Today on the Winning with Shopify podcast.
Too many brands finish Black Friday, turn everything off and
carry on as normal, or go into peek and then turn everything
off and carry on as normal. Multiple time.
Browsers clearly interested. Added to cart, clearly
interested. This is part of our secret
sauce. We used to only say it's the
clients, but we talk about the podcast now because we love you
guys. Late one night, get a bottle of
wine and get cracking through this thing because you don't
drink too much. You won't know what's going on
anymore. Hello and welcome to another
episode of Winning with Shopify podcast of me, your host Nick
Truman. I've been hosting the show since
June 2020. So this is my fifth Black Friday
running the show. Happy Black Friday, everybody,
and if you haven't tuned into this before, please give us a
like, write a comment, hit subscribe, leave us a review,
whatever channel you're on. There are so many different
channels you can find us on now, and we're reaching at nearly get
this for a statistic. We're reaching nearly 1,000,000
people a week across all of our podcasting platforms, all our
social platforms and through our emails.
So it's unbelievable that a million people are seeing my
face every week. It's quite a lot to to
comprehend. Some people will be seeing more
than one thing, of course, but it's so good to have so many of
you guys on the journey. Some people as well thought this
podcast was quite small. We're pretty confident we're the
biggest in the world at the moment and hopefully you're
bigger now. There's a response to Black
Friday, which is where I was going with that.
I'm currently on holiday as well, so apologies for the bad
video and audio quality. I'm hiding in one of the rooms
in where we're staying with, with our family.
So but it is Black Friday. I want to this Black Friday is a
week, and I've had some stuff sent in from a couple of our
partners and there's some stuff from my team as well.
We're going to be talking today about what you need to do
between now and probably the end of Monday, depending on how long
your sales are running. But there's a big problem in the
e-commerce world, and that big problem in the e-commerce world
is too many brands finish Black Friday, turn everything off and
carry on as normal, or go into peak and then turn everything
off and carry on as normal. And there's an enormous,
complete repertoire of lost opportunities by doing that.
So we did to talk about something similar the last
couple of years, but from talking to some of you guys
since it's not really hammered home.
So I'm going to go even harder on this this time.
So grab a cup of tea. I've got my glasses on because
I'm getting old and there's quite a lot to read.
So let's go through. First we've got Siguno, then
we're going to talk about Tax cloud and then some stuff from
my agency here Spec. And so we're going to start off
with Saguno. Saguno, if you don't know, are
an e-mail platform and for built for Shopify.
We had Shopify themselves in the show recently talking about what
Bill for Shopify actually means with Chris from Saguno as well.
So incredible episode if you missed that.
But Saguno predominantly is well known as an e-mail platform.
They also do lots and lots of other things and it plugs into
places like Canva as well to try and make e-mail marketing a bit
easier for you guys to do. And it only works for Shopify,
which means it's perfectly built for Shopify and you can only use
it within the Shopify space as well.
So let's have a look at these guys are sent over.
These guys are really, really quick to to come back to me as
well. So thanks guys.
I'm a bit last minute at the moment because I'm away.
So Maria and the team came back really, really quickly on this.
And some of these things are from the webinar we did with
them as well, which is on our YouTube channel.
Anything, but anyway, I'm talking long enough.
Let's go through some of the things that you guys need to be
doing to tail off the end of Black Friday.
So you want to maximize conversions by tailoring your
follow up through Cyber Week and through December using Black
Friday, Cyber Monday e-mail engagement data, which sounds
really obvious, but here are three ways you can do that with
a couple of points around each #1 Black Friday, Cyber Monday,
only buyer. So people have only purchased
from you during Black Friday. No other times customers have
only purchased during the sale period, but never before try and
promote A complimentary item. The point here being is they're
still new customers. And because they're new
customers, they still don't understand who you are, but
you've acquired them through a Black Friday deal or similar.
So it's really important. Now we get that 2nd, 3rd, 4th,
5th order, etcetera, from that person.
So it's super important to try and get the 2nd order from these
guys, especially on Black Friday because you've put a discount,
your margins have been shrunk as well.
So you probably need to get some profit from these guys.
The second one is the high intent window shoppers.
So people that have added a car, browsed multiple times, multiple
browsed multiple times, but didn't purchase from you guys.
I think it's a huge opportunity around these.
Quite often brands just wait for that purchase and if they don't
get a purchase from someone, then it's kind of game over.
They just sort of give up and say right, we're not going to
get anything from them. But multiple time browsers
clearly interested, added to cart, clearly interested.
And depending on what country you're in, there's different
rules in the US to the UK, to the EU, for example.
So just be really, really clear on making sure you're following
the rules and not kind of bending anything or annoying any
customers in the process here. So, so that's who they are.
This is where they're continuing to promote your brands because
those guys have browsed items along with any reviews and
testimonials which could help them.
So they haven't purchased from you yet, which means there's
some reason they've not purchased.
So again, reviews and testimonials are a really good
way of building that trust with new customers and you can push
people over the line to purchase.
I think especially as we've just come out of Black Friday side of
Monday at this stage, which we will in, if you're watching this
live, as soon as it comes out on Friday, the 28th of November,
Black Friday is going to be inside Monday, going to be over
in three days time on Monday. So this is a really good
opportunity through Christmas to push some of your Christmas
ranges. Christmas offers that kind of
thing, especially if you do bundling as well.
Since someone was looking at two or three products, suddenly say,
hey, two of the products you looked at are actually part of a
bundle of three. You buy this third product with
them. Again, it's a really good way to
try and get somebody to come by and it's not actually costing
you kind of anything slash that much.
I just want to interrupt. Today's episode to talk about
some big news for Shopify merchants.
Yopo which you might be using is Sun setting as e-mail and SMS
products. You may have got e-mail from
them and if you haven't, this might be the first time you
hearing about this. So if you have been using them
then you might be wondering what's next.
Well. Our sponsor Saguno has.
Recovered. Saguno is the most deeply
integrated e-mail marketing platform for Shopify and make
switching really, really simple with hands on onboarding,
migration help, and deliverability expertise.
Right now with code WWS 20 you get 20% of your first three
months with Saguno. So don't let your marketing skip
a beat. Switch to Saguno today at
saguno.com/winning with Shopify. Third Point and final point from
Saguno VIPs who went silent. So people that previously
engaged but didn't buy from you through Black Friday, Cyber
Monday, I'm not going to go into too much detail about what this
is, but what you need to run on this is a win back campaign.
So these guys used to purchase from you, They haven't really.
So you want to try and win them back.
Ideally you want to find out why they haven't purchased.
We've had some customers, we've, well, some brands we've worked
with actually phone customers directly.
The VIP customers say, hey, you've not purchased from us in
a while. I just wanted to check if we let
you down. Has anything gone wrong?
Is there anything we could do to to actually change that for you?
You know, we delivered a faulty item or something and you've
just not told us, but we'll be happy to to fix that and have
you come back and purchase from us on a regular basis.
So that one to one engagement with customers can be absolutely
key to to long term, long term revenue for businesses.
So let's talk about tax cloud. So if you guys haven't seen Tax
Cloud software and before, just to give you a heads up, it's
only in the US, but there are some good learnings here for UK
and especially if you're selling in the EU because EU member
states work a little bit like American states when it comes to
tax. So we're going to give you
financial advice, just purely going to tell you that you need
to pay your tax and in different states across the US and this is
what it is. But Tax Cloud does it all for
you. They do all the hard work and
it's all plugged into Shopify. So you can reach out to those
guys as well. There are actually offers which
will put both Saguno, I think Saguno was a complimentary on
boarding session so you can have a conversation.
We actually introduced a lot of our clients to Brian and the
gang at Saguno and they have a conversation, say, hey, these
are opportunities for your e-mail marketing and how Saguno
can help you reach those. Same for Tax Cloud, I think it's
Tax cloud.com/winning. I haven't got the link in front
of me, apologies, but it will be in the description.
And you guys have got a really good offer on there as well to
to start playing about the Tax Cloud and see if it can help
you. There's three points here from
Tax Cloud as well. Number one, watch out for new
Nexus thresholds. This was a new thing for me.
The first time we had tax cloud on the show.
I didn't know what Nexus was. I don't live in the US.
I don't, I'm not based in the US at all.
But Nexus thresholds basically means once you've had a certain
amount of revenue or sales and big sale, big sale weekends like
Black Friday can push you over this threshold.
Once you go over the threshold, you I think, I think it, I think
you guys put the notes, I think it's forever.
It might not be to check that, but the point being is once you
go over a certain threshold, you've got to start paying
individual and reporting individual tax, tax to that
exact state. So, so I'm just checking my
notes. Yeah, once you go over the
threshold, you're required to collect, file and remit sales
tax in that state, remit being pay, pay sales tax in that
state. Which again, is really, really
important to make sure that make sure you're doing that and
following all the tax rules that you need to.
Because I've seen too many businesses go under when they've
not looked after their tax properly and it's eventually
caught up with them. They're going, we can't actually
sustain this tax debt anymore. We're going to have to close.
And it's a real shame. So the best way to know where
you stand is to review your total revenue and transactions
count for the whole year, then compare those figures to each
state's thresholds. It's quick to check and can help
you avoid some surprises during filing season.
I, I call this a bottle of wine project.
I say it's the clients a lot if we've got lots of stuff for them
to check through and it's quite mundane, but it all needs to be
looked at. It's a bottle of wine project.
Just late one night, get a bottle of wine and get cracking
through this thing. So you can do that.
Then look into your licking yourself.
Obviously don't drink too much. You won't know what's going on
anymore. Empathy.
Make sure you're considering all sales when looking at these
numbers. So the guys there have said when
you're reviewing your sales tax obligations, don't just look at
your e-commerce store. Nexus is based on your total
sales across all channels. So obviously your website, your
Shopify store is one of those channels.
Another one might be marketplace sales.
So you might sell through Amazon, eBay, Wish other wish
that obviously TMO, lots of other platforms where you can
sell products. TikTok being one of those social
commerce, which obviously is TikTok, but then also things
like Instagram and Facebook shop.
So you can sell products through there directly.
They used to handle the sales tax for you.
My understanding, and I mentioned it on Tuesday, tea
break talks. I don't think Facebook and
Instagram do that for you anymore.
So if you sell directly through them, you need to get some
support or some advice as to whether you need to start
changing the way you do that. Yost have just launched
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So that's the first 3. So pop ups as well.
So pop up shops, pop up stores. And even when you in get do
invoiced wholesale orders, once you're doing an invoiced
wholesale order to a set to a specific state and you go over
that state's Nexus is it couldn't.
Yeah, the the Nexus threshold you need to, you know, then you
start filing it. It probably be, if you've never
heard of this and you've only got into business recently,
you've just started selling in the US recently and you're
thinking what is this thing Nexus just because it might be
useful. It's spelled Nexus.
So you need to make sure doing that.
So yeah, check all of those. Check the thresholds again.
Bottle of wine project, I'd like to call it.
So if that helps you, motivate you to do it, get a nice wine
and evaluate #3 evaluate how you're handling sales tax today,
which is obviously very, very important.
So this is what these guys have sent over to me, which I think
is really, really useful. As you wrap up the year and
start planning for 2026, it's a great time to check in on how
you're managing sales tax. Ask yourself, is my current
process really working for me? If you're filing manually and
selling to more than one state, that's a sign that it may be
time to delegate this to a partner so you can reclaim your
time and focus on growth. And obviously tax Cloud is that
partner always one of the the best options, we think, which is
why we partnered with them and to be to be looking after your
sales tax for you. So the final thing they've
written on here is or maybe you're still with a legacy
partner, but you're unhappy with the support, the accuracy and
the and all the cost. If you're feeling that friction,
just to know you're the great alternatives and the end of the
year is perfect time to make a switch.
And obviously depends on your company year end, where it
doesn't have to, but it probably does have some bearing as to
when your company year end, when your company tax liabilities are
due, which again, country to country, it varies.
In the UK, you can decide what month of the year it is.
And it's a blooming nightmare because it means throughout the
entire year we're doing budgeting for a different client
at different point as to what budgets we want to spend.
So yeah, check out tax Cloud. I think it's Tax
cloud.com/winning, but again, we'll put the link at the bottom
if you want to go check out those guys.
And I think the lovely thing as well, when you're trying to run
a store and I have this for my business, I do not want to get
bogged down with things like tax.
It's like, I just want to know what it is, what the revenue
target is, how it's all going to be accounted for and make it as
automatic as possible so I can focus on signing new clients in
my my industry, doing fantastic podcast interviews, like some of
the amazing guests we've had recently for you guys.
It's selling products and running marketing campaigns and
dealing with customers. That's where you should be
spending your time. And even some of that stuff you
start to automate and outsource that every time as well.
So last few things, we've got five points here from spec.
They're all quite quick and we try to keep it very like, right,
do this. Here's your five step To Do List
#1 is during Black Friday will generate lots and lots of
backlinks which are really good for SEO and as an SEO agency.
And we obviously want you guys to not lose any of that backlink
equity. And when we say backlink equity,
it's not losing the fact that all these people have linked to
us what a lot of brands do when Black Friday's over, when Cyber
Monday's over, when Christmas is over or peak or holiday season,
whatever you call it in the country you're in, in the
business you're in with a lot of people when they get to that
point, they just turn everything off, which means all those
backlinks from external websites are like news articles going,
what is, what are the top 10 phone cases to buy right now?
What are the top 10 trainers to buy?
But then in Black Friday, you get the top 10 Black Friday
Deals, the top ten presents for him, for her, for Christmas or
for holiday season, things like that.
When you have all that activity pointing back into to your
website and you turn all that stuff off in your site, all
those backlinks now land on a four O 4 and you quite
dramatically lose the benefit from Google's eyes and anyone
still clicking on those links. You surely want to send that
person into a live page that says hey, you were trying to get
hold of this Black Friday deal. This is the product.
It's not on Black Friday anymore, but it's still on the
top rated products and here it is you can buy it now.
So you want to make sure you redirect all of this stuff into
the right places so you don't lose all of that when you turn
all your Black Friday content off.
So every time you get rid of a, you want to redirect it
somewhere. And the second part of this
first point as well as you want to make a Black Friday page for
2026, you want to make it. This is part of our secret
sauce. We used to only do this for say
it's the clients, but we talk about the podcast now because we
love you guys. But you want to make a page
specifically for for Black Friday 2026.
You want to make it now and you want to forward a lot of your
activity to that. So through the entire year,
you're ranking number one for Black Friday and whatever your
thing is. So there might be Black Friday
phone cases, for example, Black Friday Deals on phone cases.
If you sell phone cases and then you want to be #1 throughout the
entire year to get to Black Friday, you're already number
one. You're going to get a ton of
traffic for that. And there's a bit of a dogfight
as soon as all their different phone case companies and same in
any industry put all their Black Friday pages out.
So massive opportunity to build that page now and send a lot of
your links into it. And you, and another quick tip
as well is put some sort of sign up page, say like put your
e-mail address in here. You'd be the first to hear about
Black Friday when it does launch for 2026 and you've already got
an e-mail, which I'm sure you love this guys at Saguno, you'll
have that e-mail campaign ready to roll to people that been
waiting a month, six months, 12 months for the Black Friday
activity for 2026 #2 on advertising, you want to
schedule all of your advertising campaign updates.
And if you can or you're able to as well, and Shopify, you want
to schedule all of your Shopify updates.
One of the biggest things we've seen brands fall down on is like
the campaigns are still running with the Black Friday Deals on
them, but actually the website's been updated and there's no
Black Friday on the website anymore.
The Black Friday codes have expired, but we're still
advertising them elsewhere. So you want to schedule all of
the updates at the same time. So midnight, you want to put a
timer on the site so that Black Friday ends in one hour.
You're probably going to find some of the highest conversion
rates for that hour running into Black Friday ceasing to exist #3
all the audience. Anyone that's engaged with Black
Friday, a bit like Saguna said earlier as well, anyone that's
engaged with Black Friday and has or hasn't purchased, you
want to put those guys into some sort of audience.
And you want that audience very, very specifically to be targeted
on Google Ads. And you want to target a look
alike of those people next time you run a sale because you know
that these people have engaged a Black Friday.
So you want to advertise to those guys and the look alike of
them to find more people like them to engage with.
Your next sale, which might be into Christmas, it might be a
January sale, could be at any any other time of the year, but
you want to make audiences from all of the data you can to run
specifically as audiences on either P Max or or to run
through something like retargeting.
So you can still target those guys especially the same as like
Saguna said earlier, if you have their e-mail address, obviously
send them an e-mail and say, hey, you didn't purchase from
us. Why didn't you come back and
purchase if you don't have their e-mail address.
This is a fantastic way building these audiences of people that
have looked at Black Friday pages, clicked on Black Friday
adds, added to cart for a Black Friday product, etcetera #4 you
can still make Black Friday and Cyber Monday content after that
date. And content's obviously very,
very good for SEO. So one idea I, the team and I
put together here is thanks for shopping with us.
So doing a big blog post, thanks for shopping for us during Black
Friday. Again, if you're going to do the
first thing I make Black Friday page, you can link this page
going get on our database for next Black Friday as fast as
possibly the first to hear about exclusive deals will get early
access to next year's Black Friday as well.
So people that didn't purchase is a fantastic way to keep them
engaged, get their e-mail address and then you can start
emailing them through Saguno. Obviously got to make sure
you've got permission to e-mail them.
That is super important, especially in the UK and EU.
And you could also list some old stock as well.
So stuff that's sitting in the corner of the warehouse that you
just can't sell, say like, hey, this is leftover Black Friday
bits, bits of bits of. So we're extending the Black
Friday sale on our clearance for another month or another three
weeks or something to try and shift a lot of that.
You could also do Black Friday leftovers.
I thought it was quite a nice one, especially after, you know,
obviously this Thanksgiving and Black Friday, really, really
close to one another. I think that they're literally
next. Again, I'm not in the US, so
I've never lived in the US, so I think they're literally day one
day before the other. So apologies for not knowing
that. I know it's really important for
you guys in the US and I totally support the message behind
Thanksgiving as well. And yeah, you can do Black
Friday leftovers, which was a nice kind of pun, or play on
Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving lunch or dinner at #5 Then a final
point for me today. If anything went viral, these
are additional stories for your blog.
So like, we went viral. Thanks so much for engaging with
us and putting some of the content out.
Like if one of your products went viral, I've literally seen
brands before say that, you know, we we're totally
unexpected. This was the most popular
product during Black Friday. And that's quite a nice
engagement piece to send out on e-mail to use in some of your
advertising or to even have just generally on the website if
someone lands on a product says this product you're looking at
right now. This was our top best seller
during Black Friday. Anyway, got an amazing interview
coming up next week. I think it's next week.
I got the date completely wrong whilst we're recording here.
So that might have been scrubbed out.
But next week I think it's, it's an amazing interview we've got
coming up, which was face to face, which is quite exciting.
So if it's not me and somebody sitting there, then it's that's
always going to be posted a little bit later.
Thank you so much for tuning in today.
I hope Black Friday's been amazing.
And I hope I haven't taken up too much of your time with
today's episode. Got loads of homework on there.
If you've got any questions about any of this stuff.
Hello at winning with shopify.com.
Send us an e-mail. And some of those don't appear
to be coming through to me at the moment, so I need to fix
something. But Byron is picking them up and
forwarding them to me, mostly saying, have you responded to
these guys? This is a great question.
So thanks so much for sending all the questions in.
And if you haven't already, again, subscribe, leave us a
review and say sorry for my scatiness and terrible audio and
video quality today. I'm on holiday, but I'll be back
in the studio again next week. Thanks so much for tuning in.
Take care and I hope you have an amazing Black Friday.
This episode of Winning Shopify is brought to you by Tax Cloud.
It's the busiest time of year for e-commerce.
Your stores buzzing, orders flying in and growth is at an
all time high. But with all that momentum can
come new sales tax exposure that you might not even see coming.
That's why now is the perfect time to take a closer look at
how you're handling sales tax. And make sure your.
Business is set up for the growth that you've earned.
Tax Cloud is our trusted partner for sales tax compliance.
Built for growing Shopify. Brands they handle.
Regulations, filings and ongoing.
Compliance working. Directly with the states on your
behalf across the US so you can stay focused on running your
store. They've got a five star rating
in the Shopify. App Store and listeners.
Winning Shopify get free at migration and boarding when you
make the switch to apply for that and learn more.
Go to tax. Cloud.com/winning.
That's tax. Cloud.com/winning.