🏎️ Speed

It’s Wednesday and you know what that means… Morning Commerce. 

Here’s what’s in this issue:

• $3k/day on Amazon

• Shop expands to the web

• Lewis Hamilton on Shopify

• How fast is your Shopify Theme?

• Google mobile-first indexing has landed

• 7 reasons to be optimistic about ecommerce

• New AR beauty tools for shoppers and brands

— Kyle Tully

ACQUISITION

New AR beauty tools for shoppers and brands

Google Shopping introduced AR beauty tools over 3 years ago, and continues to bring innovative features to the platform.

The latest addition is the ability for shoppers to virtually try on hair color and foundation, and access AR beauty tools on mobile browsers.

And exciting news for beauty brands who can now promote products with AR Beauty ads.

$3k/day on Amazon

I’ve seen a lot of brands over-think launching on Amazon. And to be fair, there are plenty of reasons you might not want to sell on there… but there are also 3,000 reasons (per week) you might want to think about it.

Zack is spending a little on Amazon Ads to hit these numbers:

• “Today we spent $490 and did $4,697.”

• “I’ve spent a total of $1,073 so far to generate $15,310.”

And no doubt the paid social ads on Meta that drive to the DTC site are also leading to people searching on Amazon for the brand.

Never underestimate the power a brand like Amazon has on consumer confidence, especially for first-time purchasers.

You and I might be comfortable buying from a new random Shopify store every other day, but plenty of shoppers are still super cautious and would rather shop on Amazon when possible.

Google mobile-first indexing has landed

Mobile visits now dominate most website traffic — in some areas, people almost exclusively use mobile devices to access the web. Google has been slowly moving to a mobile-first focus since 2015. That move — to what they call “Mobile First Indexing“ — is now complete.

What does this mean? 

If your site works on mobile, then they will prioritise crawling it with their mobile Googlebot. And here’s the important part — their ranking systems will now look at the mobile version of a page's content to evaluate its relevance to the user.

If your site flat out doesn’t work on mobile (throws errors or is blocked via robots.txt etc), then they will continue to crawl it from the desktop Googlebot. But this will likely be sunset in the not-too-distant future.

You can look at your Crawl Stats report to see how Google is currently crawling your site.

CONVERSION

How fast is your Shopify Theme?

The Shopify web performance team continue to pump out helpful content, this week it’s a comprehensive comparison of theme performance against Google's Core Web Vitals.

What’s interesting about this comparison is they used real-world data over a 7-day period from stores using the most popular themes. So these scores aren’t just based on demo stores, but real stores fully built out with various apps installed.

The biggest issues they found?

And their recommended immediate steps for merchants?

There are large speed differences between themes so if you’re in the market for a redesign this is worth taking a look at and factoring into your decision.

The other interesting piece of data in this article is you can see the most popular non theme store themes such as Avone and Wookie, which tend to be feature-rich but performance-poor.

So how fast is your Shopify theme? Check out the full article and data table.

And if you’re thinking of going headless for better performance? (Don’t) They also have a nice write up on Liquid Vs Headless here.

“Done well, headless can be fast. The catch? Data suggests that it’s not common to see headless implemented in a way that supports great performance.“

In my experience, headless can make sense when you have very specific customisation or integration reasons, but if it’s performance you’re after then standard Liquid is the way to go. (You’ll also save yourself $100k or so.)

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

7 reasons to be optimistic about ecommerce

If you’re in a rut right now it’s easy to let the doom and gloom naysayers get into your head. We’re hard-wired to pay attention to negative news more than positive so it’s easy to fall into pessimistic thought patterns.

This tidy little thread from Andrew Faris sheds light on some of the more positive things ecom has going for it:

1. The world is quickly getting a lot richer.

2. Online retail specifically keeps growing.

3. DTC is getting smarter.

4. Meta's incentive to keep being a great source of customer acquisition is gigantic.

5. Google's (and others) incentive to grow in this continues.

6. The DTC software infrastructure is massive and awesome.

7. People are smart and figure things out.

Some of my client’s biggest breakthroughs came just after their toughest battles. You’ve got this 😉

Optimising returns… or not

One thing I’ve been thinking about this week is optimising returns.

A fashion client was worried about their 9% return rate. (The average return rate for fashion ecom is around 20%.) There are a few things we can do — better sizing guides, more detailed descriptions, more photos, live customer support etc.

But at some point very quickly you hit a point of diminishing returns (no pun intended) where those resources are better spent growing the business.

For example, if 9% returns equal $10k in sales then your max impact here is $10k. And you’ll likely get nowhere near that because a certain percentage of people are always going to return for one reason or another. Let’s say you halve your return rate and have an extra $5k in your pocket.

Great… but optimising ads, email flows, or social marketing? There is no max impact on these efforts. A single campaign could be worth $100k or more.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t optimise and get your returns as low as possible, but it’s important to focus where you can have the biggest impact and be OK with not everything being perfect.

SHOPIFY NEWS

Shop expands to the web

Shop is now available on the web at shop.app/search

There is a search auto-suggest feature on the page that’s worth playing with to see what search phrases you’re potentially showing up for.

And don’t forget you can manage what shows up on your Shop page by managing the sales channels each product shows up on.

Lewis Hamilton on Shopify

Legendary F1 driver Lewis Hamilton just launched the first non-alcoholic tequila, Almave, and it’s powered by Shopify. They also got the nod for our inspo of the week site down below.

Six new Shopify updates

• Hydrogen v2023.10 has been released - Hydrogen v2023.10 is now available including a number of new features and breaking changes.

• Structured return reasons - you can now capture data on in-store returns with staff now able to select from a static list of return reasons when performing a return.

• Send cart POS attribution - when a customer completes an online checkout from the email link sent from the retail store, the Send Cart feature now accurately attributes the sale to POS channel, Retail location and Staff member.

• Shopify Payments now supports multiple payment captures for the same order - now you can capture partial payment multiple times directly from the Orders Page or using the GraphQL API.

• New POS UI extensions activation in admin - new setting allows you to add and remove third-party app POS UI extensions to the Smart Grid from Shopify admin.

• Markets Pro - Shipping Label Price Adjustments - Merchants will see shipping label price adjustments in their Payouts moving forward, with details available in Order timeline events.

INSPO OF THE WEEK

Not all brand collabs make sense. (Ralph Lauren x Fortnite… amirite?!) But a non-alcoholic beverage and a professional race car driver is a match made in heaven. Almave has done a great job on their Our Story page of nailing this point. “I’ve always loved a good tequila, but on days or nights when I needed a clear mind - either the night before a race or while hanging with friends…“

How we can help…

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