Weaverse Blog
Insights, tutorials, and updates from the Weaverse team.
Weaverse, The First Theme Customizer for Shopify Hydrogen, is now available for the Vanguards.
Weaverse is undergoing a paradigm-shifting evolution: We have reimagined our eCommerce solution to provide Shopify merchants with Weaverse Hydrogen - the Very First Theme Customizer for Hydrogen storefronts, purposefully designed to help you take your Shopify store headless. Why Weaverse? Headless commerce isn't just a buzzword. Headless allows merchants to have richer merchandising, more personalization, sub-second page loads, design flexibility, and full creative freedom to build a bespoke e-commerce experience at every customer touch-point. Buzzwords come and go, but headless, and everything great about it, is here to stay. Shopify knows this more than anyone: In early 2023, Shopify acquired Remix with the strategic aim of revamping Hydrogen - Shopify’s framework for building custom headless storefronts. In Shopify Winter Edition’ 23, Shopify announced that Oxygen - a serverless hosting platform designed to enable easy deployment of Hydrogen storefronts - will be available on all plans except Starter & Development, providing lightning-fast, globally available storefronts that seamlessly integrate with the Shopify ecosystem Hydrogen is nowhere as accessible as Shopify themes. Even with Hydrogen, implementing a headless architecture is still hard and expensive. You need a deep pocket. You need engineering power to build and maintain such infrastructure. We also have to acknowledge the caveat that most Shopify merchants don’t need Headless Commerce. You need to focus on what makes your beer taste better. You start small and simple. You solve your customer’s problems. You make them happy. You make your cash register sing. That’s all that matters. But what if it’s not enough? Chances are you’ll go against industry titans - competitors with the benefit of scale. While your products may be better, they could boast greater brand recognition, substantial marketing resources, and better acquisition capabilities. In such battles, every win counts. What if you can gain an upper hand with a superior eCommerce experience? What if building a headless store becomes easier and cheaper? What if having a performant, pixel-perfect storefront is just as easy as making a new website from a free theme? Those are no longer rhetorical questions. With Weaverse, we built a visual editor on top of Hydrogen and enriched it with pre-made Hydrogen themes. Merchants can do what they have always done: drag, drop, design, publish - but instead of having a vanilla website, they get headless storefronts that are lightning-fast, content-rich, and unforgettable. "Going Headless" Meant Weaverse What Is Weaverse? Imagine Online Store 2.0 but for Shopify Hydrogen. How Does Weaverse Work? Using Weaverse theme customizer and pre-made templates, developers can cut down development work and deliver Hydrogen storefronts with speed. Once set up, merchants have a native tool to manage store content without nagging developers for help. And here's the cool part: Not only did we make Weaverse look like Online Store 2.0, but we also integrated the Liquid section creation flow into the Remix framework with our Hydrogen SDKs. Developers can define sections in React, customize them with the Section Schema, and dynamically render with the loader, which means you can fetch data from any source like products, collections, meta fields, meta objects, and more. Plus, it's backed by the native server-side render and streaming render power of Remix. Want to take it for a spin? Check out our playground. How Much Does Weaverse Cost? During this beta phase, it's on the house. You can use Weaverse for free for local development. After conducting thorough research, we have examined similar solutions offered by our competitors to ensure that we provide a cost-effective solution. However, we have found that there are no real competitors with true Hydrogen integration as they merely claim to offer it and charge exorbitant fees. Our objective is to deliver superior value, potentially at a fraction of that cost. What's next for Weaverse? The future is exciting for us: We plan to update and refine our documentation and tutorials to make sure you can quickly put Weaverse to its full power. We're forging partnerships with Shopify apps and partners to give our users more add-ons and more components. Our Weaverse SDKs are being primed for 3rd app integration, ensuring Shopify app partners can transition into Hydrogen seamlessly. Getting Started 🔥 Weaverse is now officially listed in the Shopify App collection for "Apps that extend your Hydrogen build"! To get started, all you need to do is install the app and then follow the tutorial in the app onboarding. Give it a try, and let me know what you think. :)
The Ultimate Shopify Hydrogen Theme For Headless Websites
💡 This is a guest post by TrueStorefront team. Shopify is one of the most powerful platforms in the e-commerce landscape. As the demand for headless commerce continues to grow, choosing the right theme becomes crucial for unlocking the full potential of your Shopify store. So, look no further! Discover how the OWEN theme empowers you to create visually stunning, high-performing, and customizable headless commerce experiences that leave a lasting impression on your customers. I. Overview 1.1. Peek behind the curtain about Shopify In the world of e-commerce, Shopify has emerged as a leading platform, providing entrepreneurs and businesses with a robust and user-friendly solution to launch and manage online stores. With its extensive range of features, flexibility, and scalability, Shopify has become a go-first choice for merchants of all sizes, especially SMEs. According to the statistics of Store Leads, there are over 2 million live stores running on Shopify, increasing 14.9% quarter-over-quarter in 2023 Q1. In addition, this platform is used by online businesses in over 170+ countries worldwide. These numbers show the fact that Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms at present. 1.2. Hydrogen - Shopify’s answer for headless websites? As the demand for headless commerce grows, the need for specialized themes that cater to this unique approach becomes crucial. This is where Shopify Hydrogen themes come into play. Announced at Shopify Unites 2021, Hydrogen is a powerful React-based framework for headless Commerce, specifically crafted to empower businesses with complete control over their customer-facing websites and front-end experiences. Technically speaking, Hydrogen encompasses a range of tools, utilities, and ready-to-use examples that streamline the process for web engineering teams, enabling them to swiftly launch headless commerce storefronts on the Shopify platform Venturing into the headless realm brings immense advantages and robustness, but it also reintroduces challenges. Suddenly, you find yourself in need of substantial development resources to upkeep headless storefronts. So, what do you need to do? II. Introducing OWEN theme - best theme in town for Shopify headless site In the realm of Shopify headless commerce, choosing the perfect theme for your online store is of paramount importance. The theme you choose will shape the entire user experience, define the visual aesthetics, and influence the performance and functionality of your website. In order to tailor the user experience, enhance performance, scalability, responsive design and more key reasons, choosing the appropriate theme for your Shopify headless commerce is absolutely essential. 💡 Looking for similar Hydrogen demo store to TrueStorefront, check out this blog post. 2.1. What is the OWEN theme? Is it incredible to assure that Shopify Hydrogen OWEN theme stands out as the ultimate choice for Shopify headless site? Say hello to OWEN theme means say goodbye to slow loading times and hello to a seamless experience with this empowering theme! Its advanced optimization techniques and lightning-fast loading speed allow your website to run at peak performance, maximizing user engagement and driving conversions. Shopify Hydrogen Owen theme incorporates a robust technical stack that empowers developers to create exceptional Shopify headless commerce experiences: Node.JS version 16 or higher NPM version 7 or greater Remix.run Typescript Tailwind CSS Sanity Content Builder Strapi Content Builder As a result, with these comprehensive technical stacks, Shopify Hydrogen OWEN theme ensures a solid foundation for building high-performing and customizable Shopify headless commerce stores with Owen theme. 2.2. Shopify Hydrogen OWEN Theme live demo Let’s dive into the live demo of OWEN them in action with headless CMS such as Sanity Studio, Strapi Content Builder, and Algolia Search. Explore the live demo to witness how the Shopify Hydrogen OWEN theme brings the best of content management, data administration, and search capabilities, empowering you to create an unparalleled Shopify headless commerce experience for your customers. Shopify Hydrogen OWEN theme’s integrate with Sanity, an advanced content management system, allowing you to effortlessly create and manage your website's content, ensuring a dynamic and engaging user experience. (Check out live demo | Hydrogen With Sanity) With Strapi, a powerful headless CMS, the OWEN theme offers a user-friendly interface for managing your data and providing a scalable backend solution. (Check out live demo | Hydrogen With Strapi) OWEN theme's integration with Algolia, a robust search platform, enables lightning-fast search functionality, delivering accurate and relevant results to your customers. (Check out live demo | Hydrogen With Algolia) III. Key highlight features of OWEN theme Shopify Hydrogen OWEN theme offers a range of impressive features and benefits that make it the ultimate choice for Shopify headless commerce. Besides several general features including incredible UX/UI, maximum customizability, SEO-friendly, fully responsive, and support multi-language & currencies, OWEN theme also presents numerous other awesome core features. Powerful Mega Menu: Replace the basic and simple menu with a dynamic and informative “Mega Menu”. Page Builder: With Sanity Page Builder, it helps you create your dream store in the fastest way possible. Multi Layout: This Shopify Hydrogen OWEN theme supports multi layout for a storefront, which changes it easily via settings. Collection Filters & Showcase: OWEN theme offers awesome components for collection filters, easy to show products on the storefront with icon, name, link of collection/category. Banner Slider & Grid: This theme framework supports Banner Slider Component which is easy to set up, and helps you show promotion banners for storefronts. Video Background: The OWEN theme includes empowering video background components for storefronts. Moreover, the Shopify Hydrogen OWEN theme brings advanced site settings, multi-layout, integrated social media sharing, a seamless checkout process, comprehensive documentation and support, and continuous updates and improvements to ensure your store stays at the forefront of innovation. IV. How to install and integrate OWEN theme? As a result of the ultimate core features, let’s explore how to download and install Shopify Hydrogen OWEN theme in the step-by-step guide below. 4.1. Install and integrate with Sanity Step 1: Download the latest theme file After you complete the purchase, you would see the download package displayed in the My Account / Downloads section. Step 2: Set up Sanity Studio for CMS In this step, you need to extract owen-sanity-studio.zip and update environment variables in sanity.config.ts and sanity.cli.ts*.* After installing your Sanity Studio, continue installing the Sanity app to synchronize products and collections to your Sanity project. Step 3: Install the OWEN theme Follow this guide as below to install Shopify Hydrogen OWEN theme: Change environment variables in .env file Change other variables in general.config.ts file And finally, you have installed the OWEN theme on the development server successfully! 4.2. Install and integrate with Strapi Step 1: Create a Shopify custom application (to sync Shopify collections and products with Strapi) In Shopify Admin, go to Apps → App and sales channel settings → Develop apps → Create an app → Fill the App name → Click Create app button. Choose API credentials tab In the Access tokens choose Configure Admin API scopes option, and choose permission for custom app Scroll down and choose Save, then Click Install App Click Reveal token once and save it somewhere secure because you can only view it once Step 2: Update config for Strapi In this step, extract the owen-strapi-cms.zip file. Then, edit database/shopify.js then change your store link and ACCESS_TOKEN that you have created in the above step. Step 3: Deploy Strapi CMS to your server Next, you need to deploy Strapi CMS to your server to provide the best possible environment. Step 4: Grant all Permissions for Public Roles Step 5: Update Strapi variables for Owen Hydrogen Theme In the root folder of Owen Hydrogen Theme, edit general.config.ts file and store Strapi variables. Completing this step and you have successfully installed the Strapi CMS and integrated it with the Shopify Hydrogen OWEN theme. V. Weaverse Builder - The First Theme Customizer for Shopify Headless Themes. Imagine OS 2.0, but for Headless, Hydrogen-powered Storefronts. With Weaverse, Shopify developers build and curate reusable Hydrogen themes, then share them with non-technical users. Everyone builds their own headless Hydrogen-powered storefronts that are lightning-fast, performant, and highly customizable without writing code. Here’s a sneak peek. For non-technical users, Weaverse brought in the familiar section-based page-building experience they had with the current Shopify Customizer. Add section. Edit text. Add image. Customize. then Publish. The best thing about Weaverse is that merchants can keep doing what they’ve been doing, but instead of a normal Liquid-based Shopify store, they got a blazing-fast Hydrogen storefront bursting with possibilities: HD video dancing in the background, sleek animation enlivening every corner, or uniquely story-driven product page design - they’re all within reach. And by providing Shopify developers with a trove of pre-built components, pre-made Hydrogen themes, and a Theme Customizer, Weaverse enables developers to shorten development time and quickly overcome the technical complexity of building a Hydrogen storefront from scratch. However, Weaverse is currently in private beta and will be open to the public soon. If you aspire to remain at the forefront of the latest trends and stay ahead of the curve, follow them on LinkedIn or sign up for early interest. VI. Conclusion In conclusion, Shopify Hydrogen OWEN theme emerges as a game-changer in the realm of Shopify headless commerce. With its superb code performance, incredible UX/UI, maximum customizability, and support for multi-integration, OWEN theme equips you with the tools to create truly exceptional online stores. Its responsiveness, SEO-friendliness, and support for multiple languages and currencies further enhance its versatility and appeal. Whether you're a small business, a growing enterprise, or an established brand, OWEN theme offers a range of pricing plans to suit your needs. Embrace the power of OWEN and elevate your Shopify headless commerce venture to new heights of success. Do not hesitate to experience the future of e-commerce with OWEN theme and revolutionize the way you engage with your customers today!
Death By A Thousand Cancelled Orders
Forget sales and marketing. In 2023, supply chain challenges might be the death of many Shopify brands - as 66% of surveyed brands said they are bracing themselves for major logistics hiccups in the near future. (According to Shopify’s 2023 Commerce Report.) And not a single one of them is a Debbie Downer, Shopify merchants are getting a lot of things working against them here. Accelerated climate-change events, drawn-out pandemic impacts, escalating trade tensions, and cyber-attacks are all putting a significant dent in our production and logistics capacity - making it an uphill battle to meet customer demand and expectations. Production times lag, shipping times drag on, and inventory management becomes a Herculean feat. It doesn’t help that massive marketplaces have set unrealistic expectations for same-day delivery and easy returns that not even they can keep up with anymore. Even the big guys struggle, what are the chances for the Davids of eCom? Here’s How You Fight, Shopify Advised In the same report, Shopify outlined a few ways to future-proof your logistics network, including: Increasing inventory: Carrying more inventory is the most popular way to combat supply chain issues, with 8 out of 10 companies surveyed by McKinsey increasing their inventory in 2021. This makes it easier to meet customer demand, but it's important to strike a balance between cushioning inventory and overstocking. It’s also reported that brands that increase inventory holdings little by little (depending on cost, space, and demand) lower their risk of trapping funds in inventory they can't sell. Diversifying product sources: Creating a resilient supply chain means looking beyond low cost and high productivity. One-third of Shopify Plus merchants are diversifying their product sourcing by finding new suppliers or countries, while others are sourcing products closer to home. Reducing return rates: Returns are a major source of loss for businesses. To minimize returns, companies need to provide a comprehensive pre-purchase experience - with detailed product descriptions, (real) customer reviews, and 360-degree views of each product to set the right customer expectations. Augmented reality is also becoming a viable option to bring products to life for customers and reduce return rates. Fewer returns mean happier buyers, less pollution from transportation and packaging, and less strain on a key aspect of supply chains: inventory management. By taking these steps, brands can improve their inventory management, increase their resilience, and reduce losses from returns. But it’s always easier said than done, I know. The above advice might be harder to apply when you’re local businesses selling daily delights - restaurants, florists, bakeries - where cushioning inventory is much harder (florists can store more flowers, but they won't stay marketable for more than 02 days) and AR-augmented technology might not even move the needle (do people really need 360-degree views of a croissant before purchasing it?) How exactly can you follow the above practices? Take a step back and scan the scene. Let our gaze wander and our mind keen. Then, we'll see that many of the most effective strategies for shipping and delivery might boil down to one thing, one thing only. Customers Expectation Management Is The Key If you’re a Shopify merchant, let's take a moment to flip the script and step into the shoes of an eager online shopper, eagerly awaiting the arrival of your coveted purchase. Can you recall the moments of frustration when reality failed to meet expectations? Your package finally arrived, only to reveal a product that was nothing like what you had seen online. Or maybe you endured a never-ending wait for shipping, far beyond the promised delivery date. And who hasn't experienced the agonizing uncertainty of not knowing where their package was or when it would arrive? All of these mishaps stem from one source - mismanaged expectations. When the promises made by the seller don't align with the realities faced by the buyer, disappointment ensues. I'd argue that the gist of the above best practices is simple - set the right expectations, and keep the lines of communication open throughout the post-purchase journey. By keeping this essential principle in mind, you'll discover a host of techniques to safeguard your delivery process from potential pitfalls. Think SMS notifications, real-time tracking updates, transparent shipping costs, return fee estimates, or even creative packaging - the possibilities are abundant. The Shipping App For Local Business And again, managing customer expectations is much more challenging when it comes to local delivery: expectations are much higher - you have to deliver within hours, and returns often come as a loss to sellers - you don't often re-sell a returned bouquet (do you?) This is where apps like DingDoong come in handy. DingDoong is a game-changer in the world of local delivery and pickup, offering a host of Delivery management features that will operate as your personal assistant to make sure deliveries are butter-smooth and expectations are well-managed. (Sounds like an overhyped plug? It's not, I guarantee. Look at these reviews, can't help but feel like DingDong is your friendly neighborhood super-deliveryman.) With DingDoong's date picker, your customers will love the convenience of being able to choose the date and time that works best for them. No more waiting around for hours on end, hoping that their package will show up. You can also set specific delivery rules for different sets of products, or set up lead times, cut-off times, and black-out dates to make sure customers have the right expectation for delivery. But that's not all. With DingDoong's newest feature (they shipped quite often!) - Group Order, you can let your customers shop with their friends, making the whole buying experience more fun and enjoyable. This is how you stand out: By managing expectations like a diplomat and using tools like a craftsman.
What If Elon Musk Were A Shopify Developer?
What would Elon Musk and Aristotle do if they were Shopify developers? The question is nonsensical. I know. What do Aristotle and Elon even have in common? They used the same approach for problem-solving: first-principles thinking. This powerful mental model allows them to do 02 things: Break down complex problems into their fundamental components of truth (first principles). Reassemble the best solutions using these first principles. But let's talk about Elon Musk. Hate him or love him, he is the embodiment of first-principle thinking. For example, when faced with the problem of expensive building materials for rockets, Musk examined the core materials and discovered that their commodity value was just 2% of the typical rocket price. This realization led him to question conventional rocket production methods and establish SpaceX, where he could build cost-effective rockets from the ground up, applying first principles to redefine the space industry's limitations. In Tim Urban’s The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Sauce series, Musk put it brilliantly: “It’s rare that people try to think of something on a first-principles basis.” They’ll say, “We’ll do that because it’s always been done that way.” Or they’ll not do it because “Well, nobody’s ever done that, so it must not be good.” But that’s just a ridiculous way to think. You have to build up the reasoning from the ground up—from the first principles. So what would he do if he were a Shopify developer? Start with a simple example. Let’s say you’re an in-house Shopify developer and the stakeholders want you to optimize the store performance for better load time. To apply first-principles thinking, we would begin by breaking down the problem into its fundamental components to get a better understanding of the problem space: Why is it a problem? i.e: Because fewer visitors were going to the checkout page. Is there any evidence/data point for that? Is there any issue that might be contributing to this drop-off? (Changes in marketing copy, discount campaigns ended, or change in the design of the product pages, etc) Is web speed optimization the best solution to the core problem? You don’t want to waste your engineering effort on the wrong solution. Let’s say you’re aligned on the problem space. You start to dismantle the problem and you find several key issues contributing to the site's performance, such as server response time, image optimization, code efficiency, and third-party app integrations. Then you would want to examine each factor individually to understand its impact on the site's performance. Server response time: Investigate the hosting environment, server configuration, and content delivery network (CDN) setup. Image optimization: Evaluate image sizes, formats, and compression techniques. Code efficiency: Review HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code for redundancy, minification opportunities, and potential improvements. Third-party app integrations: Assess the performance impact of each app and explore alternatives or optimizations. Now you reassemble the problem with new insights. With a deeper understanding of each component's role in the site's performance, the developer can devise more laser-focused solutions: Server response time: Upgrade to a better hosting environment, optimize server configurations, or utilize a more efficient CDN. Image optimization: Implement responsive images, use next-gen formats, and apply lossless compression techniques. Code efficiency: Refactor the codebase to remove redundancies, minify assets, and implement best practices for faster rendering. Third-party app integrations: Replace poorly performing apps with more efficient alternatives or work with the app developers to improve their performance impact. By approaching a problem with first-principle thinking, you no longer sound like a IT service provider — you actively participate in the business conversation and converse like one. You became an equal business partner. And if you operate at this level long enough, people start to see you as a decision scientist, a thought partner, or an internal tech expert — one that helps them improve decision quality, and they’ll seek you out where the codes speak. And I think that’s where every good Shopify Developer should strive to become. 💡 In case you also want to learn Shopify Hydrogen, check out this article.
We're adding AI-powered features to our Shopify Section Builder. Get early access now.
Sign Up Here Since the birth of Weaverse, our North Star goal has stayed unchanged: To help eCommerce merchants slash away unnecessary page-building hassle so that you can focus on what you do best - making sales and building brands. Have to learn the rules of layout and columns and rows and whatnot to use a page builder? We removed that. You drag and drop like it's Powerpoint Now we tackle the next nuisance: Having to write hundreds of lines of product descriptions, sales pages, home pages, landing pages, or customer engagement emails. We're bringing you a built-in AI assistant. No more tab switching and waiting for ChatGPT to load. Want to generate content for a sales page? Just enter a prompt. And we're not going to stop here. Next: Generate a design for an entire page with a prompt. Sounds exciting (and maybe too good to be true) - sign up for our waitlist now.
Competitive Research Tactics You Can't Find On Google Search
Clashing heads with competitors is unavoidable for every merchant. If you don’t have a competitor, chances are you didn’t do your research enough - or if you’re lucky, you’re the only player in the market. The latter is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing - so you have a much better chance to win a subset of the market if you do competitive research right. Here are 05 tips to do better competitive research: 1/ Reverse-engineer competitors' tactics. You don’t want to copy everything your competitors do without understanding why a tactic works. What work for your competitor might not work for you. This is more of a heuristic than an actual, actionable tip - we’ll get to the tips now. 2/ Sign up for their email list. Learn how they onboard their new customers, how they nurture prospects, which type of content they’re sending out, and how many touch-points they go for. 3/ Go to Sparktoro. Enter your competitors’ websites or social accounts to get more insights into your target customers: Whom do they follow? Where do they usually hang out? What type of content are they interested in? Marketing is all about sending the right message to the right people, in the right place and at the right time. Sparktoro helped you a lot with the Time and Space :) 4/ See an interesting pop-up, section, or functionality on your competitors’ website or marketing touch points? Right click → Select “Inspect”→ Ctrl+F or (Command + F) → Search for “javascript” - you’ll see the list of apps that are running behind your competitors’ websites. Take the Hiut Denim website as an example - you can see you’re using the following apps: Geolocation Recommendation Sumo (likely for Pop-up) Klaviyo (likely for email marketing) 5/ Go to Webarchive.com. Add your competitors’ websites. Learn how their copy changed over time. Changes in copy might tell you about how they define their target customers, how they sell their products, and what they think their unique value propositions are. For example, looking at the 2013 homepage of Dollar Shave Club - one of the leading Shopify brands - and comparing it with their 2018 homepage (when they first started vs when they were more established) - we can learn that: For the manscape/grooming subscription business, pricing used to be a good differentiator (Dollar Shave Club emphasized how much customers could save up) When Dollar Shave Club was more popular and the market was more crowded, they shifted their positioning to product quality and personalization instead. You need to know how they sell their products so that you can find another framing/positioning to sell yours differently. You don’t want to be a copycat - especially when going against a more established player. 6/ Study your competitors’ customer reviews. Skip 05-star reviews and focus only on 03-star reviews, because that’s where the insights are. You might discover unaddressed pain points and hidden needs and use those to your advantage. For example, if you’re selling earrings and you find that most 3-star reviews for your competitors’ earrings are about how it's too small, or it’s easy to fall off - the straps are too loose, or the color was off. Or if you’re selling cleaning paste and the 3-star reviews mention the unpleasant smell - despite its effectiveness. This is where you swoop in and differentiate yourself: You don’t just sell earrings - you sell beautiful earrings that don't fall off easily and are highly durable. You don’t just sell cleaning paste - you sell scented cleaning paste that flood customers’ house with flowery fragrance after cleaning. That's all for today - try these tactics yourselves and tell em about the results in the comment :) -- Interested in reading more blog posts like this - subscribe and I'll send you a weekly newsletter where I combined Engineering mindset and eCommerce best practices to bring you insights you can't find on Google.
What A Book Store Tells Us About The Future Of eCommerce
In 2020, everyone talked about how eCommerce spells doom for brick-and-mortar stores. We were wrong. 02 years later, foot traffic is up again, and the in-store shopping experience is making a strong comeback. If you need an example, just look at Barnes and Noble. In 2022, Barnes & Noble is making an admirable turnaround after a long period of decline. When all of the technological flavors of the year are in trouble - Mass layoff at Meta, Salesforce, Amazon, Netflix stock plummeted by 50%, Crypto is entering its winter - Barnes, and Noble is still making bank, they even planned to open 30 new stores. So what was their secret sauce? There was no secret sauce. Barnes and Noble had been struggling for quite a while - bearing a heavy brunt in the transition to online shopping and ebook reading for the last 10 years. They failed to catch up and the shadow of Amazon Books was too big to escape from. They tried making their own ebook readers (The Nook): Failed. Selling greeting cards and toys: Failed. Launching a restaurant chain (Barnes and Noble Kitchen): Failed, again. They came within a whisker of a complete collapse in 2018 when they had to fire 1800 full-time employees and suffered an $18 million loss. Its share price was down by over 80%. It was a disastrous era. But they managed to turn it around. Ted Gioia wrote an excellent case study on B&N’s strategy so I’m not going to regurgitate the entire thing here - I encourage you to read his substack post in full. Here’s a quick summary of B&N’s strategy, and spoiler: it's beautifully elegant. Empower booksellers: B&N lets booksellers select displayed books - instead of having an iron fist on which books are displayed. B&N’s new CEO - James Daunt - explained: “Staffs are now in control of their own shops. [..] Hopefully, they’re enjoying their work more. They’re creating something very different in each store.” Understand buyers: Daunt also made it his north star goal to create an environment that’s intellectually satisfying —and not in a snobbish way, but in the sense of feeding your mind. It was a big success. Ted ended the case study with a lesson about “love what you do” - but I don’t entirely agree with him. Love for books was vital - but not enough - the remarkable turnaround of B&N represents a bigger change in shopping behaviors post-pandemic: The craving for genuine interaction. A brick-n-mortar store provides something eCommerce storefronts can’t (at least for now): the experience of being physically immersed in a space designed for your interest: fascinating curation of books that are well-displayed + the element of human understanding coming from the booksellers themselves - empowered to choose the books. Look at this photo and you tell me you can get this kind of atmosphere and vibe from an online store? Shopify Plus’s Commerce Trend 2023 also told the same story: A physical presence can supercharge an online one by doubling as an interactive billboard that builds customer trust. Brands get on average 37% more web traffic the quarter after opening a new physical store. "Online and offline are effectively one continuous experience,” says Shopify director of product retail and messaging, Arpan Podduturi. “Very few people walk into a retail store without having done their homework. They usually started on their phone. They're following some brand and they go into stores with purpose.” So what’s next? Physical and digital retail is no longer separate lanes of business. Retail is going nowhere. More streamlining will be needed to unify both in-store and online shopping experiences. And to have complete creative control across all your touch-points - in-store or online - for a cohesive, purpose-driven customer experience, you'd probably need headless commerce. But that’s the story for another day.
Every eCommerce Merchant Should Know About Double Jeopardy Law.
Let’s start with a classic setting: You decide to open a lemonade state on your front lawn. Your neighbors seem to like your lemonade, you make enough to pay back your parent the inventory money you borrowed earlier and you have some extra cash to invest. You compute your options: Get a larger stand. Buy more lemons. Or do some marketing to get more eyeballs. You decide to reinvest your profit in marketing. Why, because at the corner of your street stood another Lemonade Stand - operated by a much older kid, so A. it’s been there for a while and already has some loyal customers and B. it has the majority of the market share. They sell 80 cups of lemonade, for every 20 cups you sell. Marketing is an obvious choice - you want to gain more market share and make your cash register sing louder. How’d you do it? In theory, you’d just need to get your customers to buy more often. Instead of buying a cup of iced lemonade once a week, you get your customers to buy 5th times a week. So now instead of having 20% of the market, you have more than 50% of it. But in practice that is impossible. We know it’s impossible because the Double Jeopardy law in marketing tells us so - and it has been empirically proven, by Byron Sharp - Professor of Marketing Science and Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute – the world's largest center for research into marketing. This law states this brand with less market share because they have far fewer buyers (first strike), and these buyers are slightly less loyal (second strike). Our lemonade drinkers currently only buy one cup every week, therefore you’d have to command 100% loyalty just to achieve 05 purchases per week per customer. But no lemonade brand is bought 05 times a week (people are not that thirsty) and no lemonade brand commands 100% loyalty. There are 02 significant implications following this law: 1/ Brand growth comes primarily from market penetration. Double Jeopardy law tells you that you can’t expect to have significant growth from growing loyalty only - you need to emphasize penetration alongside loyalty or buy rate. 2/ Loyalty and market share change together - so it’s nigh-impossible to grow loyalty without gaining more market shares. Therefore, loyalty gains are a result of market penetration, not the other way around - which shows that improving loyalty is a weak growth driver. I know this would not sit right with a lot of marketing professionals - as it seems to be common knowledge that it is always cheaper and easier to sell one more unit to an existing customer than to find a new one. But if you want proof that this is not BS - check out Byron Sharp's How Brand Grows. It’s revolutionary!
Make Your Beer Taste Better
I helped build a Shopify app that 200K+ Shopify users use - and the best Shopify brands never lose focus on making their beer taste better. No, they didn’t sell beer. “Focus on what your beer tastes better” is the analogy Jeff Bezos made when pitching AWS at the 2008 Y Combinator Startup School. It was an odd - but cleverly calculated analogy. The analogy came to Jeff Bezos after he visited a 300-year-old brewery in Luxembourg - which were one of the first factories in Luxembourg that used electric power to help in the beer-manufacturing process. Back then they couldn’t buy electric power off the electric grid because there wasn’t an electric grid - so they started making their own electric power (which is pretty badass by itself). Many other companies also did the same thing - they wanted to make their operations more efficient, and the only way to do so was to become an expert in electric power generation and set up their own generators. But the tricky thing was that generating their own electric power didn’t make their beer taste better. After a while, these breweries realized that making their own electric power was resource-consuming, capital-intensive, and taking a toll on their operational capacity - without making their beer taste any better. And if new shiny technology couldn’t make your beer taste better - then what was it even for? (this is a rhetorical question in the context of beer-making only because electricity was our greatest invention) And the point Jeff Bezos was making - which was insightful and highly applicable to us eCommerce insiders - is that you don’t need most novel technology to build your product, do marketing, or make sales - you just need the right one. You want to go from your idea to a successful product as quickly as possible, rightfully so - and there will always be some heavy lifting that gets in the middle between your idea vision and your success. And we often think that this heavy lifting has to be done at a world-class level of excellence, or else your vision will fail. But this is totally undifferentiated and isn't actually making the beer taste better. We get tunnel vision and deafened by all the noises out there - when 100 products saying 100 different things but they might just be the same (and we might also be guilty of it :) ) This is not to say you shouldn’t install new apps to improve your revenue operation or buy a new tool to help your marketing team - it’s more about not letting them dilute your focus on making your beer taste better. :) Watch Bezos's full pitch here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nKfFHuouzA
Goodbye Liquid. Hello Hydrogen
82% of Shopify partners on Experts Marketplace specialize in custom storefronts and custom theme development. The market is crammed. But if you’re finding your edge as a Shopify developer/web agency, here’s how you can do it (or what I’d do). The short answer: By learning Hydrogen. The “Why” is fairly obvious - if you’re been in the space long enough. Shopify Liquid has some major drawbacks and limitations: The risk of vendor lock-in is significant. Liquid theme binds your code to Shopify - so if you want to migrate to a different system, good luck. Liquid is (seemingly) built under the assumption that companies won’t evolve because it makes the e-commerce platform the hub around which the whole apparatus of success spins. When brands have to change their platform, the entire system might go to waste - translating into the loss of resources: thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars Customization with Liquid in the background can take a toll on developers. The available options with Liquid are severely limited, whereas installing apps may incur additional fees and hamper performance. You can use additional app scripts, but they can conflict with your theme code, which results in even more redundant and non-reusable code. Any developer with a DRY mindset (don’t repeat yourself) would hate it. Another stumbling block is the need for better performance optimization. Liquid is a backend template language used for static content generation - so if you want to make a website more interactive and responsive, you have to use an additional 3rd script, which guarantees to put a brake on your site’s loading speed. And the most fundamental drawback is that Liquid is a template language - making it challenging to develop. Custom databases and complex logic are tough nuts to crack. I remember reading this somewhere on Shopify Reddit - which perfectly captures the biggest drawback of Liquid: “Liquid theme restricts you to how and what you can develop. Do you want to create a single-page application? No. Perhaps a progressive web application? No. Is it possible to unit-test your markup? Again, no! Even custom URLs are not an option.” The engineering wizards at Shopify must have been aware of these drawbacks - because they have been actively working on Shopify Hydrogen - a new programming language that was specifically designed to improve the performance and scalability of Shopify stores. Hydrogen is intended to be a replacement for Liquid - and Shopify is pushing for it with vigor. They recently acquired the community-favorite RemixJS and plan to use it to improve Hydrogen’s stability and performance. And this is from Shopify’s Press Release:Remix Joins Shopify To Push Web Forward, written by VP of Engineering at Shopify themselves: With the Remix team at Shopify, developers building on Shopify will benefit from new tools that they will love, and merchants will see custom storefronts that are faster than ever with an improved Hydrogen product. The Remix open-source community will have a strong sponsor and supporter they can trust to enable the framework to accelerate its roadmap, with the knowledge that they can bet on the framework for the long run. While Hydrogen is focused on commerce, Remix is focused lower in the stack, and will continue to be a general web solution that scales from content through commerce and all the way to apps. Shopify will use Remix across many projects where it makes sense, and you can expect to see more of our developer platform with first-class Remix support over time. I can tell you from my own experience - the possibilities with Hydrogen are abundant: Developers can create fully custom websites with access to the controllers and models, making complex logic and third-party service requests possible. Hydrogen also does not tightly couple code to the Shopify platform, meaning businesses can change platforms without having to start from scratch. Better Flexibility: Hydrogen enables developers to create a single-page application, a progressive web application, and to unit-test their code. It also supports custom URLs and has better performance than Liquid. Enhanced performance: Hydrogen is optimized for performance and is able to handle large volumes of traffic more efficiently than Liquid. This means that stores built with Hydrogen may load faster and be more responsive. Better error handling: Hydrogen has improved error handling and debugging capabilities, making it easier to identify and fix problems with your store. Improved developer experience: Hydrogen is designed to be easier to learn and use than Liquid, which should make it easier for developers to build and maintain Shopify stores. As Shopify developers, I wager we’re at the threshold of a complete disruption - the eCommerce equivalent of transitioning from horse-drawn vehicles to automobiles. I’ll leave it to you to decide what to do next, but for me, I’d better run.