Canadian e-commerce titan Shopify has announced that it is launching a new app that will enable its clients to better reach out to their respective customers. In a recent article on its Product Hunt page, Shopify said its Ping app will enable online merchants to communicate directly to their customers.
New Shopify App
The Ping App basically works as an integrated messaging platform where Shopify users can leave and receive messages from their clients, and potentially give them what they need. This app brings together all the communication tools or functions from other messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger and Chatkit. Observers believe that there will be more features down the road as Shopify explores more ways to enhance this feature to benefit their users.
The app, which only works on iOS, includes a feature called “Kit” which users can go to if they want to deliver ads on Facebook and Instagram. It can also come in handy when making email and retargeting campaigns based on information gathered from messages of customers. This feature is expected to make it easier for retailers to pinpoint their campaigns or ads with customers based on the feedback they’ve been getting in their messaging channels.
Shopify app gets positive reception
The Shopify app has received good reviews from industry observers. Ray Wang, an analyst at Constellation Research, says that Shopify made the right move to converge marketing and chat in its platform.
Some observers have also noted that the new Shopify app is a nod to Intercom, another customer messaging app. However, it should also be stressed that the Ping app works only in Shopify and not as broadly focused as the said messaging tool. Still, the launch of the app is considered a breakthrough considering that Shopify is a major e-commerce platform that pulled in nearly $600 million in profits last year.
Canadian e-commerce giant Shopify is making a complete 360 degree turn by building its own brick and mortar store. The company, which has helped build more than half a million online stores worldwide, recently announced that it is going into a different world by opening a physical store.
Shopify Brick and Mortar Store
Shopify said its brick and mortar store will open in an undisclosed location in the US by the end of the summer season. According to Shopify vice president of product Satish Kanwar, the goal of the firm is to reach out to its customers particularly small merchants and give them in-person advice and counseling so they can further expand their online businesses.
In an interview with Forbes, Kanwar expressed confidence that this is the right time for Shopify to help small merchants determine what’s ahead in the very competitive retail environment. He said that the planned office will hold workshops for customers plus a showroom where the firm will be able to showcase its hardware products ranging from cash drawers to barcode scanners. The latter will be designed for business owners wanting to have their physical stores as well.
Shopify Before the Brick and Mortar Store
The firm was founded by Tobi Lutke in 2004. He and a pal attempted launched an online snowboard store but could not do so due to lack of software. A coder by training, Lukte wrote an e-commerce program which he sold eventually. Raising $200,000 from family members and friends, he used the money to launch Shopify.
Today, the firm has generated more than $55 billion in online transactions. Lutke owns around 10% of the firm. He made it to Forbes’ list of billionaires last March with a $1.2 billion net worth.
Some of the biggest customers of Shopify include energy drink Red Bull, Kylie Cosmetics, and Rebecca Minkoff, a popular clothing and handbag company.
Do you want to sell your goods online? Shopify provides perhaps the easiest platform to do so. With this platform, you can also sell digital products and even services like drop shipping or consultancy. The sky’s the limit for budding entrepreneurs like you when you use Shopify.
You don’t even have to shell out a significant sum of money to be able to set up an online store on the platform. You can create a free trial account that runs for 2 weeks. It’s a way to test the water, so to speak.
So how do you get started with Shopify? Here’s a short guide:
Create a free Shopify trial account
Go to the website (www.shopify.com) and start your free trial by inputting your store name, password, and email. Fill out other personal details like address, name, and contact information.
Then go to the dashboard where you can set up your domain, add products, and customize the look of your website. You can also add a theme if you want.
Add products to your Shopify store
It’s also on the dashboard where you can find the functionalities for adding products to your shop. Prepare images of the products that you will be selling online. Upload the photos, set the price, and enable Shopify to track your inventory.
Set up Shopify Payment gateway
With Shopify, you can connect to the most popular payment gateways in your country. This means you can accept payments securely. Your customers will also have multiple choices in paying you, from debit cards, credit cards, net banking, among others.
Shopify Shipping
Since you’re running an online store, you naturally have to choose a shipping option. You can choose to partner with the top logistics firms in your country. Shopify allows your firm to enjoy automatic and smooth shipping.
Shopify blogs and social media
Finally, you can set up a blog on your site to keep your customers interested in the goods or services you are offering. You may also add social media buttons to increase visibility of your site.
What does it feels like to be an entrepreneur? This is a pretty harsh question.
What we know for sure is that the 500,000 (and more) retailer who adopted Shopify to run their businesses, “entrepreneur” takes many shapes.
When you put these excellent entrepreneurs and business owners together, it’s palpable.
We met thousands of Shopify businesses owner during our Workroom event in both Los Angeles and New York this month. Everyone we met had a fascinating story to tell.
Entrepreneurs all around the United States shared their striking and peerless journeys with us. They were all different, but despite where they live or what they sell, they all had one thing in common: enthusiasm for what they do.
We asked the most successful business owners about their motivation to start their businesses, about the “cha-ching” moment when they made their first sale, and what they took from Workroom that will improve their businesses.
Monica started her business by chance. She doodled little characters during a boring meeting which later became really important. After Monica gave birth to her first daughter, what was once distraction now became the base for a new and fascinating business idea.
She expanded on her world of characters, writing backstories and also songs for each one of them,and she also tested the designs on real products. She executed her idea on Shopify and used Printful and Printify to print and deliver “The MoMeMans” products, adding mugs, leggings, and decorations for kids.
Despite her past life gave her a good knowledge in marketing, her experience was only limited to large stable brands. She found out quickly that launching a small business from nothing implied a different skill set.
“I asked a friend of mine for SEO-help to make sure I was correctly labeling everything because if someone was tagging something, for example, on Pinterest I wanted it to be sure that it would come back to me. He said: ‘I really have to help you with this because your stuff is good but no-one is going to see it. This is the ardest part.
This is the hardest part: getting noticed. And I’m still trying to figure it out!
In 2014 in Colombia, Giovanni and Todd find out the Wayuu tribe and became captivated with their beautiful handcrafts and with their style of life. They learned, though, that they were a tribe at risk of extinction.
So they launched Putchipuu, that means protector and messenger of the word, to help the Wayuu tribe through marketing their products. Thanks to their earnings and activism, Putchipuu helped protect their tribe and improved their daily life style.
The two guys now sell handcrafted Wayuu bags and accessories in their Shopify e-commerce. Every single product page reminds the client of their important mission with this message “A purchase of this item provides 30 people water for one week.”
The first sale: teh sound of the Shopify App “cha-ching” made it feel that everything was possible. We had now started our first business.
What was the best lesson learned at Shopify Workroom?
We learned that content creation was the key. We started posting every week blog posts, videos and more content.
After 22 years of working in the book publishing sector, Janet Talbert began working on her true dream. Janet launched her brand “On This Rock Jewelry” in 2009 and has been making inspirational jewelry for Christians ever since. Her first big success came when the well known Kathie Griffin chose her silver cuff as one of her “Favorite Things” in 2010.
“A lot of orders needed to be fulfilled so my teacher Chris helped me. It was similar to one of those Chrismas films when everyone helps each other. It was ama amazing moment and the support of Chris and my community was crucial.
Thanks to a friend, Janet secured some TV love for her jewelry once again, so she was able to make it wear to Susan Kelechi Watson on the NBC hit series “This Is Us”.
“Leave an advice for everyone who wants to start their first business”
“Don’t let fear block you. Keep moving towards your goal. Keep going for it. Never quit”
Any BFCM plans?
“Debut a limited edition suite of jewelry, tag all items so they are Instagram-ready, and follow the instructions in the marvelous BFCM Toolbox. I will also be doing a pop-up at West Elm Lincoln Center on Saturday, the 25th and I’m excited to use the Shopify Card Reader!”
Don’t let fear block you. Keep moving towards your goal. Keep going for it. Never quit
Named for two literary tomboys, Kirrin Finch is the business brainchild of Laura Moffat and her wife Kelly. The couple knew that they were fed up with clothing lines for women. Even if they found options they liked in menswear, they didn’t fit their bodies. With zero knowledge in fashion (Laura was in sales and Kelly was a teacher) they quit their jobs and started their business.
Kirrin Finch, a brand selling only online manufactured in New York, mate menswear style with women’s fits. With the help of the Brooklyn Fashion Design Accelerator, the women learned the ropes, hired a pattern-designer, and built a community on their brand.
What was the best thing you learned at Workroom?
“The things I like about Shopify are all the apps that give you so many opportunities as an e-commerce company to keep improving your site and growing your business. There are so many to choose from, you can really level up your site. I spoke with one of the gurus about what apps she thought were the best for a growing e-commerce company and I got awesome bits of advice. I also felt supported in our approach and I am thinking to add a referral program in a month based on her feedback.”
Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.
Steve Jobs
These days, you don’t need to hire an IT wizard to be able to put up your own online store and sell on the Internet. There are numerous e-commerce platforms that you can use to launch your online business such as Shopify and WooCommerce.
We’re excited to announce new, easy-to-access metrics for all physical retailers: Our improved Retail Analytics puts the data that matters most at your fingertips. You can now track and act on cricial metrics right from your Shopify store, like staff performance, location performance, and much more.
Your Shopify will now feature new reports from Shopify POS, including sales by:
Retail location
Staff
You can also quickly get key insights on your improved dashboard, including:
Total sales
Average order value
Total orders
Top products by units sold
If you use both Shopify POS and Shopify’s Online Store, you’ll now be able to see all of these reports directly on your important online store reports.
Collect data about Staff, Store Locations, and More
The improved Retail Analytics helps you make the most out of every transaction, employee, and location. With the these reports, you can now easily:
Recognize top performing staff and reward them, push new goals, identify what made teh succeed, and Help other stuff member acheve their full potential.
Recognize best-selling products on all your retail shops, so you can laser-focus on what’s working and take weighted decisions.
Use compounded metric to imporve your ROI (return of interest) by comparing sales by location and staff performance with units sold.
Benchmark total sales with different time frames, to assess seasonal ups and downs, identify incoming hard times and prevent them.
Determine AOV (average order value) so that you can profit margins, promotions, sales, and other tactics in order to grow your traffic to your store.
New Improved Retail Analytics:
Big data analytics examines large amounts of data to discover hidden patterns and correlations. But today’ it’s possible to analyze your data and get answers just in seconds so you don’t have to waste days and nights and you can finally focus on the fun part of you business – an effort that’s slower and less efficient with more traditional business intelligence solutions.
The major that big data analytics brings to the table, however, are speed and efficiency. Whereas a few years ago a business would have gathered information, run analytics and unearthed information that could be used for future decisions, now this business can identify insights for immediate decisions. The ability to work much faster gives organizations a competitive edge they didn’t have before.
Two of the more popular e-commerce platforms today are Etsy and Shopify. A common question asked by novice online retailers is ‘what are the differences between these two platforms?’ If you are one of them, it is important to learn the answer to that question as it can help you determine which platform is better suited for your online business.
You’ll need to know two things to really make your blog posts effective: your audience, and your goals.
Know and understand your audience.
Before writing a single word and even a post draft, you have to know how the ideal customer would be and what they want.
Who is buying your product? (Age, gender, location, device..)
Why are they buying it?
What do they care about?
What do they believe to be true?
Think how much easier it will be to create amazing blog posts for a 25-year-old male with a medium-high salary that loves photography and that in his free time he actually take pictures. Targeting people like this instead of people who “just like photography”.
Now that you know exactly what kind of audience you are going to target you need to set a few goals for your blog.
Know your goals
Sure, posting twice a week is a goal, but it’s not anything to get all that excited about.
In order to give yourself the right motivation to push your blog up to another level, try setting goals directly related to your business. An example like driving more customers or increasing sales.
Thanks to the opportunities of online marketing, you can fully track the result of your blog post. How can you track this? Google Analytics makes a great work at this.
Now you may focus on business-oriented goals, like having 2% of all your blog traffic-audience convert to sales. Think now how much more motivated you will be to post those articles.
You also want to make sure that your post are set up for sales conersions. This might mean linking your shop’s prosucts, using banners, or including a non-invasive pop-up that provide a coupon code that encourages sales.
FURTHER READING: Not sure how to measure your blogging goals? Check out this free guide to ecommerce analytics for everything you need to know, starting at square one.
Now it’s time to get going on those four powerhouse posts!
AR or Augmented reality uses your smartphone’s camera to turn the real world around you into a different reality.
AR works by using computer vision and tracking through your camera to anchor a virtual object to a physical point in your environment.
But even with all the potential, you can imagine for technology like this, the quality of the experiences so far meant as a side business instead of an e-commerce business game changer.
Augmented Reality: Not new but widely improved
The term “augmented reality” was firstly used in the first 90s. It was developed by the U.S. Air Force’s Armstrong Labs and involved a complicated setup that looked like this.
Since then, there have been different attempts—like the AR glasses by Google that lets you view augmented reality on the go. But these never became a mass product—the technology and the market just weren’t ready for wearable AR.
But that wasn’t the case for mobile AR. An example can be the Snapchat’s Lenses and the extremely successful location-based game Pokemon Go that allowed the user to familiarize with the concept of interacting with virtual objects through their smartphone’s camera in what was the first solid and tested example of AR completely embraced by customers.
The technology was really far from perfect, though. The AR objects couldn’t adjust in size, this was due to an unperfect evaluation of the algorithm that perceived distance objects nor it would stay in place.
As a result, you could still easily distinguish between real and augmented reality.
But everything changed when Apple announced iOS 11—giving developers the ability and the tools to create more realistic AR experiences—where the virtual (added) objects that “augment” the reality were nearly indistinguishable from the real ones.
And with it, augmented reality’s potential has moved beyond the games and started moving towards architecture and interior design.
Bringing Products to Virtual Life
Perhaps the biggest commercial opportunity within these improved AR experiences is how they give us a better sense of scale and let us closely evaluate products as if they were right in front of us.
The best commercial opportunity within this augmented reality is the chance it gives. We can now choose a better approach to shopping by directly seeing the product we want to buy in our real environment.
“Will this painting fit with the hall?”
“How will this lamp look on my desk?”
Instead of hesitating on this decisions, customers can simulate every purchase scenario possible into their own homes through their smartphone.
This was the result:
“This technology allows users to check and control the peculiarities that make that given product unique,” James says. “We always want to surprise our customers with this amazing service and experience that we provide”
Modelled by Shopify’s AR team, this caliber of experience just wasn’t accessible before ARKit.
The fantastic opportunity to virtually place products everywhere you want leads to a more informed and exiting buying experience.
“Thanks to AR, online shoppers will now have the answers to: How will this piece look in my home? How big is the item in real life? What does the inside look like, or the back? At the end of the day, nothing tops the in-store experience, but AR provides the capabilities for guests to make equally informed buying decisions from afar, at all hours of the day.”
Your Smartphone Camera: An Augmented Mirror
For other businesses, AR is not only for shopping or home decoration but also for your own appaerance.
Now you can use your front camera as a mirror so you can use AR that lets you answer the question, “I wonder what this would look like on me?”
Since facial features are approximately equally placed, fun applications of this technology on Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat have already become popular through social media.
But besides the puppy feature on snap chat, some businesses are using this technology in a more practical way.
Eyewear and cosmetics immediately come to mind—two types of products that you’d want to try before you buy.
That’s why, earlier this year, Sephora updated its app with a “virtual try-on” feature that lets you sample their make-up against your specific complexion. Eyewear companies like Glasses.com have also experimented with a similar feature in the past to virtually try on different styles of glasses.
A web designer is always in search of nice web design blogs to check out the new tips, tutorials and trends of the designing industry. Time is precious and you just cannot keep on scrolling the internet to find the good blogs to gain some knowledge. However, it is essential to bring the highest quality blogs in the search results for the web designers to spend some time and find out what they need.
Subscribe to a few recognized web design blogs this coming year and acquire more knowledge about the latest web designs. See the list below and push your confusion away by adopting these blogs for inspiration:
Smashing Magazine
In the web design field, the Smashing Magazine blog is one of the largest and most popular web design blogs. To get a detailed scoop of the trending web design elements, graphic design and user experience, this website has it all for its readers. Want to get the innovative and useful information about the web design and development industry? Hop on to the smashing magazine website and get to learn latest happenings of the design world!
Tuts
In the areas like illustration, photography, web design, coding, Photoshop tutorials, nothing can beat the increasing popularity of the Tuts+ blog. If sources are to be believed, this website is one place that every designer would love to explore to get access to a wider range of topics. If you want to take your learning to an advanced level, Tuts+ is a flexible and the best option.
Creative Bloq
To get the latest insights of the web design, 3d design and graphic design world, the Creative bloq blog is the ruler. It is a portal that delivers exceptional blend of creative tips and techniques to master the designing genre. With its recognition across the globe, the designers can get to know the best trends of the design and development industry.
What are you waiting for? Browse these websites and see what’s trending…
