Hello everybody and welcome to another Tuesday tea break talks.
And today I've been absolutely spoilt, which is good because I
haven't done one of these last week and I missed a few weeks
before that. I had every intention.
I even went away and took my camera microphone, this
microphone with me to record some fun things going on.
But we've done a double week this week with a double things.
But I've been absolutely spoilt in this cup here.
And then we can see it doesn't even look like tea, but it's
smells delicious. It looks, I actually think it
looks like granola, but it smells wonderful.
It is blue pomegranate tea. It's been brewing in there for
about 5 or 10 minutes now. Boiled the kettle to 80, which
apparently is the best thing. So grab a cup of tea and I'm
going to tell you some health benefits of this and then we'll
talk about e-commerce, shall we? Just to just to top things off,
as this is a Winning with Shopify podcast, it's not this
is amazing. Sorry, I'll show you for anyone
watching if you're listening to this, you just have to use your
imagination. But look at the colour of this
tea. It doesn't even I don't know if
I can't really angle the camera anymore that's spilling tea
everywhere, but it's like a pinky colour, which is
absolutely delicious. So we're going to enjoy a nice
cup of blue pomegranate tea. It is rich in goodness, my
notes, rich in antioxidants and has several potential health
benefits, including supporting heart health, reducing
inflammation and boosting the immune system.
All the above I need right now because of the reasons I
couldn't record last week is I wasn't very well and I was
supposed to be on holiday and things were turned upside down.
But we're back now and we are very happy.
We being me, myself and I and my family, but we're all good.
We're going to go through a few things today.
We've got quote of the week. We've got some shop if we've got
loads of Shopify news because we obviously missed last week.
It was my birthday on the 29th of October.
Thanks for the presents everyone sent.
That's a joke. This is English sarcasm.
I didn't get any presents. Well, I actually don't have to
get 2 presents from work, one being this delicious tea from
the bean shop. Lorna, I don't know if you
intended this to be a birthday present, but I've taken it as
one. See we've got loads of Shopify
news to go through. We're not going to have any
partner news this week so don't have to go on too long and we've
got some agency learnings. We've got four things going on
the agency we're going to share about BBC SEO.
We've got an incredible Quivia. It's actually a myth.
I'm busting A myth this week using some stats from the
Telegraph. And then we'll all say a sweet,
sweet sorrow and goodbye. Sorrow as in a sorrow filled
goodbye. Maybe.
Sorry, I've been away for a week and my inbox is carnage.
So I'm just I've literally gone and locked myself in the what
used to be a cupboard. It is now the the podcasting
room. But anyway, I've got 3 quotes.
We've got some quotes sent in. Thank you very much guys.
John has sent in. The best discount is a great
experience. The best discount is a great
experience. So rather than just discounting,
come at the best discount. There's no name on this one.
Everyone's offering deals, so have a think about what will
make yours stand out. Sorry, what will make yours
stand out? Very different grammar.
What will make your stand out is how you deliver that deal.
So you think about the positioning of things and
sometimes you'll even what I love about this quote is
sometimes I think about things and go, do you know what?
I really enjoyed that buying experience from that company or
that shop or whatever it might be.
And then when I thought I was like, they didn't actually even
offer me anything extra. It was like the person at the
till just smiled a lot. Or actually they said, you know,
if you buy 1000 products, you get one for free and the free
one just I wasn't expecting it. Didn't even know I was getting
it. Just a random act of kindness as
far as I was concerned. Then you think like one in 1000
or one in 10 orders or whatever. It's not actually a great deal.
But again, it's is how you deliver the deal is really,
really key. So get good at that in your, in
your businesses. And then final one is action and
audit your post purchase flow this week.
We've been doing loads of testing on this recently where
once you've bought something from a website, actually say,
well, do you want to add something else to the order?
You've got one hour to do so and there'll be no additional
delivery charge. Some companies here in the UK
like delivery do it. I don't know if you have
delivery in the US, in Australia where are lots of our others
listeners are based, but you basically go on delivery and you
can just scroll through tons of different takeaways shops and
order all sorts. You have pizza delivered and all
that kind of stuff through delivery, but delivery did it
really well. Once you've ordered something,
it says for no extra cost, you got 10 minutes to add something
from a local supermarket and there'll be no additional fee or
cost to add something from the supermarket.
Try and encourage more people to use that supermarket journey.
So look at your post purchase flows.
Add a thank you e-mail if you haven't got a decent one
already. Optimize it.
Add a how to guide so the product they've just bought now.
Tell them how to use it before it arrives.
Keep them engaged while they're waiting for the postman to
deliver it. Especially if you're in a
country like America where it takes quite a while often for
delivery to happen. We are so spoiled in the UK.
We get next day delivery almost all the time.
If it's not next day, I actually will reconsider whether I'm
buying it. That's how much our buying
habits have changed and what else?
We got a personalized note and just remember, especially
through Black Friday, Cyber Monday, that actually this isn't
just about getting the transactions and the revenue
over that period. You really need to be thinking
in advance what we're going to do over Black Friday, Cyber
Monday to get people engaged and get them buying from us multiple
times into next year. It's really, really important.
Otherwise you might find your RO is up, but your margins are also
tighter because you put a discount on the products.
So you can end up spending a lot more money and actually not
making much more anyway. So some really good quotes
there. Keep those coming.
I think the tea is drinkable. We're going to try it.
So I love pomegranate, and this is blue pomegranate.
I feel like, not saying it's delicious just because that's
what you're probably expecting me to say, but it is really,
really nice. It's very fruity and the best
thing about loose leaf tea in a thing you can actually, you can
put water back in it two or three times and it still tastes
delicious. So you get several cups of tea
out of 1 little pot, which is lovely.
Anyway, I love free stuff. You want to send me some free
stuff, ping it over as long as it's of good quality.
Some of the things we've been sent I, I not not consumed.
But anyway, let's go through some of the Shopify updates and
some of the stuff that Shopify have been doing the last few
weeks. So first one is reporting will
now give you insights in cross-border sale profitability.
I spoke about some cross-border stuff a few weeks ago.
I'm just checking back on my notes.
No, we definitely haven't covered this.
All the notes will be all the updates will be older than that.
Yeah, you can now get the probability reports across
border, which is really, really key, especially if you sell in
multiple countries or they're often called markets now because
it's not always a country. Like sometimes it's like we're
selling there, but that's not actually a separate country, but
it's a separate place and has separate rules and shipping and
import, export tax. But it's not into a country.
So they couldn't markets to be nice and nice and politically
correct, I guess. We've introduced 2 new reports
in Shopify that will help you understand your original order
profitability across the various markets as well.
So again, quite a bit reporting stuff released in 20 seconds.
There's a another one on here, unlisted product status.
This one's new use the new unlisted product status to make
products only accessible via a direct URLI guess the unlisted
it's the same as ways YouTube videos work, if anyone has ever
used that. So you can send people to a
product, but they'll only get there if they have the link to
it. They won't find it in your
collections, won't be indexed on Google.
I assume again, I'm I'm learning all this news today because that
that one especially happens after I after I went away.
So that that's quite powerful. I think especially if you're
running like a specific campaign just to your e-mail customers.
You can only access that product via a link, which means you have
50 versions of the same product for 50 different campaigns
you're running and actually the public one available.
Just be the full price or whatever.
You have some more tea. That is really nice, really
nice. Thank you, Lorna.
You can control search engine indexing for your Shop app
storefront. OK, so Shop app pages are now
indexed by search engines by default, helping customers
discover your store through organic search.
We have had some issues with this where some of our clients
have got loads of indexing through the shop app, but it's
almost duplicated content of the actual same content they've got
in the Shopify store as well. So be able to control the two to
say I don't mind you coming through the shop app or actually
I don't want you coming through the shop app, I just want you
coming straight to my main store.
Please, if you don't know what the shop app is or how it works,
Oh my gosh, do some Googling. Pause.
Now do some Googling. You are missing out another one
on 29th of October which is my birthday.
Thank you very much. I probably read my date of birth
in the podcast. I'm sure it's fine, but Shopify
duties and import taxes US section 232 tariff customization
is now available. I don't know what that means at
all. There's nothing to do with my
world, but but yeah, US Section 232, I'm assuming it's been in
the news a lot. Not something I've heard about.
Duties and import taxes now support customizing the
percentage of the value of your products that Section 232 steal
an aluminium tariffs are prior to as well.
So there's been a lot going on with tariffs and it seems to
have calmed down at the moment, but we'll see.
Never know what he's going to say next, do we?
It's kind of exciting but also terrifying at the same time.
Legacy custom apps will be can't be created after the 1st of
January 2026. You won't be able to create
custom apps in admin. Users can instead use the dev
dashboards to create apps. So slightly different way if
you've got customized apps, customized apps, sorry on your
store and we don't. We were hoping to have a really
big announcements of partner news this week and we don't and
there's plenty of Shopify stuff and we're already heading
towards 10 minutes and we try and keep this a bit short and
snappy. The only thing I say on partner
news quickly that's just come to mind as well is and again, I was
away last week, but if you missed our episode on Friday, we
had Shopify themselves on talking about built for Shopify.
There was quite a lot. I sort of thought, come on, the
badge is quite obvious. But we'll, the more we got into
the conversation with them and also Chris, who's the CEO at
Saguno, the more we got into the conversation with, with, with
them both, the more we started to realise actually, there's
loads in this. And you guys just click in
install, install, install, install on apps on your Shopify
store and ruining SEO page speed and making life for me and my
team hell. And there was quite a lot in
that episode that was quite useful, I think.
So if you're running a Shopify store, you will be using apps.
I highly recommend going to listen to that and stay tuned.
I think we might get them back at some point as well.
But watch this space, some updates from the agency, then
this is quite cool. And then I thought some of these
were getting a bit too technical.
And some of you guys have reached out and said, can we get
more on this? This is great.
Someone said, sent us a note. Just, well, more than one person
have asked us. Can you tell me more standard
shopping versus P Max campaign tests you're running?
So here's one for you guys, testing standard shopping
campaigns and setting a target row as to see if this
outperforms performance Max using target row as within
standard shopping. And it has in a few instances,
it's quite hard to clear cut that.
You can't run what's called an experiment and just say every
other person that triggers one of my ads give like person A the
standard shopping campaign, person B performance Max and
just keep alternating. You can't quite do that.
So you have to sort of take a range out and go, right?
That's the benchmark for that range over the last year, two
years or a few months, whatever data set you've got available,
make a change and then see how the new one does versus what you
had previously. But in quite a few instances, it
has worked better, but not all of them, which means more
complicated campaign set up, but better performance, which is
good. This one, one of my team, I
don't know who's written this one.
I've just been given the notes, which is liberating.
But also, yeah, so whoever this was, I love the fact they've
started saying this one. Might sound silly, but hear me
out. If you have a gift set or a gift
bag with the product, mention it in the product title.
And Google Shopping. We've had an increase in ROI on
almost every single product that has gift wrapping or is part of
a gift set. We've had ROI increase in almost
all of them where we've where we've actually included that at
the beginning of the title. So there you go.
There's a quick win. It's a bit of our secret sauce
that we, we do do little things like that quite a lot, but we
don't always talk about them until we're until we start
working with people. But there we are.
There's one of our bits of secret sauce SEO.
The sooner you add content on a new product, ideally before,
this is the key here, before the product launches, the more
traffic you will receive when the product is live.
With SEO, there is a what we call a lag.
We use the word lag across PC and SEO, but on SEO you launch
something. It takes a while for Google to
see what you've done for you to build some credibility and that
kind of thing. It's a lot smarter to say,
right? We're launching a product on the
1st of June. So actually January, February,
we're going to do a teaser on e-mail and socials and other
stuff. We're going to create a waiting
list so people can so we say like there's a new product
coming or this is our main. Let's say there's teapot.
There's loose leaf teapot. Delicious.
Think about it's on Amazon or eBay a few years ago, this
little teapot say we're launching a new version which
doesn't spill as much when you pour it.
It is better instiated, keeps the tea warmer, which I think I
think people miss sell stuff. I was thinking about this, this
whole thermal flasks thing the other day because I put a load
of green tea in a thermal flask and I went out quite a long walk
on a very cold day with my mates.
And 2-3 hours later I thought, Oh my gosh, I didn't drink the
tea, open it and it was still scorching and I burnt my mouth.
So actually saying it's like super insulated for me was not a
good thing. I'm like, I almost wanted to be
like just insulated to a point where it holds the right
temperature for a while. I even saw you can get a
portable espresso makers recently.
So I might be buying one of them.
But the point being is say we were launching a new version of
this teapot. So we've got this is the this is
the version 1 and we're launching the version 2 of this
teapot. What we do is you tease like a
small picture with one little bit, maybe just like the spouts
of the teapot and say, actually this bit here, we've changed the
design of it and it's going to be amazing.
You know, a very dark room with one little bit lit on the front,
almost like a new car being shake.
Do that and like, you know, be the first to hear about this new
product that gets launched to all the people that bought
version one of the product. You start to build this
awareness and get this waiting list and Google watches all this
activity start to happen and start to unfold, especially on
your socials and goes, this is really popular.
And then when the product is available, people are swarming
to that product because you've, I've already told them it
exists. We do it a lot when we're
launching a new business, when it's the first time that
business has ever been available, been heard of, it's
like, let's build a waiting list.
So especially if we've got a quite a pioneering and quite a,
if you're pioneering or quite disruptive products in that, in
that market, it's going to make quite a big change.
It's like, let's talk about some of the stuff and be the first to
hear about it. We did it years ago with a
electric bike of the electric cars coming out.
Problem with electric bikes is batteries are quite heavy and
you're only on two wheels and you've got a sly, not sly,
sorry. You're slanting left and right
as you go around corners. I'm not a biker, but we did this
whole marketing campaign around launching this thing across
certain states in the, in the US and so many people going
absolutely crazy for this thing. And before launch, we even
managed to start a big debate on Facebook groups, Reddit, Quora,
some of the big forums. And we started this big debate
going on that we, we kind of leveraged and told some of the
staff like go and drop a thing. And they're saying like, would
an electric bike be as good as a Harley-Davidson or something
with a big engine or a big loud engine as bikes normally
normally renowned for? And actually we find the whole
market of people that love bikes and actually they feel slightly
self-conscious and embarrassed when the bike is too loud,
especially late at night. And so actually the electric
bike was perfect. Plus it got nought to 70 miles
an hour in next to no time because it's got no way and you
don't have to wait for the engine to Rev up and stuff.
So it's actually incredibly fast.
So again, look do some stuff around product launches before
they launch, build that awareness and your SEO rankings
are going to be higher as a result of dinner this activity.
And then last one on the SEO team as well, product
recommendations in the basket need to be accurate.
We've done some tests where we've deliberately put sort of
what seem seemingly disconnected products and some of them have
done well. So it's always accurate to the
user. They need to be related somehow
to that person that's shopping. So if you're if you're manually
controlling what is available in the car and you're upsells in
the basket, etcetera, you're probably trying to shift old
stock and that's not the not the best approach for these things.
Anyway, time for our weekly Quivia.
This one. I did a big digging for this
one. I'm quite proud of this.
The Telegraph shared some stats during the start up boom of 2019
to pre COVID. So they shared some statistics
on how many businesses fail in year 1 and year 3.
So I want you to have a quick think, how many, what percentage
of businesses do you think fail in year 1?
And what percentage? Same, same data set.
So you're expecting to say, say you think 90% of businesses fail
in year 1, then you can't be higher than 10% in the second
one. And spoiler alert, not every
business fails. So can't.
Also, if it adds up to 100, you're definitely not going to
win. But yeah, what percentage of
businesses fail in year 1 and what percentage of businesses
fail in year 3? Just going to sympathy.
Well, counter to myths I I found, I found over one and a
half million quotes and instances across the Internet
that quoted 90% or higher businesses fail in year 1.
And according to this data from the Telegraph, it is not true,
not even close. In year 1, only 20% of companies
registered globally fail. Only 20% fail in year 1.
So this whole most businesses fail.
Let's go onto the second standard set, but they do not
fail in year 120% year three. Would you guys put for that?
I don't know, I'm asking. I'm sitting in a cupboard on my
own with a camera. Year 360% of businesses fell by
year 3. So it is it's high, but it's not
90% fail in the first year. And the more I thought about
this over the last few hours, the more I thought, actually, do
you know what? That kind of makes sense to me
because at the end of year one, you've not even submitted any
accounts yet. A lot of businesses don't even,
they get registered, but then they don't even really get going
for, you know, you register the company and then start building
the site, the product or service or whatever.
There's very few businesses that start kind of like I did, which
was literally I already had work as a self-employed person and
then registered a company. Most businesses are like you
guys, you've got to order products and stuff.
So the quicker you register that company shell, the quicker you
can offset some of your tax and other stuff, which I'm not an
accountant so I'm not going to get into today.
But quick, you start to offset some of those numbers and it's a
lot safer to do it under a, we call them limited companies in
the UK. So it's limited liability for
the directors. So if it all goes wrong, it's
like the company's its own entity.
And I think LLCLLP some of that in the US and same same kind of
thing, same thing. But anyway, I was quite a stake
about 20% in year 1 and 60% in year 3.
Anyway, thank you so much for listening, guys.
I hope you can join us again on Friday.
I've got an amazing episode coming out this Friday as well.
A very tasty episode's gonna be very, very hungry.
And yeah, stay tuned. We've got loads of other
episodes being recorded at the moment.
Got some amazing guests. My inbox is stacked for the
people that want to come on the show.
If you want to sponsor the show, get in touch with my colleague
Byron about some of the sponship opportunities.
And I cannot wait. I think it's going to be January
now. We're going to announce the
biggest thing we've ever done. And it's absolutely huge.
And I've been guilty of exaggerating over the years, but
it's statistically the biggest thing we've ever done as we're
way bigger than what we've done on the podcast as well.
So super excited for that. You'll be the first to hear
about it. Guys.
Haven't already checked out on social Santa on newsletter.
And I hope to have you listening in on Friday and many, many
weeks after that as well. Thanks for joining in and enjoy
your loose leaf tea.