🫰 BFCM Results

Whew!

We survived another BFCM 🙏 

Time to sit back, relax, and get your fill of Morning Commerce:

• Metafield madness

• Claude 2.1 launched

• Accessibility lawsuits

• $9.3 billion in sales by Shopify merchants

• Preparing for the end of third-party cookies

• Where DTC brands see opportunities in 2024

• Google Bard can now answer questions about YouTube videos

— Kyle Tully

ACQUISITION

Where DTC brands see opportunities in 2024

Digital advertising expansion leads the way for areas of opportunity for DTC brands in 2024, with 59% of respondents saying it’s their greatest opportunity, according to a new study by Digiday / Klaviyo.

51% say testing is an area of opportunity, however this was dampened by 68% claiming that finding budgets and buy-in for testing is a challenge.

Other top opportunities include:

• Shipping/fulfillment improvement (50%);

• Website/UX improvement (47%);

• Content creation capacity/quality (47%)

You can download (sign up required) the full report here.

CONVERSION

Preparing for the end of third-party cookies

If you’re still using third-party cookies then here’s your monthly reminder that Chrome plans to disable third-party cookies for 1% of users from Q1 2024 to facilitate testing, and then ramp up to 100% of users from Q3 2024.

Here’s a detailed breakdown by Chrome for Developers on how to prepare:

1. Audit your third-party cookie usage

2. Test for breakage

3. Use Partitioned cookies with CHIPS

4. Use Related Website Sets

5. Migrate to the relevant web APIs

And some interesting conversation on Hacker News.

If all this is flying over your head you’re not alone. Just know that tracking and advertising might get a little worse in the short term while we figure all this out. But a lot of smart minds (and money) are working on solutions.

AI

Claude 2.1 launched

Claude 2.1 is now available via API and the chat interface at claude.ai.

The new version boasts an industry-leading 200K token context window, which basically means it can understand up to 500 pages of content at a time. Great for summarising those long, winding emails you get from your mum (just me?).

They’ve also halved its hallucination rate, meaning it’s more reliable and less likely to make up answers.

Both of these updates make it a solid contender in the AI space for working with large codebases (like a Shopify theme or app), financial statements, and Shopify data exports.

Google Bard can now answer questions about YouTube videos

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Accessibility lawsuits

Over the past few months, a plague of opportunistic lawsuits appears to be targeting Shopify merchants who fail to live up to accessibility standards.

I’ve had a number of people reach out for accessibility audits and code updates after lawsuits were filed claiming vision-impaired users were unable to use various parts of their Shopify store, or in some cases were completely unable to checkout.

While the lawsuits do feel like a bit of a shakedown, there is validity to the claims that most Shopify stores simply aren’t usable for a large population. Try turning on Voice Control in the Accessibility settings of your computer and then browse the web… it’s darn near impossible.

Is your website accessible for vision-impaired users? Frankly, the average Shopify merchant has no clue. In my experience, in most cases, the answer is a clear-cut “no”. And if you’re on the receiving end of one of these lawsuits it could cost you dearly.

You can run a basic audit and find a “quick reference” guide to accessibility here.

SHOPIFY NEWS

Metafield madness

If you’re metafield curious but haven’t yet discovered all the unique things you can do with them, this screenshot from one store’s product page metafield setup should get your brain firing.

While this might be overkill for many stores, it does give you an idea of what’s possible.

But why would you put this info in metafields rather than just stuff it in the product description? A few reasons come to mind:

1. You separate data from formatting and can systemise the display of all this info across your entire product catalogue.

2. You can re-arrange your PDP content using the OS2.0 visual builder and every product using the same template will get updated instantly.

3. You can use logic in your PDP to show/hide other elements or change formatting based on the values in these metafields.

I’m sure there are dozens of other reasons and use cases. You’re only limited by your imagination… and a max of 200 metafields for each resource type..

$9.3 billion in sales by Shopify merchants

Shopify merchants absolutely smashed it this Black Friday / Cyber Monday, with a total of $9.3 billion in sales, up 24% from 2022’s $7.5 billion.

Oh yeah, and they live-streamed the whole thing on the Vegas Sphere 👀

Even cooler, 55,000+ merchants had their highest-selling day EVER on Shopify.

Other interesting nerd stats:

• Shopify achieved 99.999+% uptime, serving over 5 TB/min.

• Shopify’s egress processed 145 billion requests on Friday alone.

• App servers handled peak of ~60 million requests per minute.

• 61 million consumers bought from Shopify-powered brands.

If you’ve ever run a non-Shopify site you know how easy it is to crash a website. A single dodgy plugin, slight server misconfiguration, or a fraction too much traffic will do the trick.

So these numbers absolutely boggle the mind and are a testament to how much work (and resources) are put in behind the scenes to handle this kind of volume without missing a beat.

One new Shopify update

• Select custom dates for metrics on Home - you’ll now find a custom date range picker for metrics on Home, giving you the ability to select specific time ranges to view store performance metrics.

INSPO OF THE WEEK

I’m a sucker for productivity porn and everything analogue, so obviously I’m obsessed with Ugmonk. Product design and photography take centre stage here and all the website needs to do is step back and let nature take its course.

How we can help…

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