gear.

These tips are just a quick highlight. You can purchase my full Black Friday guide here.

The most important thing you need to consider is how clear it is for the customer that they have taken an action. They clicked and something happened. If I'm drunk, have an eye closed with no glasses on, is it abundantly obvious that an action has occurred when I click add to cart?

The cart options:

• Cart page: a static landing page
• Cart drawer: 25% of the screen slides out
• Modal cart: a pop up in the middle of the page
• Mini cart: widget that pops out from your cart icon

My preference is a cart page. It’s a clean experience, static and the customer gets directed to the page as confirmation. In Shopify, you can test out each type of cart week to week and see what does best, but in terms of pure conversion rate, a cart page wins.

A cart drawer can be superior based on pure aesthetics. It pops out as confirmation and the customer can continue shopping if they want.

Pro tip: For any of the non cart page options, the customer will need to have an additional step and click to check out. Instead of using the phrase “go to cart” use “go to checkout”.

Shopify theme developer Paul Reda is a collector of Minor League Baseball (MiLB) t-shirts, and has for years hoped MiLB would move to Shopify. And then they did, but they didn't consult him, and now he has mixed feelings about it. Anyway, let's try to buy some Isotopes shirts together. (Paul accidentally filmed his side with a potato. Accidents happen. Sorry!)

A spicy website teardown of Chicago condiment institution Marconi Foods

Watch an ecommerce expert spend $50 on socks in this exciting screencast.

Founded in 2013, Bombas is an apparel brand that originally sold socks and began selling T-shirts in 2019. For every item purchased, a clothing item is donated to a homeless shelter or homelessness-related charity.

An entirely unsolicited website teardown of Pit Vipers Sunglasses, a Shopify store that is equal parts impressive and ridiculous.

Shopify Re-Unite keynote wrapped up this morning. In it, Shopify's leadership team revealed new and upcoming features. I took notes.

Here are the big announcements:

• Installment payments coming to Shopify Pay later this year. (works like Affirm/Klarna/Sezzle.)
• Product States: Instead of just published/unpublished, there are now Draft and Archive status.
• Sounded like Sections Everywhere just got reannounced. Independent sections in all templates. Sections Everywhere is currently in Partner Beta
• Shopify Fulfillment Network no longer in beta. Also, its staffed by robot utility carts.
• Shopify Email has been used to send 30 million emails since its surprise launch two months ago.
• SHOPIFY BALANCE will let you pay bills, track expenses, and get funding from your Shopify admin. Shopify is your new bank. No fees, no minimums, and you get a Shopify ATM card.
• Several new features coming to Shopify and POS to support curbside delivery, tipping, etc.
• New Order Index page makes managing orders easier. Rolling out now.
• Performance Dashboard will show you how fast (or slow) your store is over time so that you can identify issues detrimental to performance.
• Product pages now support "Page activity," you can see who else is working on the same product as you and avoid losing work. Coming to other areas later.
• New storefront renderer decrease time to first byte, making your site more performant with no extra effort
• Cross-Border Domains, coming later this year, will allow currency and language switching based using multiple domain for a single store

This is a partial list, and timelines are subject change. Some features are rolling out now, others we won't see until next year. Keep an eye out in your Shopify dashboard, the Shopify newsletter, and the Shopify blog for announcements as new features roll out.

Not sure what all this means? We discussed it in-depth on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast.

An entirely unsolicited website teardown of Allbirds.com

Allbirds is a DTC ecommerce darling. Let's poke around their website and see what we can learn.

"Allbirds is a New Zealand-American footwear company that uses a direct-to-consumer approach and is aimed at designing environment-friendly footwear."

Logistics and Audience

Retargeting

A good place to start is remarketing. Focus on the warm traffic that’s already visited the site but hasn’t bought, because it is dramatically easier than trying to get cold traffic to convert. The dynamic ads make content a lot easier.

Prospecting

Make a conversion campaign optimized for purchase, and if it’s a new ad account, start by targeting interests. You can track which interests are working well and which ones aren’t. Take one interest per ad set. So, if you want to test three different interests against each other, then you would have three ad sets.

A/B Testing

To keep things simple, start with the same two ads in each of those interest based ad sets. Then, keep the copy the same in both ads and just change the image in each of them, so that you’re limiting the number of variables. Square images show up across Facebook and Instagram really well and fits in pretty much all placements. Run those ads for five days and choose the winning ad.

Budget

A good rule of thumb here is 1 - 1.5X your average order value and run it for 5-7 days to see how it does. If you increase your spend, you can run it for a shorter amount of time.

Selecting Images

Select images with pretty different concepts, not just a color change. This will really give you insight and learnings as to what works better.