Kurt Elster beside the headline 8 BFCM checks before your sale goes live, with the Ethercycle logo

8 BFCM Checks to Make Before Your Sale Goes Live

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been sharing BFCM tips for Shopify stores on LinkedIn and Twitter. Below are the 8 tips, along with some of the best advice people shared in the comments.
Vanessa Lee, VP of Product at Shopify, smiling at a podcast microphone during an interview about Shopify Editions Fall 2026

Shopify Editions Fall 2026: Shopify Wants to Be the Default for Agentic Shopping

My read on Shopify's Fall '26 Edition: Shopify wants to be the default shopping infrastructure for every developer building an AI agent, and leading lets it help define how agentic shopping works. ...

We Analyzed $29 Million in Shopify Discounts. Most of It Bought Nothing.

24 months, 10 Shopify stores, $29.4M in discounts, 1.14M orders dissected. Blanket discounting, the 20% herd, always-on leakage, and the case for gifts over price cuts.
We Measured the AI Traffic Wave: Tiny but Growing Fast

We Measured the AI Traffic Wave: Tiny but Growing Fast

94 million sessions, $274M in revenue, 10 Shopify stores, 24 months of data. AI assistants drive 0.06% of traffic. Here's where the money actually comes from.
GWP ROI Calculator showing a gift-with-purchase campaign netting $4,684 per month versus the equivalent discount

Free Gifts Beat Discounts. We Built a Calculator to Prove It.

A $34 discount costs you $34. A $34 gift costs you $9. We ran 60 days of real store data through that asymmetry, then built a free calculator so you can run yours.
Frosted-glass 3D illustration of a doll silhouette in a magnifying glass over listing cards, connected to independent storefronts

We Built a Barbie Search Engine to Prove a Point About Shopify's UCP

Shopify's Universal Commerce Protocol makes every store's catalog searchable with no auth, no tokens, and no fees. We built DollScout, a live collector-Barbie finder, to prove it, then open-sourced...
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