👎 Meta madness

Never a dull week running an ecommerce business. Here’s what’s up:

• POS upgrades

• Shopify Bill Pay launches

• Most collection pages suck

• Meta ad system bug spends like a drunken sailor

• It might be time to upgrade to an Online Store 2.0 theme

ACQUISITION

Major System Error Causes Heavy Overspending On Meta Platforms

If you’re advertising on Meta platforms then you likely had an “interesting” weekend. A widespread system error caused many campaigns to overspend by as much as double in the early hours of Sunday morning.

A few large advertisers spent hundreds of thousands of dollars more than expected thanks to the issue. And many smaller brands had campaigns overspend anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars.

Ecommerce brands are often hardest hit by these types of bugs as margins are tight and we’re all painfully aware of exactly where our numbers need to be. Double ad spend with no additional conversions would be devastating for many.

What happens next? The unofficial word is once Meta gets to the bottom of the issue that at least partial refunds may be given for the overspending.

Keyword match types still matter (phrase & exact match are not obsolete)

As Big Search moves closer and closer to a keywordless AI-driven dystopia utopia, the temptation grows stronger to let the machines do all the heavy lifting.

Plug in your website, hand over your credit card, and let the AI do it’s thing…

(One look at this week’s Meta ad spend disaster should tell you how much of a good idea this is.)

But keyword match types are still a powerful tool for managing ad spend, improving Quality Score, and controlling which searches use up your budget. Learning how to carve out important keywords into their own Exact and Phrase matched Ad Groups is still 100% necessary for full control of your campaigns.

CONVERSION

The Current State of E-Commerce Product List UX Performance (15 Best Practices)

According to the latest UX performance report by Baymard, 57% of ecommerce sites have “mediocre” or worse collection page performance which results in shoppers abandoning their hunt for the ideal product.

Here are a few performance boosts that stood out in particular because I know most Shopify stores fail at them:

• Use a simple “load more” button rather than endless/infinite scrolling or pagination.

• Load a different number of products for mobile and desktop. (15-30 on mobile and 50-150 on desktop depending on whether the products are spec-driven or visual.)

• Combine product variants into a single product list item. (Showing 15 different colour variations of the same shirt just confuses and overwhelms people.)

• Provide all crucial product info on the collection page. (Making users click through to the product page for crucial info, then go back to the collection, only to have to click into the next product page, and try to remember everything to perform a comparison is a nightmare.)

• Provide essential filters based on purchasing preferences. (Price, User ratings average, Color, Size, Brand.)

Some interesting findings in here and well worth reading the full report.

SHOPIFY NEWS

Pressure is on to upgrade to an Online Store 2.0 theme

If you’ve been holding off upgrading to an Online Store 2.0 theme you might want to consider moving that project higher up on your priorities list.

Shopify recently announced the Asset API will no longer be accessible to public apps. Why should you care? Many apps use this API to add their code to your theme.

Going forward, apps will use the Shopify 2.0 App Embed to add their code. But as the name implies, this method only works with 2.0 themes. So if you’re still using an older theme then not all apps will be compatible.

As mentioned in our inaugural issue, there are lots of good reasons to move to an Online Store 2.0 compatible theme, including:

• Personalise your entire store

• Easy app install/uninstall

• Fewer developer expenses

• Faster load speeds.

• Spend money on things that matter

• More productive developers

This update just adds another time-sensitive reason to make the switch sooner rather than later. If you need a hand making the migration reach out to our consultancy Nerdify or just hit reply to this email and I’ll hook you up.

A flurry of POS enhancements

Shopify devs have been pumping out POS enhancements this week, including:

• The ability to refund to an existing gift card with reloadable gift cards.

• Product details page improvements that bring important product info front and centre.

• Streamlined attribution workflows in POS that let you attribute an entire cart to a single staff member or attribute each item in the cart to a different staff member.

Shopify Bill Pay

Shopify Bill Pay is a business payments app that lets you easily schedule, pay, and manage your business invoices from your business admin. You can keep track of all your vendors, suppliers, and contractors in one place. (US only for now.)

Inspo of the Week

Fable designs unique pet products that solve real problems. Their products also look beautiful and they’ve made the most of this with high-quality lifestyle photos, simple video demonstrations, and engaging user-generated content

How we can help…

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