When I audit ecommerce brands, one of the first things I look at is their email and SMS automation flows. What I often find is that brands are barely using any flows or automations or, if they are, they’re not AB testing or tweaking and optimizing the flows for continual, iterative improvements. I suspect, for those of you who have been running email flows for some time, if you go and check the content, you will be surprised to see it hasn’t been updated in a while! It’s a good idea to keep your message fresh. Email and SMS automations are some of the simplest things ecommerce brands can implement that take very little effort and provide significant opportunities for growth.

When budget is limited, bootstrapping founders have no choice but to focus on the things that really matter—such as imagery and content, storytelling, marketing, community-building, and quality products. For brands that have seed-funding, there is a strong tendency to get caught up in the look-and-feel and functionality of the website. Funded brands tend to quickly lose sight of factors such as nimbleness, technical debt, and the ability to iterate quickly based on analytics and data.

Journey Map is a podcast series that deconstructs the career paths taken by some of the world’s most interesting people.

Shopify Markets enables merchants on Shopify and Shopify Plus to launch regional stores anywhere in the world—from a single backend.

Are you clearly indicating shipping times throughout your entire shopping process to make it easy for customers to feel confident buying from you?

With any complex process, it’s important to separate pre-prescribed solutions from the ultimate goal. It’s important to fully understand the problems and the “whys”—and to avoid jumping to preconceived conclusions.

The time we have all been waiting for has come! Not only do we now have sections everywhere, we have a whole new Shopify Storefront 2.0! Plus a bunch of other new features and enhancements.

Experimenting with selling custom physical gift cards produced by the Shopify Hardware Store.

A bit of an experiment in the spirit of curiosity and continual learning, the Lucid Design Store is now live!

I originally created The Foodbank Project as an evenings-on-the-couch side-project. It was an experiment to use my skills and knowledge from Lucid to see if it would be possible to build an e-commerce website using Shopify as a platform to run a charity—where every product purchased is given away.

Many brands sell directly to their customers as well as wholesale to retailers and resellers. The question comes up a lot as to whether it is better to run a single store on Shopify that serves B2C and B2B customers—or whether it is better to run separate stores. There is, of course, no simple, best-practice answer to this question—and it does depend on your needs and how you have structured your wholesale offering.

Shopify announces a partnership with Facebook to help businesses create Facebook Shops, a new and free tool helping merchants create a customized online storefront for Facebook and Instagram.

Shopify announces Shop, a digital shopping assistant that brings together the features of Arrive and Shop Pay (formerly Shopify Pay) to make it easy for customers to have a faster checkout, track their order and shipment details, and rediscover brands they love.

Last week Shopify held a livestream event called Shopify Reunite where the Shopify leadership team revealed new and upcoming features and provided insights about the future of commerce. We compiled the announcements into a handy guide. Here is everything you need to know about these features, and how they can impact your business.

Use site displays to turn more visitors into email subscribers and customers. By using our partner platform, Privy you can easily set up beautiful site displays to capture more emails and SMS opt-ins with pop-ups, banners, fly outs, and more.

After June 1st, 2020, Magento will no longer provide support or maintenance for version 1. The only options for store owners still running version 1 are to upgrade to version 2 or to replatform off Magento entirely. In this guide, we discuss migrating from Magento to Shopify and the benefits of Shopify Plus.

Authentic storytelling strategies to increase conversion rates on your website—from the top of the funnel through to post-purchase and beyond. How to turn your visitors into customers and your customers into fans.

A really easy way to increase average order value is to add a little message to the cart saying something like “you’re $5 away from free shipping”.

The last 6 months have been an eventful period for our Shopify app Redirectify. It all started with Google’s Search Console update, resulting in many challenges for us, but ultimately resulting in a better app.

Over the years we’ve built up quite the collection of apps and services that we use to run our agency and manage our teams and projects.

How do we achieve work/life balance when we are considering headspace and heartspace as well as actual, tangible, sitting-at-your-desk work?

Do you want to simply replatform with bare minimum changes to simply get up and running on Shopify as quickly as possible? Or do you want to use the migration as an opportunity to undertake a full design and usability refresh?

It can take a huge amount of time and effort to fix broken links and set up redirects when content on your site changes.

You have probably seen this when clicking into a text field, on a button, a link, or any other interactive element on a website. A border appears around whatever you have just interacted with. It’s not always a blue line; depending on the browser that you are using, it may be a fuzzy grey line or a black dotted line.

Shopify’s new "online store conversions over time" report will be tremendously helpful for merchants focusing on iterative, ongoing improvements to their stores.

I've recently been experimenting with building a simple Shopify chatbot in Slack using Zapier and Google search.

Really good image optimisation requires a few steps. However, with a proper workflow, it is possible to make considerable performance gains and still keep the quality of your images super high.

For anyone starting an ecommerce business, it’s unlikely you’ll find a better solution for setting up an online store than Shopify. It’s quick, easy, elegant, and affordable.

Over the coming weeks and months, my intention is to document the process of using Shopify and various other apps and services to build a business from scratch.

One of the more important aspects of a successful online business is the look-and-feel of the storefront. This is the first thing your visitors will see and you need to make a lasting impression while conveying the appropriate feeling and emotion for your brand.

At Lucid, our philosophy is a bit different. Rather than focusing on how much something is going to cost, we prefer to find out as much as we can about the project so we can start a discussion about what an appropriate scope of work might be. We want to find out as much as we can about the people, their story and ethos, the potential market and competitors, and the size of the opportunity. We want to determine where we can best add value to the journey.

In 2015, Shopify put out the first edition of their 3-part Grow book series—and Galen was invited to author a chapter.