⚖️ Stores sued

It’s Wednesday. Time for Morning Commerce.

We’re now a full month into that Woocommerce to Shopify project I told you about. I’m happy to report conversions have held steady at 2.5X the old site, and more importantly, sales are up from an average of $50k/m to over $120k in the last 30 days.

Shopify is a thing of beauty.

Coming up:

• Sued for fake discount timers

• European ecommerce report 2023

• Another day, another Google core update

• The content strategy of a $100k MRR brand

• How to increase conversion rate: 14 tactics for 2024

• How to uncover hidden, high-converting landing pages

• Google Ads rolls out Demand Gen to all customers globally

• One of the best product pages I’ve ever seen. (Oprah agrees.)

— Kyle Tully

ACQUISITION

European ecommerce report 2023

Ecommerce Europe — an association representing 150,000 companies throughout Europe — dropped a 97-page behemoth of a report (PDF) on the state of ecommerce in the region.

Some highlights:

• Turnover in European B2C e-commerce increased

  from €849bn in 2021 to €899bn in 2022.

• Growth slowed from 12% in 2021 to 6% in 2022, but is forecast to slightly increase to 8% in 2023.

• Online sales are expected to keep growing in the coming

  years, reaching an estimated 30% of retail sales by 2030.

• 76% of internet users in Europe shopped online in 2022, increasing to a projected 78% in 2023.

If you’re selling anywhere in Europe — or want to — there are sure to be some juicy tidbits in here for you.

Google Ads rolls out Demand Gen to all customers globally

Demand Gen is Google’s new AI-powered campaign designed to, as the name implies, drive demand.

These campaigns are for driving conversions, site visits, and signups on Google’s entertainment-focused touch points — YouTube (including Shorts), Discover and Gmail.

• Use video and image ads in one campaign: including short-form videos, carousels, portraits, and square images.

• Find customers with Lookalike segments: use first-party data and Google will match it with audience intent and interest signals.

• Drive performance based on your unique goals: Similar to Discovery ads, you can optimize Demand Gen for conversions or use value-based bidding strategies. Or, if you want to drive high-value customers to your website, you can optimize for site visits and actions with Maximize Clicks bidding.

It’s now available to all Google Ads users.

The content strategy of a $100k MRR brand

The lowly Shopify blog is one of the most under-used and under-appreciated growth strategies available for free to every store owner.

If you sell to a market that has questions about your product or how to use it… compares your product to the competition or other alternatives… or just searches for your product category online… then you should be blogging.

Ash has a nice mini breakdown of some of the strategies Beardbrand uses to get in front of potential customers at each stage of the customer journey.

What’s missing from your content strategy?

CONVERSION

How to uncover hidden, high-converting landing pages

Shane shares a bunch of simple (but sneaky) tricks you can use to find “hidden” pages on Shopify stores… like secret offer pages and paid traffic landing pages.

He likes to start with the Facebook Ads library to find interesting stores he can dig into. From there…

1. Add /sitemap_pages_1.xml to the url of any store to see all their pages. (At least those not hidden from the sitemap)

2. Use the Google site: command to see what else comes up on Google.

3. Use an SEO spider tool to dig even deeper.

Fairly basic stuff for web-native people but if this is new to you prepare to have your mind blown at what you can discover!

How to increase conversion rate: 14 tactics for 2024

Increasing sales online comes down to two fundamentals:

• Traffic

• Conversion

If you double either one, you double your sales. (In a perfect world.)

While traffic tends to get the lion’s share of people’s attention, conversion is often the easier metric to manipulate.

The Shopify Plus content team posted another banger this week, detailing no less than 14 tactics to improve your conversion rate.

My advice: treat this like an action plan. Don’t just “read” it. Do it. Dedicate a sprint to each item and you’ve got months of conversion-boosting tests you can run.

Sued for fake discount timers

Cialdini’s 6 Principles of Persuasion are powerful conversion boosters, but you must use them for good not evil.

Ecommerce sites are being sued for all kinds of “Cialdini abuses” where they have created fake urgency, scarcity, or social proof through the use of things such as fake timers, fake stock numbers, and fake “just purchased” widgets.

If you’ve ever installed an app like this it might be a good idea to do a quick audit and make sure you’re not accidentally running afoul of the law trying to eke out a few more percentages on your conversion rate.

SEO

Another day, another Google core update

Is it just me or are the search results getting worse with every update?

SHOPIFY NEWS

The Shopify counter is back

Check current availability here.

One new Shopify update

• Preview Gift Cards before sending! - You can now preview Gift Cards before sending them via email or SMS, from within the Shopify admin.

INSPO OF THE WEEK

Judy was featured as one of Oprah’s favourite things of ‘23, so you know they’re having a pretty OK year. They also sport one of the best product pages I’ve seen lately ever — with a bold hero section, value-packed “what‘s inside” image, top-notch product photos, a no-brainer comparison table, and education content sure to scare anyone into buying 👌

How we can help…

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