Happy Sunday!
It feels weird to write a newsletter focused on eCommerce when half the country just had a massive right taken away from them. Growing up with a sister, being raised by a mother, and having 80% of my employees being Women, it really infuriates me, personally. I can't understand what it feels like, but I can only imagine how angering it is to see that in today’s day and age it’s remotely possible to have your own personal decisions be controlled by another power.
I hope that somehow we, as a country, will recognize what a stupid decision this was and reverse it to what it should've been. If you have ideas on how this community of readers can come together to do something impactful, please let me know. Until then, please call your elected officials, spread information and education, and be a listening ear to those in your life who need someone to listen.
That said, I still owe you a newsletter, so let's get into it. I'm writing this email today from the sky as I travel to Los Angeles for a week of meetings and collaboration.
If today's newsletter is helpful, then please share it with others.
One quick plug — HOOX is crushing for the brands who've bought a page. If you're on the fence about buying a page from HOOX, submit your information on this page, and I'll pitch you what your LP should be, and why. But please only submit if you can afford a LP because I'll be doing these myself!
This past week I spoke on 4 stages, and my favorite quote came from Maggie Sause which was:
"In the past years, brands are discovering consumers. Today, consumers want to be the ones discovering brands."
I thought it was incredibly true, especially with what we see working tactically, post iOS 14. The brands that do a great job storytelling, bringing people in to educate, and then give options to a consumer, allowing them to feel that sense of discovering something new, are the ones who are doing really well.
From last week's newsletters, we had a few winners of billboards, on me, and a few direct mail campaign winners. I'm still finalizing that the "winners" are confirming they're ok being the winners, so I will announce them next week!
I also forgot to link a few of the vendors I mentioned, so here they are:
Adgile — The billboards on trucks
PostPilot — Klaviyo for direct mail
Quan Media Group — THE go to shop for all things out of home
On to this week...
This past week, Shopify released a ton of updates, so I wanted to give you a quick high-level run down of what they are, and how I plan to use some of these updates in practice with clients and our own brands.
I gave a full run down of their 100+ new products and updates on Twitter. You can read that thread by clicking this link.
Here are the ones that stand out to me the most:
Shopify Audiences.
Shopify Audiences is one of the answers Shopify is giving their merchants to the rising cost of digital customer acquisition. Similar to Disco Network's audiences product, Shopify allows you to leverage lookalike audiences of similar brands. I believe Shopify's audience size is around 2 million, currently, whereas Disco allows you to go up to 10 million.
It's going to be interesting to see if this works. We'll be testing this out, and I'll report back. We've seen great success with the Disco audiences product, so I can't imagine this would perform poorly.
5 years ago when I was at Hint, we would swap lookalike audiences with ThirdLove, Stitch Fix, Madison Reed, and others. It was always a winning strategy.
It reminds me a bit of non-branded search or conquesting in search — you need to have creative and a landing page that speaks to someone in a way where they feel like they're discovering you.
Shop Cash.
There isn't a TON of information out yet on Shop Cash, but let me synthesize it and break it down as I understand it to be.
Essentially, Shop Cash is a new loyalty program built on the Shopify / Shop App ecosystem. When your credit card is swiped, Shopify gets 2.4% to 2.9% of the amount paid to them by the merchant.
With Shop Cash, Shopify is giving 1% cash back in Shop Cash (you could see this as "Shop Pay store credits") to those who process orders with Shop Pay. This does two things for them:
It gets more people to use Shop Pay, which is the one-click checkout tool built by Shopify, that works flawlessly and we all love.
It gets people to use the Shop App as more of a marketplace or point of sale to place orders with their favorite Shopify merchants.
It's a win-win for everyone — the merchants, the customers, and Shopify. It also makes me think that Shopify is getting one step closer to letting Shop Pay sit on anyone's website to process orders with a one-click checkout.
I'm going to hold back making a joke about other one-click checkout companies here.
Shopify x Twitter.
As a power Twitter user (shameless follow me plug) a, this is probably one of my favorite updates.
The new Twitter app allows any brand to use their Twitter account as a storefront for the products they sell. Twitter is such a powerful platform to create top-of-funnel awareness for your brand with minimal effort, and now everyone can take advantage of that with the integration.
If you're a brand and you're not educating on Twitter, you're most likely missing out.
Shopify B2B.
Shopify's new B2B/wholesale platform is one of my favorite updates from Connect to Commerce. In the past, when I've setup a brand on Shopify, we've had to create fully separate Shopify stores for wholesale buyers.
With this new update, you can leverage the same product feed and back end, but have a separate (sub)domain for the front end, wholesale pricing, payment terms, logins, and more. This means your checkout can still happen online, and you can give merchants the option to pay in 30, 60, 90, or however many days you'd like.
Shopify Markets.
Closely tied with B2B, Shopify Markets is one of my other favorite updates. Until now, you had to use a separate Shopify store for Canada, UK, Germany, etc. Basically, anything outside of a single country, you needed a new Shopify store.
Passport Shipping helps you get around this with their last-mile shipping enablement, but you still collect your orders in dollars, and then ship it out to Australia, where they use a different currency.
With Shopify Markets, you're able to sell in a customers' native currency and language. On top of that, you can collect the right duties and taxes at checkout.
This coming week, we'll be combining two separate stores (one for US and one for Canada) thanks for Shopify Markets, to create a better back end management system for the brand and a better experience for our customers.
Checkout Extensions.
Checkout Extensions is a long-awaited update from Shopify. With Checkout Extensions, Shopify Plus merchants can build the following into their checkout:
- A more on brand design for checkout
- Custom content (last minute offers, additional form fields, shipping guarantees, social proof, etc)
- Post-purchase pages
- Custom checkout login (tiered promotional discounts, multiple discounts at the same time, pre-orders, etc)
- More robust pixel installation during checkout (to help with paid media)
On top of this, Shopify is making it easy for app developers to build tools here and then package them up to apply to more stores, or sell on the App Store. I'm excited to see what Shopify Functions (custom logic) and Checkout Extensions we see pop up in the app store.
Shop App Updates.
The Shop app that started as just an order/package tracking app for all your orders (Shopify, Amazon, etc) is getting some awesome upgrades too.
Until now, Shop has been mainly to track orders or place orders through a half-baked shopping experience. Now, it's getting an upgrade, allowing brands to get a more robust retention setup in place for re-ordering. Again, it's important to mention that orders placed through Shop app / Shop Pay benefit Shopify, so it's in their best interest to make this extremely valuable to merchants and customers alike.
- Merchants can now submit offers, exclusively to previous customers in the Shop App, and track their funnels with detailed analytics
- Create post-purchase offers for new customers or within the 30 days after someone places an order
- Get discovered by new customers across the Shop App (think of this similar to Spotify's playlists like "Mood Booster" or "Afternoon Acoustic") in curated collections.
- There is some chatter about being able to send push notifications for retargeting, remarketing, etc. but there's not a ton of information out just yet.
Shop Promise.
Shop Promise is a new badge that aims to represent safety to consumers and earn trust as a brand. As a merchant, you must be able to ship with 2 day shipping and honor hassle-free returns. This product is also tied in with Shopify Protect, their free fraud protection service for merchants.
Shop Promise gives customers a clear delivery date estimate, which is connected in through your backend settings and with an API to your fulfillment center.
It'll be interesting to see how Shop Promise evolves. It reminds me a lot of the "Non-GMO" badge you see on food products or even just seeing the "Prime" logo on Amazon products. You trust that badge/logo already, and everywhere you see it, you have inherent trust built in.
That's what I'm most excited for; what about you?
On to some fun stuff...
Vendor of the Week:
minisocial — The go to team for high-quality, fast-turnaround, and creator-led content creation
Earlier this year, I got on the phone with Kristen, the founder of minisocial, and I was truly blown away by what they do for their brands, with the price point.
Check out their past work here, it's insane how great the quality is. If you mention my name when you schedule a call, you'll also get 15% off.
minisocial handles content creation for TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, and also for placement on your site. Every campaign includes all the right licensing and rights you would need to run ads or just put it on your website.
There's a reason we send our clients to minisocial, along with Hydrant, Native, Olipop, Jot, Hilma, Harrys, and JAJA tequila. Learn more about minisocial here, but if you're ready to at least get a price quote (and be blown away), then click here to schedule a quick call with Kristen.
Jobs of the Week:
Rythm — Director of Growth Marketing
Balls — Growth Marketing Lead
Fohm — DTC, Head of Growth
You can post a job here on my job board to be featured next week in the newsletter.
Question of the Week:
For this year's upcoming Sharma Brands gift guide, what brands do you want to see with discounts?
Brand of the Week:
Half Days — The chic ski wear that your closet didn't know it needed
This past week at FounderMade, I got to hang out with the team behind Half Days. I remember being pitched Half Days a couple years ago, but I didn't understand the market that well, as I'm not a customer. But they've killed it!
Half Days makes the most comfortable ski wear and outdoor apparel for women. I'm hoping they make a mens version soon, so I can go walk around in New York feeling like a celebrity.
Check out the brand here, and learn more about the founder trio here.
That's all for this week
I hope you had a weekend full of rest, reflection, and hydration. I'm going to do daily vlogs on TikTok this week of my trip in LA, so if you want to see those, follow along on my TikTok.
Get those 9 hours of sleep tonight. See you next Sunday!
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