😶‍🌫️ Smokeless

Welcome to Morning Commerce!

Kyle here with another issue full of Shopify goodies:

• BFCM Live

• Snoop Dogg X Solo Stove

• Optimising collection filters

• Shopify speed optimisation scam

• How a native Amazon brand hit 1 million orders on Shopify

— Kyle Tully

ACQUISITION

Snoop Dogg X Solo Stove

“I’m giving up smoke”.

So read the cryptic Tweet from Snoop on Nov 17.

Four days and 149 million views later, the second piece of this brilliant campaign landed, with a second Tweet (and another 59 million views) announcing “I'm done with smoke. I'm going smokeless with @SoloStove“.

Press announcing Snoop as the official spokesman of Solo Stove hit at the same time announcing the launch of the Limited Edition Bonfire Snoop Dogg Collaboration.

All in all a brilliant campaign.

One blunder though: the promo website for the campaign goingsmokeless.com currently redirects to a 404 page on their website. I imagine there are a LOT of links and leads going wasted right now.

How a native Amazon brand hit 1 million orders on Shopify

DTC on Shopify is a different beast than selling on Amazon.

Many brands from both sides have failed to make a successful transition to the other platform. Whether it’s a Shopify brand failing to get traction with the notoriously price-sensitive Amazon shoppers, or Amazon sellers struggling to build a brand and drive traffic on Shopify, the struggle is real.

Simple Modern is a native Amazon brand that recently hit the 1 million orders on Shopify milestone. One of the co-founders, Bryan Porter, wrote a solid post laying out their challenges, the solution, and where their breakthroughs came from.

The Challenge: 

Amazon and DTC pricing strategies are opposite.

The Solution:

1. Limited edition drops. Collect names and emails of website visitors and market directly to prospects with high-margin limited edition products not available anywhere else.

2. Bundling. “With each additional item added to a cart our margins skyrocket. It costs us $12/unit to fulfill 1 item but only $2.70/unit to fulfill 6 items in the same box.“

3. Personalisation. Build personalisation features into the website so customers can personalise their products for a small fee.

Well worth reading the full post and be sure to check out their site to see how they’re implementing some of this stuff.

CONVERSION

Optimising collection filters

If you want to totally nerd out on how to optimise your collection filters then Baymard’s latest research breakdown is what the Dr ordered.

TLDR; put the most important filters for each collection — the ones that will help users quickly filter the list to their preferences — at the top of the filter list.

SHOPIFY NEWS

BFCM Live

As if the engineers at Shopify aren’t busy enough, they’re back again with another update to the BFCM live map website.

Check out the website to see what sales across over 1 million independent retailers look like this BFCM, including:

• Sales per minute

• Orders per minute

• Carbon offset amounts

• Active flash sales in progress

And who knows what other new data they’ll reveal this year 😉

Shopify speed optimisation scam

While doing regular updates on one of our client sites I noticed some extremely concerning code in their theme.liquid file.

Obfuscated javascript that at first glance is impossible to understand — and in almost every case is a sign of some kind of hack or scam:

<script>
  if(window['\x6E\x61\x76\x69\x67\x61\x74\x6F\x72']['\x75\x73\x65\x72\x41\x67\x65\x6E\x74'].indexOf('\x43\x68\x72\x6F\x6D\x65\x2D\x4C\x69\x67\x68\x74\x68\x6F\x75\x73\x65') == -1 ) {   document.write({{pDescription | json}}); } else { } document.close();  
</script>

A little investigation led me to an old speed optimisation scam that seems to be doing the rounds again.

The scam is extremely simple:

• Someone reaches out to the store owner (usually via cold email or DMs) to let them know their site is slow and let them know they can fix it, usually for a very good price.

• Once the scammer gains access to your site, they add a few simple lines of code that check if the user browsing the site is the Chrome Lighthouse tool — the most popular tool for running speed reports — and if so, instead of loading the site they load a blank page.

• They show you your blazing-fast Lighthouse reports (based on a blank website which of course is going to be very fast) and get paid.

The only problem is your site is not actually any faster… in fact, it’s actually slightly slower for users due to this extra code that checks who is visiting!

If you think you might have fallen pray to this scam please hit reply and let me know and I’ll get you sorted.

Five new Shopify updates

• Shopify Flow: Get notified when errors happen - You can now use the new trigger, Workflow error threshold reached, which will run the first time an error is detected for a workflow version.

• Add, remove, or update discounts on existing line items when editing orders - Previously, discounts could only be added to new items, and couldn't be updated or removed.

• Markets Pro preferential trade agreement support - Markets Pro now supports preferential trade agreements in duties calculations and customs documentation. Merchants should review their products’ country of origin to allow international buyers to take advantage of preferential duties treatment.

• All merchants can now choose between the one-page checkout and three-page checkout - Merchants on the Basic, Shopify, and Advanced plans can now use the theme editor to choose between the one-page checkout (default) or three-page checkout.

• ‘Add a recipient’ and ‘scheduled send’ options on gift cards for customers - Customers can now add a recipient and personalized message to gift cards, as well as schedule their gift card to be sent at a specific time, for a more personal, thoughtful and convenient gifting experience.

INSPO OF THE WEEK

Krave Beauty has nailed the oft-neglected “shop all” page with a custom collection page that breaks down products by series and gives you everything you need to know to find the right product for your needs, first click 👌

How we can help…

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