We’ve had loads of clients that have chosen to use Global-e over the years, with a view to quickly and easily facilitating for international demand and supporting various operational goals. I’ve personally always struggled a bit with Global-e, but I can see the rationale for going down this road, particularly if you struggle with agility when it comes to development / your tech stack, need their fulfilment offering or need them to be the merchant of record and take away some of the finance / tax overheads etc. In this guide I’ve detailed our experiences but also put together some tips for gett ..read more

So, creating a solution for pre-orders (or back-orders) for a small, single Shopify store is generally quite straightforward, you take the orders and then simply wait until the items are available until you then despatch, setting expectations to the user and reporting back as needed. The issue I’m trying to address here is how you can create a solution that scales as you add complexity; namely additional stores, stock locations, volume etc. The reason I’m writing this blog post is because we’ve faced this a number of times now and it’s the type of requirement / feature that can unravel as you ..read more

Over the last 12 months, a number of our clients have asked us about operating a Shopify Plus store (or via an existing global or ROW store) in the Chinese region of Macao, following a significant uplift in premium brands opening physical stores in the region. Why Macao? Macao, often compared to Las Vegas, is a small city within China, with a population of around 680,000 people. Macao is an administrative region of China, but it maintains a separate set of operating regulations and essentially has a separate government. Macao is a hotspot for premium tourism and gambling and is a well-known h ..read more

Our average client typically falls into two categories; a traditional premium or luxury brand with multiple channels or a high-growth DTC brand – with our remit often focused on scoping, governing and managing the launch or re-launch of their eCommerce store. One big trend that’s come off the back of the pandemic is these brands wanting to create highly engaging brand experiences or digital flagships – with creative and design playing a much bigger part or role. We’ve had this with 5-10 clients over the last year or so and I know lots of other brands are doing the same thing. The issue this po ..read more

Over the last few months, we’ve been working with a number of eCommerce clients on creating, simplifying and optimising product builders and product configuration processes – with this being a key part of their business and an opportunity to drive improvement in conversion rates and AOV, most notably. These types of products can also be very engaging and generally a really nice user experience vs purchasing items separately. Product customisation, building or personalisation and generally more advanced configuration has become a big trend over the last few years – and getting the design and UX ..read more

A lot of the projects we’ve worked on over the last few years with Shopify Plus have been fairly heavily international, with multiple independent Shopify stores. We’d generally be responsible for architecting how these stores worked from an international perspective and a big part of that is international traffic handling.  Although, on paper, hreflang may seem pretty straightforward with Shopify, in most instances there are actually a number of edge cases that need to be handled, in order for hreflang to work fully as expected. The most common edge cases are: Products, collections, blog ..read more

Over the last 12-18 months, cart drawers (or pushcarts or slide-out carts) have surged in popularity, starting as a trend coming out of modern, high volume sites and progressing into a fairly mainstream inclusion in lots of eCommerce sites. Following some really nice implementations and positive results, cart drawers have become an obvious inclusion in most of our projects and they’re always a big discussion topic with the client in terms of creating the best possible UX and maximising up-sell opportunity. I decided to write this piece to highlight some of the key considerations and also some ..read more

I first started looking at Centra a couple of months ago, when a Scandinavian fashion brand we’ve been working with brought it to the table when we were assessing different options. When it was suggested, I assumed it was like a lot of the other platforms currently entering the market, but I was very surprised to see how feature-rich and widely used it was, both in the Scandinavian market and beyond. I would go as far as to say that Centra is probably one of the most proven platforms out there for DTC brands wanting to go down the headless route / select their own front-end technologies.  ..read more

Moving from Salesforce Commerce Cloud (formerly Demandware) to Shopify Plus (and also BigCommerce as well, to a slightly lesser extent) is becoming a big trend at the moment, with Shopify improving its offering in the mid-market space significantly and representing a considerably lower cost platform option.  A few years ago there was a surge in smaller brands moving to Salesforce Commerce Cloud and these are the ones that I’ve seen primarily looking at alternative options, with an objective of being more agile with new feature development and generally gaining a bit more control over thei ..read more

In my September newsletter, I made some recommendations on optimisations and features that can help to maximise the peak through Black Friday and Cyber Monday, as well as post Cyber Weekend demand uplift. The following suggestions are things we’ve done before or things that we’ve seen work from working with various different clients across Europe and North America. Gifting features in the checkout process Over the last few months, I’ve had feedback forms on a number of our clients’ sites and the most common request (across all but one) was gifting options in the checkout process. The most comm ..read more