Hello and welcome to another episode of the winning Shopify
podcast is Tuesday, which can mean only one thing.
It's time for a Tuesday tea break talks.
We're going to be enjoying a nice cup of tea.
I'm going to introduce the tea in a second.
Lorna from the Bean shop there. It says tea shop on the side of
the tea packets, but Lorna from Bean Shop sent me a whole range
of teas I'm going to be trying over the next next couple of
months. So thank you Lorna, and thank
you for everybody for tuning into these.
These are quite fun if you've never listened to one of these
before. I've looked down a lot because
I've actually got notes for once.
Normally we just have a nice chat, but I've got notes that I
have to run through. We're going to talk about the
tea. We've got some good quotes of
the week about e-commerce. We've got some Shopify news.
We don't have partner news. Why are you telling me that,
Nick? Well, we normally do, but we
don't have any partner news this week.
And we've got some learnings from the agency and we've got a
thing called Quivia, which is a question about a piece of
trivia, which is all quite fun. But without further ado, whilst
I'm pouring, I've got loose leaf.
If you're watching this, we've got these world famous, they're
not really winning shop 5 mugs which I had printed cheaply on
the interwebs and we've got some loose leaf tea.
The tea is in there, it's been brewing.
I brewed it to 80°. Tends to be the best for tea to
get the most flavour out of it. I don't actually know what I'm
doing, this is all written in my notes, although I did brew it to
that temperature. The winter tea, this one's
called winter tea is from the tea shop and it offers multiple
benefits including boosting circulation and warmth support
the immune system love this with antioxidants and vitamin C and
age digestion through the soothing spices.
It is very spicy, as in not hot as in like it's going to burn my
mouth. But it's there's a lot of
spices, like a kind of cinnamon vibe I'm getting from that, a
kind of pumpkin winter spice like you would in a nice coffee
and antioxidant protection. It relieves sore throats and
congestion, which I've got to tune in next week to see if I'm
still alive, see if it's worked and promote relaxation and mood
balance and maintain it, maintain hydration during cold
weather. It's freezing in the UK, so I
say freezing. I'm an absolute wimp.
I live down in the South. It must be about 7 or 8°C today
in Fahrenheit, like a million or something.
I don't know what the Fahrenheit is.
But anyway, we're going to dive in.
I'm going to try this tea quickly.
It does smell very spicy. It's almost like a kind of
mulled wine type vibe. You only get mulled wine and you
put cinnamon sticks and orange and stuff in.
Very nice anyone is just listening to this is going.
I'm literally listening to a man tasting tea on audio only.
What is my life become anyway, let's jump in so quote of the
week. We've got three quotes all about
Black Friday and sorry, 2 are about Black Friday ones.
Not need to come from my team. Liv and Millie have put these
together this week. Daisy is taking a much needed
holiday for the next few days and you can't go into Black
Friday and put 15% off, 20% off and expect to do well.
Make sure your offer is compelling no matter what.
It's a lesson for all of us. How many brands like the finance
director said we could do 10%? It's like there's a whole
psychology of marketing. Have a real think about those
offers. The second great is Black
Friday. I love this one.
Black Friday, the day we all become professional shoppers.
I love that. I don't know about you.
I have a bit of a shopping list every year and every the last
three or four years I've been a bit disappointed to be honest,
with the discounts we've got. I remember when Black Friday 1st
became a big thing in the UK and we were getting 6070% off
things, whereas now it's like 10 or 20, which it was a lot more
reasonable. And the third quote is your
platform is only as good as the story it helps you tell.
Every customer journey on Shopify is a chapter in your
brand's book. Love that telling stories
through marketing is really, really important.
I don't know if you have it in every country as well.
Just on the side note, telling stories every year, the UKI
think it's a Telegraph newspaper here does a top ten TV adverts
and they're they've been getting more and more emotive and
passionate the last few years. I'd say last sort of five to 10
years. John Lewis always featured quite
high on them and amongst their other brands and a couple of our
clients got in over the last few years, which is fun right to
Shopify news. What's been going on and
duplicate to user groups to speed up set up and the
description says you can now duplicate user groups in one
click on the plus plan only sorry non plus planners if you
thinking about grading to plus, I'll talk about that minute.
Let's finish the description first.
I'm so sidetracked at the moment.
It's nearly Christmas, I need a break.
So yeah, you can now duplicate user groups with one click on
the Plus plan only all roles and store assignments copy over
automatically so you don't have to rebuild similar groups from
scratch. That's quite useful.
But on the Plus plan, I've had a few people reach out and I
think, I think I actually said this last week or a couple of
weeks ago, if you're on the standard plan of thinking of
upgrading to Plus and you look at it and go beyond the
financial benefits of the upgrade, what are the actual
benefits to me? And I keep saying back to people
like, well, if that's the only benefit, we'll crack on and do
it. Saves you money.
You're a business, you're an e-commerce store.
Cash is king. Save some cash by paying a
slightly higher fee for the platform each month into plus,
but then you save on each transaction, which should
actually make you a profit when you reach the right point.
So in your business plan, work out what point are we going to
cross that threshold? Really, really important.
Next one. Capital Flex is now live in the
US. Eligible US merchants can access
Capital Flex. Continuous access to working at
Capital. So you can unlock some cash of
stuff that's not even sold yet. We've actually had Shopify on
the show. I'm trying to think, I think I
recorded it in my old house. It would have been 2020 during
Covic when I was at home recording one of these and we
were talking about this kind of thing with a lady called Tui.
She's no longer at Shopify, but we spoke about a very similar
thing. But there's a new thing called
capital Flex in the US. So you can access working
capital, borrow what you need, when you need it up to your
limit. As you repay your available
funds, replenish as well. So if you're predicting a big
Black Friday or you're doing a big push of something or you can
do a big sale and you know we're starting to make profit on that
sale, you can access cash. It might be instantaneous.
It says continue access to working capital.
But if it's worth getting that, even if you're not going to use
it, I will send business. The more capital you've got
access to, the more money you can spend when you need to spend
it, when you know you're going to make it back.
Or if a big bill comes up and you think we just need to
swallow that somehow. The working capital's there, you
can use it. I don't know if Shopify can be
used for that specifically, but yeah, have a look into it.
Yeah, it's called Capital Flex. It's US only.
Sorry, everybody over here on the little island of the UK now,
the sip of tea, is that the perfect temperature?
Going to enjoy the right temperature.
You can pay US suppliers instantly with same day ACH from
Shopify Balance. I think Shopify Balance is what
we were talking about in the show years ago.
I have so many guests on here, it's quite hard to remember what
was going on. I remember too and I we spoke
about something very similar. We can access cash, introduce
same day ACH for Shopify Balance users in the US only again.
But again, US tends to be the first place.
Most changes are rolled out across lots of tech platforms,
so expect it to go worldwide once it's been tweaked.
And it's working well, making it faster to pay suppliers and
partners on the same business day, which is quite useful,
especially if you're ordering products.
That's probably someone where they'll say we're not going to
dispatch your new stock until you have paid to be able to pay
them quickly. Just saves time waiting three,
5-10 days when you've already run out of stock and you're
trying to replenish it. Or you could talk to our partner
inventory planner to avoid that happening in the 1st place by
better planning for your inventory next one.
There's loads this week. A cash cheques on the go with
Shopify Balance. Merchants can now snap photos of
paper cheques, a comment about this in a minute and cash them
directly into their Shopify Balance account, which is pretty
cool. So Shopify Balance account is
basically working like a bank account.
What I find hilarious is both the spelling of checks.
Because this is American, you call it CHECHCKS.
Sorry, we spell check CHEQUES and we wrote the language first.
It's the English language. It's funny how much you guys
have changed stuff. It's also funny that you use
cheques. I think I've received one in the
last five years and that was a rebate, a refund from an energy
company. When I moved house, I just, they
owed me some money, excited credit on my electricity account
and they sent me some money. It's funny you guys still use
cheques. We are, we're so digital here in
the UK now. La La, La La.
Two more new collection duplication.
Oh my gosh, Shopify, why has this taken so long?
Duplicate any collection to reuse the settings, the products
and conditions, to run recurring campaigns and test the
merchandising faster. Oh my gosh, we make so many
collections when we're doing an SEO and I'm so glad we can click
a button now and duplicate that. We run things.
For example, if we made a collection that was of a very
niche, filter down to a certain niche type of product and say we
wanted a collection for each of the colours and there were 8
colours moment, we have to create a new collection and then
put all of the criteria again or use something like Matrix
Suffice, download and upload it. It's a bit just clicking
duplicate and going that one was red.
Let's change red to blue and use the tag for blue products.
Bosch done nice and quick. So thank you, Shopify.
That is finally, finally available, which is good.
And November 4th as well. They also announced exclude
products by tag in smart Collections.
It used to be that you could only include products with tags.
You can now exclude them as well.
So tag is not equal to condition.
Again, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
We make so many collections in SEO.
This is super useful. Carrying on the thread about
SEO, we are into the agency learnings and updates.
I'm going to start with SEO. SEO is always second on my list
of my notes, but I'm going to start with that because Liv and
Millie are in the SEO team days in the BBC team, which might be
why days a bit first, but we'll let her off.
So on SEO, something everybody needs to go and do for ChatGPT
and AI bots definitely implement Bing's what's called index now.
So go on Google and say go on Google, go on Bing.
You search for either search engine.
It's just so as much as I do indoors Bing and I think Bing's
a fantastic platform. We spend a lot of money in it.
We probably spend more on it as a percentage to spend than most
agencies at almost any agency in the world.
But I just think in my head like, let's go Google it, Let's
go Bing it. Why don't we Bing it?
So you can use the thing called index now.
It's ChatGPT uses a lot of Bing signals.
Bing and ChatGPT will open AI very much in bed with each other
in terms of integrations and how they work and some of the
information that gets passed. So index now is a feature that
allows you to allows instant indexing post site update.
So when you update your site, bang, go and update this page
now and index it on AI. One of the biggest questions, of
course, we get asked an SEO pitch at the moment.
It's like, what about AI? You think about our AI structure
and how we're going to be on all the AI bots and people are
looking for products or services.
So we're doing a lot with this. It is flagged as a high severity
issue in Bing Webmaster Tools when you don't implement it.
So it is super important. And the thing we don't know at
the moment is a question that we're going to try and answer
over the next few weeks and months as we keep playing with
these things because it's a very new feature keep.
Could adding it increase Bing visibility and therefore ChatGPT
visibility? We are, we're testing it on all
of our clients at the moment. We've rolled it out because it's
very, very quick and easy to do. But if it has an uplift, we want
to be there. All right, this is a good one
then from the PPC team, I believe this will be Elliot
based on the subject matter. So thank you, Elliot.
We noticed that the main campaign for one of our clients
wasn't performing very well and that is because bundled products
you can buy, one individual product you can buy in a pack.
The packs themselves and the bundled products were lagging
for a few weeks. So we take, we watch things
every day in the agency here to look for trends.
Is this like OK, we just had three or four bad days and
suddenly improves. That's very normal.
Things just go up and down. The less you're spending, the
less percentage of the time you appear that you could.
Therefore, you're going to find lower performance.
I'll repeat that again, the percentage if you imagine it's
called impression share, say for the 100% of the time you could
appear if you're on a low budget and you're only appearing for
say 5 or 10% of the time, say it's 10%.
Let's keep it simple. Then there's only a one in 10
chance you're going to appear in front of each of the customers
that's looking versus the other nine that's that are looking if
that was the percentage. So again, the more you spend,
the more days you're going to get the quick you can refine.
But in this particular one, bundles, cases, packs, when
performing as well, they were lagging back for a few weeks.
In this situation it's like, right, it's been a week or so,
we need to do something about this now.
It's affecting overall performance and it wasn't just a
bad week, it's like it's actually started to get much
worse. So to fix it, we've split packs
into their own campaign and separated out the individual
products by their colours, by splitting them out by colour.
There's a lot of work to do this.
There are ways we do it a little bit quicker, but it's generally
it's, it's a lot of work to do this.
But the change has made a massive difference.
The packs and bundles have started performing much better.
We've gained more control now that we've got more campaigns.
So we can shuffle budgets literally day by day or week by
week or every few days as campaigns.
If one's got a higher ROI and it's outperforming its target,
we start spending a bit more in there.
That hands on approach has helped this business sort of
turn around just in time for Black Friday and Peak as well,
which is fantastic. We've now got more budget
focused on the cases and packs have a higher average order
value, less on the individual items.
The individual items used to have a higher rowers, not
anymore, right guys? It is time for Quivia.
I'm going to ask. We've actually got 2 this week.
Liv is spoiling us. I think she's just trying to
outdo Daisy because I know Liv really wants to do these and I
know Millie's chipped into these things as well.
So thank you Liv and Millie. These are from you guys.
True or false? Black Friday is always on the
last Friday of November. True or false?
Quick tipity discussed with anyone near you or just talk out
loud in whatever environment you're in right now.
And the answer is false. It is always the day after
Thanksgiving. I think you guys in the US are
like, come on Nick, you must. I won't do an American accent.
You must know this is what you're probably all thinking.
But most of us here in the UK and outside of the US, yes, yes,
there are more countries shopping online than just
America at the moment. But outside the US, like
Thanksgiving is, is certainly not as widely celebrated for
obvious reasons because it's AUS holiday.
So we probably don't know that. And then the last Quivia just
before we say a very sorrow goodbye ahead of Friday's
episode. And what is the expected amount
of money that the UK will spend over Black Friday this year?
So UK start one for US1 for UK. What is the expected amount of
money that UK will spend over Black Friday this year?
This tea's delicious. It's definitely one of my top
teas. Might have to get more of this
one. The answer is 14 billion pounds,
£14 billion over Black Friday this year.
Thank you for listening everybody.
It's been great having you all here and I hope you have an
amazing rest of the week. And we'll see you again on
Friday. If you've not tuned in before,
hit subscribe. Leave us a review if you
haven't. You haven't done those two
things. Go and do those two things.
And on Friday we'll have a full, full episode.
These are little mini ones on Tuesdays, but we'll have a full
episode on Friday as well. And a massive shout out to our
our Spotify audience. You guys are growing and also a
few of you've reached out for our help as well, which is how I
know Spotify started working for us, which is amazing because
we've been working really hard to get our Spotify views up.
So yeah, if you haven't already, leave us a comment on Spotify in
the description. Hello, Elliot.
Keeping an eye on those. And so Byron, so let's get back
to you very, very shortly. Thanks much for tuning in back
again on Friday.