🍆 Ecommerce reaches record penetration

Hello. It’s Wednesday. Time for Morning Commerce.

Kyle here again bringing you the most important Shopify news, articles, and strategies to grow your store.

• 2023 Google Shopping Ads strategy for Shopify brands

• Using creators to generate 25% of total revenue

• How Levi’s plans to triple ecommerce sales

• 13 great product pages and why they work

• Ecommerce reaches record penetration

• Landing page vs. Product page

• Multi-advertiser ads on Meta

• August 2023 core update

Morning Commerce is brought to you by Nerdify.

— Kyle Tully

ACQUISITION

Ecommerce reaches record penetration

The Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce shared some interesting stats.

In the second quarter of 2023, online sales went up by 2.1%, reaching about $277.6 billion. This means more people are shopping on the Internet. Yay! The total sales for everything people bought, both online and in physical stores, didn't change much, staying at around $1,798.2 billion.

Online sales are growing faster compared to last year, going up by 7.5%. On the other hand, total sales only increased by 0.6%. This shows that more customers are preferring to buy things online. Wicked.

In fact, online sales made up 15.4% of all sales during this time. The only higher quarter was Q2 2020 during the peak of covid.

At this rate — barring another black swan event like we’ve seen oh I don’t know like every couple of months lately — we should cross that barrier and start setting new record highs for ecommerce sales. Let’s get it!

How Sweet Dreams uses creators to generate 25% of their total revenue

Sweet Dreams are a Shopify brand selling CBD and melatonin-infused sleep supplements. They’ve got a slick website and even slicker results from partnering with creators.

Let’s jump straight to the results:

• 25% of revenue from creators

• over 300k in affiliate revenue

• 9X ROI program-wide

• 40% lower CAC than paid ads

All within 5 months. Not bad.

How did they do it? An affiliate program.

They built a small army of creators making content across social platforms in exchange for a cut of any sales they make.

Here’s a recent ad created about a week ago that got over 10k views:

Check out the full case study here.

Multi-advertiser ads on Meta

Multi-advertiser ads are a somewhat new Meta feature designed to help people compare products from multiple businesses. They appear as a carousel unit below products or businesses a user has recently engaged with.

Multi-advertiser ads can appear in the following placements:

• Facebook - Feed, Video, Stories

• Instagram feed

They’ve been available to some users since at least January and initial feedback is positive. So if you’ve got access they are definitely worth testing.

You can opt-in or opt-out via Ads Manager. Boosted posts default to yes.

Multi-advertiser ads are currently being rolled out across Meta properties so they may not yet be available to you. Keep your eyes peeled.

2023 Google Shopping Ads strategy for Shopify brands

Google Shopping Ads are still one of the best ways for most ecommerce stores to get started (and grow consistently) with paid marketing.

I mean, when better to market to someone but when they are actively looking for the exact thing you offer?

If you’re not happy with your results or unsure if what you’re doing is optimal then this video from Collin Schmelebeck is a solid overview of a simple yet powerful shopping campaign structure for ecommerce brands.

CONVERSION

13 great product pages and why they work

The content team at Drip have been busy putting together a fantastic resource of product page examples with breakdowns of why they work.

Featured brands include Allbirds, Brooklinen, Glossier, Bellray, and more.

Key takeaways include:

• Reduce cart abandonment with messenger.

• Add persuasion triggers to product images.

• Collect warm leads on product pages.

• Evoke curiosity to increase signups.

• Educate your visitors with content.

• Explain product options in detail.

• Show your products in real life.

• And more!

Lots of great ideas in here for your next A/B test.

Landing page vs. Product page: Where to send customers?

If you’re running any kind of paid ads or working with influencers and you haven’t tested sending traffic to a landing page (rather than direct to product page, or heaven forbid… to the homepage) then this is your call to arms.

SEO

August 2023 core update

“Core update” are two words every SEO would rather live without. (Can’t we get 5 minutes of peace?) These updates are broad sweeping changes to Google’s search algorithm that change how rankings are calculated.

Fittingly, Google casually dropped the news about the August core update on Twitter earlier today while everyone was distracted by hurricanes and earthquakes.

What’s one more natural disaster to the mix, eh?

This is the first major update since the Reviews update in April and the last core update in March.

Of course, they never really tell us too much about what they’ve changed. But you can expect some volatility in the search results over the coming days and weeks as things settle down.

Fingers crossed you get a bump in rankings 🤞

INDUSTRY NEWS

How Levi’s plans to triple ecommerce sales

Back in 2022 Levi’s set a lofty goal of tripling their ecommerce sales by 2027.

As part of that effort they hired their first ever chief digital officer, Jason Gowans. Now you might expect Jason would be taking some pretty drastic steps in order to hit these kind of targets.

But in an interview with Modern Retail I was pleasantly surprised to hear the simple strategies they’re employing:

1. The fundamentals — discovery, evaluate-and-buy, fulfilment.

2. The assortment — in-stock experience, expanding choice, differentiation.

3. Digital flagship experience — amplify loyalty program across channels.

They’re going right back to the simple things like optimising the search, navigate, and filter flows. Improving size guides and creating video education on fit and size choice.

Beyond that they’re looking at expanding into related categories such as outerwear and non-denim bottoms and taking recommendations beyond single products to entire outfits.

Six new Shopify updates

• Inventory columns can now be hidden or rearranged - de-clutter your inventory page by removing inventory states that are irrelevant to your business and create saved views.

• checkout_started now triggers on every checkout visit in checkout extensibility - this used to only fire on first visit.

• Shopify Duties and Import Taxes now supports US clothing tax exemptions.

• Shopify Flow - New customer tagging triggers and ability to change product status - three new tasks: “Customer tags added“, “Customer tags removed“, “Update product status“.

• Get guided help with our new Help Center assistant - AI has been added to the help center.

• New App Store search filters - you can now filter by program, feature, or category, including the new Built for Shopify badge.

INSPO OF THE WEEK

Desktop menu on the left, cart bottom left, product links top right… WTF? But Earthfoam makes this unique layout work. When you only sell four products it’s hard to hide behind easy page-fillers like collection sections filled with new arrivals and best sellers. This is a great example of how to tackle small catalogue stores.

How we can help…

🔥 Looking for an experienced Shopify Partner to work with? 
Smart ecommerce brands rely on us for innovative design, development, optimisation, and growth strategies to create highly profitable Shopify websites. Work with our consultancy.

🎯 Want to reach our audience? Hit reply to discuss advertising.