🧾 Shopify Tax

Welcome to Morning Commerce!

This week I’ve been busy helping some of my Shopify Plus clients migrate from Shopify Scripts and Checkout.liquid to Checkout Extensibility and Shopify Functions. So far so good! You’ve got until August 13 2024 to make the switch but the sooner the better IMO.

Here’s what’s on my radar:

• Shopify Q3 earnings

• Shopify Tax Platform

• November 2023 core update

• How to drive traffic in Google Discover

• Generative AI comes to Performance Max

• What difference does a theme decision make?

— Kyle Tully

ACQUISITION

Generative AI comes to Performance Max

Generating gobs of top-notch creative has always been a struggle for fast-moving brands. AI is proving to be the perfect tech to solve this problem, and Google is the latest company to add generative AI capabilities to their ad platform, with the release of generative AI in Performance Max.

Starting with just your website URL, the system will scan your site and populate your campaign with text and other assets, plus suggest images uniquely generated for your business.

You can then further refine the assets generated using both text-to-text and text-to-image prompts. Plus you’ll be able to enhance both generated and existing assets with AI-powered image-editing tools.

And Google AI will never create two identical images, so no more worries about your competitors using the same stock images.

What’s most impressive is these generated assets take performance data into account, creating one of the largest self-learning ad creation platforms on the planet. Scary. Nice!

AI asset generation is available in the US for now, with other countries set to roll out in 2024.

CONVERSION

What difference does a theme decision make?

There’s no way to sugarcoat it, some Shopify themes are just slow.

Bloated javascript. Unnecessary CSS. Poor programming decisions.

And there’s only so far you can optimise them before it makes sense to start looking at other options.

If you found your theme way down in the rankings in last week’s “How fast is your Shopify Theme?“ article and are thinking about changing themes, you might be wondering just how much of a real-world difference a change can make.

Wonder no more…

After testing a bunch of different themes, st_malachy made the switch to the lightweight Paper theme and in the last 40 days conversions are up 54% 👀

Now, this isn’t a scientific A/B test as many variables changed at once (the theme, layout, and time period for starters), but we know speed is a conversion booster and this is another solid anecdote to add to the list.

SEO

How to drive traffic in Google Discover

Google Discover was introduced by Google in 2018 but has largely gone unnoticed by most ecommerce sites. Until now.

If you’re unfamiliar with Discover, it’s a queryless Google feature that shows curated content to logged-in users across Google apps and websites. And it’s been known to drive tens of thousands of clicks to a site in a day.

Most of the time, Discover shows trendy, timely, viral-style content from news-style websites and blogs. But it will show ecommerce product pages and other high-converting pages to in-market prospects from time to time.

If you’re tapping out other traffic sources or just keen to add something new to the mix, this ultimate guide by Moz is worth a read.

Among other things it covers:

• Ensuring technical eligibility for Discover

• Understanding user affinities & entities

• Getting the image right

• Using web stories & video

November 2023 core update

Google started rolling out the November 2023 core update on the 2nd. It’s expected to take up to 2 weeks to roll out. It can’t be any worse than the last one… can it?

SHOPIFY NEWS

Shopify Q3 earnings

Shopify president Harvey Finkelstein appeared on CNBC to talk Q3 earnings, with a glowing Jim Cramer singing Shopify praises.

The highlights:

• GMV was over $56 billion up 22%

• Revenue hit $1.7 billion and was up 25%

• Free Cash Flow was over $270 million

Harvey also talked about:

• The benefits of AI being integrated into the platform.

• Some of the biggest brands moving to Shopify including Ted Baker, Tom, Quicksilver, Billabong, and LVMH.

• Why he believes Shopify merchants large and small will see outsize returns this holiday season.

• Amazon’s Buy with Prime app.

Shopify Tax Platform

Five new Shopify updates

• Extensibility is now available for Plus merchants on thank you and order status pages - Plus merchants can now use the checkout editor to customize the appearance and functionality of checkout.

• Connect your preferred tax service to Shopify with the Shopify Tax Platform.

• New granular staff permissions for Orders - there are 12 new, more granular staff permissions to fine-tune what staff can access.

• Update and automate gift card email sending with on/off toggle - Preview gift card emails and control whether or not to send gift cards manually on creation by adjusting the default setting for this sending behavior from your Gift Card > settings in your Shopify admin.

• Improved Shopify Collabs creator profile pages.

INSPO OF THE WEEK

The Flings PDP is a treasure trove of features to discover. Each flavour has its own unique style page, starting with a custom colour scheme all the way down to custom animations and different content sections for features, ingredients, and lifestyle images. Not sure if I’m a fan of the reversed layout (with the image right and ATC left) but it does get attention, and the massive ATC button helps orient you.

How we can help…

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