Shopify Updates - TRIBETALK EP 5

Check out this TribeTalk from our Director of Operations, J.P. VanderLinden chatting with one of our Account Directors, Chris Grippo.

Welcome back to TribeTalk! If you’ve been keeping up with our past TribeTalks you know that normally we talk about a wide range of channels and topics. Today we are going to focus on Shopify. 

Shopify recently had their annual conference, Shopify Unite 2019, and released announcements for new updates on their platform. The updates included changes to Shopify’s online store core, online store advance, backoffice, many updates to Shopify Plus, developer products, and fulfillment networks. 

The biggest announcement is a new fulfillment service by Shopify. This is a big deal but there are some lesser known announcements that have the potential to be significant, especially for the merchant/vendor side. 

Page Sections & Portability

A game changer will be the update to allow for sections on every page. Sections-based editing will provide more flexibility and give you the ability to customize pages to your needs.

This could potentially change the nature of why someone might use Shopify. While we have seen this platform be used for mostly eCommerce, we believe the new custom sections could lead more businesses to use Shopify where eCommerce isn’t their main focus. You could do custom pages previously but you needed some technical skills, now you can expand your site in all kinds of ways. This feature may kill some apps that we’re used to using like Shogun and Pagefly. Time will tell. 

Shopify is also introducing what they call master pages and content portability. You’ll now be able to switch between themes without transferring content manually. This means we could see way more switching and testing of themes because there’s no upfront work. 

Fulfillment by...Shopify?

As we mentioned, what’s getting all the press is Shopify’s new Fulfillment service. You can apply right now if you have a minimum of 10 orders and up to 10,000 orders shipping per day. 

A few years ago, Amazon was doing only about 10% of its own shipping and in 2019 Amazon does 40-50% of their own shipping. They have had huge success with FBA and Prime. Now with Shopify rolling this out to their own vendors it will give companies another tool in their belt as they are switching strategies away from Amazon and third parties to direct consumer models. 

A lot of vendors that come from Amazon and are wanting to go direct are trying to figure out what their additional value proposition will be with the switch. This option could open the door to allow direct sellers to compete with that 2 day/48 hour shipping that Amazon offers. There are services out there right now which can do this for you (Shipbob, Shipeasy) but being built within Shopify will make it more seamless. 

A Bonus Email Hack

Since we are on the subject of Shopify, some of you may know that Mailchimp recently stopped being a direct integration partner with Shopify. This was due to a lot of privacy and security  issues which resulted in a lot of finger pointing and eventually disbanding the partnership. 

Now that Mailchimp is not an option if you are on Shopify, we have been seeing a lot of folks move over to Klaviyo. We are big fans of what they are doing, not just because they are a great integration partner with Shopify but because they have great workflows and other cool tools. 

One of the cool tools is Klaviyo’s collected email address option that you can use to handle out of stock differently. When a product goes out of stock, they can opt in  to be notified when the product is available! You collect their email and set up an automatic email campaign to notify anyone who has opted in once the product is back in stock. There’s an automated workflow that tracks your Shopify inventory and you can set up a multi-chain email sequence to go out to those customers. 

They are already seeing really good results with this back-end stock flow. It’s out performing on a revenue per recipient basis by almost 75%, while message open rates are over 50% to their next best flow. 

What do you think about these updates? Will more eCommerce companies be able to move to direct transactions? Do you have any feedback on Klaviyo? Let us know what you think.