Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) is a critical event for most retailers, historically delivering 20-30% or more of total holiday revenue. Therefore, you want to be sure your eCommerce site is ready and able to handle the influx of visitors and that you have strategies in place to convert one-time purchasers into longer-term customers. To help merchants capitalize on BFCM this year, we reached out to some of our tech partners for insights on what is the most important area they think merchants should focus on to get the highest return on their efforts. 

It’s a mantra at eHouse Studio: brands must work to earn the customer. Beyond providing products and services consumers need and want, beloved brands with loyal customers also provide great customer experiences. If you can’t compete on experience, you’re boxed into competing on price, which can become a race to the bottom. Not an ideal situation for most eCommerce merchants. 

If your eCommerce business is relying solely on conventional tracking for analytics – client-side tracking in the browser – you should be wary about trusting your data. Why? Unfortunately, due to trends like increasing use of ad blockers, cookie restrictions, and Apple iOS updates, as much as 20-25% of your data could be missing or inaccurate.

Shopify Editions are the company’s bi-annual highlights of what’s new in terms of products and features. The Summer 2022 release covered a lot of cool new developments. We thought it would be helpful for us to pick out the things that have us most excited, explain what they might mean for your business, and what are some next steps you can take to leverage the latest of what Shopify has to offer.

You’ve probably heard about non-fungible tokens (NFTs): digital tokens that prove ownership of one-of-a-kind digital assets including art, images, tweets, and videos. Some of the most notorious NFTs include characters in the Bored Ape Yacht Club and digital artist Beeple’s $69 million NFT titled “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days.”

Brands are looking for any edge to stay competitive. We saw brand loyalty dramatically fall off early in the pandemic, when many consumers switched from their tried-and-true to other products based on availability, convenience and pricing. 

When it comes to talking about eCommerce platforms, a lot of focus is (rightly) on the front-end customer experience. Speed and performance are critical for great experiences and increased conversions.

Want to know what life was like before smartphones, high-speed internet, and Wi-Fi?

Flip phones. 56k modems. CD-ROM magazines. Waiting 12 minutes to download a song. Waiting 16 seconds for a web page to load.

Back in 2002, we sat at fat, box-like CRT monitors, in a physical office, with a desk phone plugged into a jack. We designed websites for 800 x 600 screen resolution. We developed interactive experiences with Flash for PDAs.

So much has changed in 20 years. (Bet you had to look up what a PDA is.)

Google’s Universal Analytics, the tracking and reporting lifeblood of tens of millions of websites, is making some changes. In fact, it’s being replaced. 

eCommerce is like an endless race to improve customer experience. Great online and mobile experiences stem from a vital requirement: speed and performance. While you may offer all the bells and whistles on your site, from personalization to live chat, if pages are slow to load, consumers will go elsewhere.