‘Tis is the season for new customer acquisition and increased revenue! But did you know it’s also a great opportunity for some strategic A/B testing? Yes! You can get even more value out of holiday traffic! But, as with most things, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about it. What to test and what not to test? Following is a guide to what factors we think are important to consider, as well as some recommendations for the best (aka most effective and least disruptive) areas to focus your testing efforts during the holiday season.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is dominating technology news, but if you’re not a heavy ChatGPT user, you may be thinking: “What does AI have to do with me?” As a Shopify merchant, AI in some form or another may be more relevant to your business than you think.

While we sometimes hear merchant chatter to the contrary, we are here to reassure merchants everywhere: you can set up shared, multi-brand shopping carts in Shopify – and we have a lot of experience doing it. It doesn’t require complex development work, but sometimes it can be tricky to get right from a UI/UX perspective. 

Since Shopify released Shopify Online Store 2.0, we’ve had many brands ask us if they should upgrade from their legacy Shopify store to Shopify 2.0. The answer is (as often is the case in life): it depends. Although we can’t give you a definitive yes or no answer, we can help you think through reasons why you might want to upgrade your legacy Shopify eCommerce store to Shopify 2.0 – or why you may not want to just now.

The top of your funnel is always hungry. With Google’s imminent cookie phase-out, increased data privacy regulations, and the impact of Apple’s iOS updates on Facebook advertising, it has become a lot harder to feed the funnel using third-party data to find and acquire new customers. If there’s a silver lining to this situation, it’s that the necessary increased focus on fostering relationships with customers means you’ll understand them better and be able to provide better experiences, ultimately increasing customer lifetime value.

Your eCommerce site isn’t performing. You’ve tried all the usual fixes. Conclusion: you need a different approach. Should you go with Shopify Online Store 2.0? What about headless? Headless is becoming more common thanks to new tools and hosting, but it’s still not for everyone. Or, in another scenario, maybe you already went headless but the way it was built resulted in a costly headache. 

Here’s a little secret: a lot of brands have DTC eCommerce sites, but their revenue is largely driven by B2B. Why? It’s a smart model for building brand equity and brand recognition. And for keeping the lights on. Smaller brands (and even not-so-small brands) realistically can’t boil the internet ocean, so the savvy ones go where the market is more in their favor (e.g., third-party retail shops, gyms, salons, hotels) to get in front of their audiences directly with less competition. 

Revenue growth means finding more customers, right? Not necessarily. And that’s fortunate because, as you know, it’s becoming more costly to acquire them. We see it all the time: brands that want to grow their revenue decide to focus their efforts and budget on acquisition marketing. Or, they say they want to focus more on retention, but don’t make changes to their strategy and actually do it.

Many of us are shopping differently than we used to, from buying subscriptions to discovering new brands on social media. Some of us are rushing to do more shopping in stores after being limited by the pandemic, or ordering online and picking up curbside.     

Whether these changes are generational and/or a reaction to all that’s been happening in the world during the last few years, consumers’ expectations when it comes to shopping are now different and likely changed for good. What is it that consumers expect? Ultimately: that merchants meet them where they are. They want a cohesive customer experience that spans any channel at any time of day or night, and marketing and communications that are responsive to their preferences and life situations. In other words, consumers want omnichannel shopping experiences.