Hello and welcome to another episode of the Winning with
Shopify podcast. Well, is it another episode?
No, it's not. Interesting times ahead.
Tuesdays we're going to start posting a talk Tuesday or
Tuesday talks. I've got the name wrong on the
very, very first thing I've said.
Tuesday talks are calling it and it's just going to be me talking
on a Tuesday. It's quite simple.
And we were playing around with my surname as well.
Truman. Tuesday talks, we're just going
to call it Tuesday talks. I'm not that big headed when we
are doing a solo little midweek episode to bring your all things
Shopify. We're going to add in.
I've got a little agenda for today as well and we're going to
add in all things Shopify. In fact, the agenda's on my
screen up here. So we're going to talk about a
motivating quote. This is how we're going to kick
off every week. I'm going to kick it off in a
minute. Shopify news and updates as much
as the e-commerce world. It's a bit of an update as to
like what's going on some of the stuff we're reading so you don't
have to filter through and be like where are the opportunities
right now? We're going to bring this
straight to you guys. We're going to talk about what
some of our sponsors and partners are up to.
We'll talk about some of our own events.
There's only one in the diary right now, only one physical
one, which is in London is coming up to talk about that.
Some cool learnings from one of my teams in my agency.
There's a few things we're going to share from last week.
I think we have, if I just check in my notes here, we've got four
things we're sharing. They're actually about 30.
They put four and I thought 30's too much.
We're trying to keep these things short and snappy.
And then we're going to finish with fact of the week, a fun
fact about Shopify. So these little snippet episodes
on Tuesdays, we're never going to have a guest on them as far
as I'm planning to, and we're going to keep them going just so
long as I can be bothered to do these things.
I'm joking. It's mostly about diary
management and not because I'm busy or important.
I'm just bad at diary management at times and I'm very bad at
keeping up the same sort of things.
That's why I'm a good sort of CEO business owner as opposed to
someone that has to do the same thing over and over every day.
Anyway, enough about my failures.
So firstly, written on the iPad of Glory today is Quote of the
week. I thought we'd kick off with
Winston Churchill. This one's really stuck with me
the last few months, especially with all the turbulence that's
going on globally and in the e-commerce and business world.
It's been no exception at all to the turbulence.
I think we've actually experienced, in my opinion,
experienced more over the last probably 12 to 18 months,
especially in the UK market and starting to over the last sort
of 12 months in the US market as well in e-commerce, more than we
experienced during COVID. And a lot of people couldn't go
to a shop during COVID, say e-commerce did well.
This is hitting us, I would say much harder.
But when we go into the news headlines in a minute, there are
some big opportunities out there.
But anyway, the quote from Winston Churchill is success is
not final, failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue
that count. I will read that again.
Success is not final. Failure is not fatal.
It is the courage to continue that count.
Winston Churchill was a very wise man.
And if you've not read up on him, Oh my gosh, he's an
absolute hero of Britain and absolutely worth reading up
about him. But having read this, it's stuck
with me. And when we talk about
especially about the courage to continue that count, that when I
hear the word courage, and this is all part of my mind trying to
take more of a positive approach to things in the last five years
where it used to be quite negative and always be moaning
positive approach to things. When you talk about being
courage rather than struggles or whatever, that positive language
of courage makes me feel genuinely like, let's go and do
this thing. Let's keep going.
Let's have the courage to to carry on Section 2 then.
So let's talk about some Shopify news.
And this is from some of my team.
I use the few AI bots to find something to be Googling.
And also I've I've subscribed to a number of newsletters and
writing things down over the last week as they've been coming
in. So there's a few from Shopify
initially. First one is that there's been a
lot of chat about Black Friday, Cyber Monday, cyber weekend,
whatever you want to call it. And then obviously heading into
peak, if you haven't already, get planning.
You do not want to be making up your strategy during Black
Friday. More of my clients than I or
they would like to admit do Black Friday quite last minute.
You don't need to at the time of recording this, this is the 14th
of July. You'll be listening to it no
earlier than the 15th of July. You're already quite late.
So let's play catch up and, and and get a get a strategy in
place there. The second one, one is that
Shopify, this is quite interesting.
A lot of you guys have reached out to us.
We've been surprised how many of you are not B to C Brands.
When we started, well, I said when I started hosting the
podcast, which would have been five years ago now I don't
really look old enough to be working five years, but five
years ago, the obviously I look much older than that.
But five years ago when I started running this, we were
surprised how many we thought it was all B to C brands, business
to consumer, direct to consumer and consumer products.
But actually a lot of you guys are in B to B and this one's for
you. B to B stores can now Access
Bank transfers, checks, still a thing in the United States.
We don't really touch paper anymore here in the UK.
We do touch bank transfers there, which is now available
for you on B to B. And the third thing is always
international wires. So bank transfers checks and
international wires within Shopify's checkout B to B
company. You've got to be using that.
One of the biggest things we've been using in the checkout with
our clients have in the B to B space has been that payment on
on invoice. Somebody can order everything
because they've got a credit account with you and you know
they're a safe pair of hands financially.
Send that stuff straight out and they compare an invoice because
that's how businesses operate. Someone's ordering half
$1,000,000 worth of kit. They're not going to be putting
that on a credit card. Imagine the cash back, it'd be
$5000 in cash back at 1%. Not bad.
Anyway, those are available in the Shopify check out.
Shopify is the third one. Shopify Now have launched a
three month trial for just $1.00.
You go to shopify.com/free Hyphen trial.
We are not endorsed at all by Shopify.
I just think that's a great deal.
And I've written in my notes here as well.
The excuses end now. So if you're thinking of
starting a store, you've got three months for just a single
dollar. So go and sign up.
Once you've finished today's episode and before Friday, set
up a store, start playing with it, upload some products and
start working out how you're going to run this business
you've been planning for so long.
Because we don't want passengers here, we want business owners.
So go in there, go and get involved.
Digital commerce 360 have released a really interesting
article. Amazon Prime event has spurred
on a $7.9 billion in U.S. sales. Get this on day one.
So you know, Amazon do their annual prime event day one is
$7.9 billion. I, I was having a discussion
with someone about this. You know, when governments or
councils, they announce a budget for something and you hear like,
oh, it's going to be billions or trillions or zillions or I
struggle to even imagine that amount of money.
When you say 7.9 billion in U.S. sales day one of the Amazon
Prime event, you just that's a ludicrous amount of money, isn't
it? So if you're not selling on
Amazon, you are missing out. Amazon is very much still
growing and very much important to businesses.
Next one down. And I thought there's some
interesting news out there, Mexico business news.
And then the article's actually about France, and this is really
interesting. And forgive me, there's at least
three pronunciations to this brand, but France has fined, I'm
going to call them Shein or Shein as some people SHEIN,
they've been fined $47 million over misleading discounts.
We are very, very hot on this in the agency.
If we think something is misleading, not clear, or if
someone says, oh, it's half price.
And then when you get to check out, it's actually not half
price. We're very hot with our clients
and say that's that's misleading.
There are laws and rules around that in most countries about
misleading sales. And obviously France have have
cracked the whip here $47 million.
So worth taking that with a pinch to sight everybody and
going what are my offers and are we honouring those things?
Are they misleading? Are they clear and are they the
right offer just thinking about from a marketing perspective?
Well, three more so Premier Construction News again, random
news outlet, but talking about e-commerce, UK and European E
com order values. So number of transactions, order
volumes, values volumes, sorry, not values.
Order volumes are up 18% Q2 this year.
I was not surprising, sorry, I was, I, I was not expecting
that. I am surprised and you probably
tell I've I'm very tired today at the point of recording this,
but very surprised there up so much.
I, I thought it was going to be a really bleak year and I love
being wrong when I think it's going to be bad and it's good.
So it's been a really good year for a lot of us so far.
Last couple then. So Drapers UK suppliers have
described tariffs as traumatic. Very interesting article.
Very much worth a read over there and startups.co.uk lovely.
I've actually featured on that site a couple of times.
E com has outpaced the High Street again in June.
It didn't actually say where, but because it's the KDK, we're
going to assume the UK, but it does reference a couple of US
brands as well. So hopefully that's some
uplifting news, but also some of those bits like the B2B payments
and also looking at Amazon Prime and missing discounts.
Hopefully some good learnings for you guys there as well.
I mentioned the next part of this, then there's going to be a
couple of partners. So two, we're putting in a
spotlight today. One of them is Yost.
If you didn't catch Yost's episode, they're one of our
sponsors. They were on a few weeks ago.
Yost is the most used plug in on WordPress and as far as we're
aware, and last time they counted was the exact words they
used on the show, They were the most used website plug in in the
world, the most used plugin in the world.
They now have a Shopify plugin. I love it because it's all about
SEO and it helps you Shopify store rank better on Google.
You can get 15% off for life on either Shopify or WordPress and
it's WWS 15. So that's winning Shopify 15,
but it's WWS 15 is the code that you need to use.
And the second one as well as Covella.
I know a few of you guys have reached out to Covella since an
episode we had them on recently. With everything going on
globally at the moment, it's quite turbulent.
You can get up to 40% or sorry, the average saving is 40% on
your stock costs. So say you were selling these
T-shirts, you spend 40% less stocking these T-shirts.
Plus you can use their their product finding or supplier
finding system, which will save you a huge amount of time
digging through Alibaba or flying out to China and Vietnam
visiting factories and that kind of thing.
They will do that for you. And then they put their own
guarantee and warranty on it as well.
And that includes all of the tariffs, which is amazing.
You also can do a product sample and they will give you 50% off.
It's a half price product sample run.
If you use the code winning when you sign up, a few of you guys
that signed up, we know you came through us, but you didn't use
the code winning. So we've been thanked by Covella
for all the great work, but you've not used the codes.
You've paid more than you need to.
So half price product sample run.
See how good the products are for that code.
Winning fun and a bit of news from our side.
London. We're going to be in London on
the 4th of September at Molly. We haven't quite announced the
speakers yet, but I will mention that over the next couple of
weeks as they are announced. I'm just waiting for a couple to
confirm. We've got three amazing brands
that we are talking to. They're keen.
We're just trying to work out logistics at this stage.
So 4th of September in London, you come and meet me and my team
and there's gonna be a few amazing talks.
There's going to be pizzas and cocktails being made, beer, all
sorts. It's going to be a super fun
night and there's also a balcony where you can have a nice drink
on the balcony overlooking London.
We're hoping the weather's going to be, if it's raining, classic
London, we will look out of the window from the warmth of the
inside interior, right? There are a few things I want to
share from our agency and I hope these things spark some ideas
from you guys. We're going to put these in
every week and we're going to change the topic every week.
We're going to start with PPC this week.
Haven't decided what we're doing next week, so please don't ask.
Not that you did anyway. Our PVC team, they have come
back to me with, as I say, with over 30 things.
I whittled it down to 26. I'm going to read out four of
them this week and I might save some for a few other weeks.
But these are interesting statistics we found in people's
data, which has now LED them to a decision change, a strategy
change, tactic change, and there will be similar things in your
data. So thought actually if we shared
some of these things, it would spark some ideas.
You can go and look at your own data on some of these and see if
there's anything striking enough to go that's worrying or that's
exciting or that's interesting, or most of my marketing budget's
been wasted. What a disaster.
Well, now you know and you can change it.
So the first thing is that on one of our clients who sell
personalized jewellery, only one in 10 products that was added to
CAR actually got purchased. So 9 out of 10 things added to
CAR are not purchased. Running some AB tests at the
moment. One's had absolutely 0 change
and one's had quite a nice change, which is why we run the
tests. What we're looking at here is
how many products were in their collections and there were
thousands upon thousands of products.
So people probably weren't finding the right products.
So they were finding something they like and going let's add it
to cart because this site has so many products I might not be
able to find it again. So that was one of our
hypotheses. And the second one as well is
what happens when you add to cart?
Are we not giving people enough information to then go through
and make the purchase? Are we not exciting people
enough to then want to go through and make the purchase?
The second thing we've learnt over this last week that when
customers land on one of our clients sites we have this
beautiful NAV and we have SEO the NAV.
We also have lovely links within the collection.
So if you look at a collection of perfumes, you can go, oh,
actually I'm going to buy, I was going to say coffee machine,
totally unrelated, but actually I'm going to buy a specific type
of perfume or perfume by gender or perfume by send or prices.
And we've got little links going after all of those.
But actually when people land on almost every single page, they
go straight into the search bar and they just search for the
thing they want. And the site search on that
client's site is really, really underwhelming.
So we're now testing a new app to improve site search that will
bring up collections, products, blog posts, etcetera, to give
people the information and things that they want.
At the moment it's just very clunky.
Again, we're going to test that and see what that does.
The third thing we've learnt from another client, what most
users click on, they don't tend to go on to buy.
When we say click on, sorry that we're talking about PPC here, my
PPC team came out with these, but most people when they click
on a product on Google Shopping, they land on that product that
is not the one that they buy. It's always other products.
Now this is really interesting. 99% of the time when we come
into a brand, we say to people, show us your website journey,
show us what a customer do and they go straight to the home
page and we're like, OK, fine, you're on the home page.
Then they go into a collection, then a product and start digging
around. When we look at the data though,
and again, this is all about the data does the talking, the data
tells you what's wrong, what's good, what's the opportunity.
The data says that actually most people land on products.
And if you're running Google Shopping, that is exactly where
they land. And SEO, if you've done your
SEO, well, it's probably been always collections, probably
collections. So people are landing on your
products. What are you actually doing to
tell them about your brand, about who you are and if they
land? I'm probably going, that's nice.
Oh, quite right, but that is nice.
Someone will click on your ads when they think it's nice but
not quite right. So how then you have the colour
variants, the sizes and other related products and how you
bring that to the forefront is really important.
What order you put things in a product page, That's the billion
dollar question. And for every brand it's
completely different. But this is just really
interesting when we're looking at the data of going, people
have clicked on these products, but when we actually matched the
things that people had clicked on compared to the things people
had actually bought, the trends did not match at all.
People were browsing around the site and finding other things
they actually wanted to purchase.
So have a look at how you get someone from the product they've
landed onto the one they actually want.
So bread crumbs, back to the collection tags maybe to go,
this product is made of glass. This product has it is runs on
electricity. This product is blue whatever.
If you have little tags on the product, people can click ah,
I'm just going to call the blue items and you click on that and
it goes to all blue items were also filtered by lighting.
And then they go, OK, I was looking at a blue lamp, but
actually I don't want a lamp. I just want blue items.
I love this brand. Take that off and go right
blue's the accent of my lounge. What else am I going to buy?
All those little things can make such a difference to conversion
on the right brand, the wrong brand.
All the things I've just said as examples will completely fail.
So you've got to test these things.
And last one from the team suite, when the cost per
conversion, I love this, when the cost per conversion is
higher on Google Ads. So when say you were spending
$20 per conversion on Campaign A, but you're spending $40 per
conversion on Campaign B, remember that we're talking
about Campaign B here. When the cost per conversion is
higher to Campaign B, we also make more revenue.
More expensive sales are worth paying more for.
We've seen some brands that do not have conversion tracking
that brings in the revenue to say that actually, although
you've had less sales in this campaign, that average auto
value is really good. Otherwise, you're just going to
be making the wrong decisions. You'll say we've only sold four,
I don't know, 4 garden furniture sets, but we sold 50 lampshades.
Well, the four garden furniture sets will probably make you more
money at $3000 per garden furniture set than a lampshade
at 30 or $40.00. So you see the the economics of
those things really, really important.
So just because there's a high cost per conversion in the
campaign, don't shy away from it, don't ignore it.
To finish off then fact of the week.
So the fact of the week, this week is Shopify's first ever
thing that Shopify ever did, the first thing that the core team
at Shopify ever did before letting people build e-commerce
sites is that they were selling, they made their own store and
they were selling surfboards. And that was just over 10 years
ago saying just over 10 years, Shopify has become what it is
today. But they started as an
e-commerce store. They obviously built a really,
really good back end platform that is now Shopify.
What a crazy amount of growth they've had since.
I hope you've enjoyed today Friday.
We will have a guest on with a full length episode and I'll be
back again next Tuesday. If you have any cool facts, cool
bits and news, any amazing quotes or anything you've been
learning that you want me to share as well.
I'd love to shout out some brands on these on these little
Tuesday ones. So please do reach out.
Otherwise I won't be I won't be asking for volunteers.
I'll be forcing volunteers forward.
Obviously I'm, I'm joking. Have an amazing week.
See you guys on Friday.