🎺 One-page checkout

Welcome to Morning Commerce!

Lots happening in the world of DTC Shopify this week as everyone is ramping up anxiety levels to ludicrous speed in anticipation of BFCM.

Shopify has not slowed down its impressive dev schedule with no less than eight platform improvements this week, including two big ones in the much anticipated one-page checkout and Audiences 2.1

Here’s what else caught me eye:

• DTC copycat hell

• Shopify Audiences v2.1

• One-page checkout is here

• How to work ON your business

• 4 common email marketing problems

• A comprehensive guide to customer lifetime value

— Kyle Tully

ACQUISITION

DTC copycat hell

Wise words from David Herrmann on how easily we can be swayed by the latest tactic everyone is talking about and how quickly this can disrupt your entire marketing strategy.

• a little creative from here

• a dash of offer from there

• a bidding strategy from anywhere

Before you know it you’re running a Frankenstein marketing campaign with bits and pieces cobbled together from a dozen different sources and wondering why you can’t replicate the success of others.

David reminds us of some of the important lessons passed on from David Ogilvy you can use as a filter for deciding which, what, when, and how you apply the strategies and tactics you hear:

Lesson 1: Do your homework

Lesson 2: Focus on benefits

Blind copying might not break your business, but it can certainly put a nice dent in it.

CONVERSION

A comprehensive guide to customer lifetime value

Customer lifetime value is one of those metrics that when you finally get it — and figure out how on earth to actually calculate it — everything changes.

The idea is simple. Customer lifetime value (abbreviated to CLV or LTV depending on who you listen to) represents the total worth of a customer over the lifetime of their relationship with you.

If the average customer buys 3 times and spends $100 each time, your CLV is $300.

This lets you know how much you can afford to spend to get a customer.

Once you know this number you can slice and dice it to figure out the segments of customers who are most and least valuable and adjust course accordingly.

• Perhaps customers coming from SEO are twice as valuable as those from TikTok.

• Maybe people who accept an upsell end up being five times more valuable than those who don’t.

• You might find people 26-35 are only half as valuable as those 36-45.

The ever-elusive CLV metric has escaped most ecommerce business owner’s attention. Perhaps because it can be difficult to calculate on Shopify. RetentionX is aiming to change that and wrote a comprehensive guide to CVL for Shopify that is well worth the time investment.

EMAIL MARKETING

4 common email marketing problems

Jimmy Kim from Sendlane wrote a tasty little morsel of a post this week breaking down the 4 most common problems with the email accounts he audits.

Worth a read, but some takeaways:

1. Treat opt-ins, customers, and repeat customers differently. (Aggressive, easy, love.)

2. Segment by lifecycle and behaviour not just engagement.

3. Single CTA repeated multiple times.

4. Focus on clicks and what drives them. Do more of that.

5. Clicks are your KPI with a 5%+ goal for email and 25%+ for SMS.

I can’t stress enough how much of a goldmine email is if you take the time to do it right.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

How to work ON your business

The average ecommerce business has so many moving pieces and so many things that can catch fire on any given day (both good and bad) that it’s easy to get stuck working IN your business:

• customer support

• dealing with suppliers

• packing and shipping orders

• running social media campaigns

Without careful planning, it’s easy to forget to work ON your business:

• analysing customer feedback to iterate product design

• carefully crafting and adjusting long-term strategy

• diving into analytics and hypothesising new tests

• fostering win-win partnerships across all areas

This simple idea from Brennan Dunn of scheduling time in your calendar for “1% improvement” — a dedicated time block every day/week/month to work on your business — is a winner.

Try it and let me know how it impacts your business over the next 90 days.

SHOPIFY NEWS

One-page checkout is here

After what feels like years (ahem, it has been years) one-page checkout is finally rolling out.

The demos look good and while the basic info you input is the same, the streamlined one-page process does feel quicker. Fewer clicks and screen refreshes can only be a good thing.

The new checkout experience will be available to everyone by October 2.

Plus merchants who have updated to checkout extensibility will see the new one-page layout in your checkout editor right away.

If you are on the Basic, Shopify, and Advanced plan, your checkout will be auto-updated to the new design first week of October.

In case you’re wondering, abandoned checkouts are created once a customer is attached to the checkout by inputting a phone number or email.

Shopify Audiences v2.1

Good news for Shopify Plus merchants, Audiences 2.1 is out and according to Shopify, it can help you cut your customer acquisition costs by up to 50%.

Audiences 2.1 also includes:

• The best-performing algorithms yet to drive more conversions.

• New benchmarks dashboard so you can compare and optimise your campaigns.

• Support for three new ad channels - TikTok, Snapchat, and Criteo.

Audiences now supports six channels in total, including the existing incumbents Meta, Google, and Pinterest.

Eight new Shopify updates

• Manage Gift Cards with added “Gift Card ID” column in reports - see which gift cards were used for which orders.

• Acquire new wholesale customers with company account requests - the Shopify Forms app now has a customizable account request form to enable prospective B2B customers to submit their information for review.

• POS Go Remote Logout - you can now remotely log out devices.

• Shopify Flow - New Log output action - this action allows you to display the value of variables in the workflow run log, without taking action in the workflow.

• Edit your Shopify Inbox chat widget’s button - You can now customize the Shopify Inbox chat widget’s icons and text.

• New input setting text_alignment introduced.

• Enhancements to range and select input settings.

• More ways to filter products in admin - There are now more ways to filter and sort products in admin, layering in filtering for all metafield reference types.

INSPO OF THE WEEK

Cowboy electric bikes (operating on the killer cowboy.com domain) lean into their sleek product design with an equally impressive website featuring the longest product page I think I’ve ever seen. If you’re selling an expensive product with lots of technical bits to explain then this is a great site to break down and analyse.

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