Google “Shopify vs. Amazon,” and you’ll get over 51 million results. Whether to sell on Shopify or Amazon (or both) is a debate that’s raged for years in the SMB community.
In working with dozens and dozens of eCommerce brands, I’ve heard both sides of the debate: Shopify is good for preserving margins and conveying branding ideals; Amazon is a revenue machine. Those who end up focusing on Amazon do so because of Amazon’s conversion power and huge, loyal audience – but also in part, because Shopify simply hasn’t had the user experience functionality to make its websites as appealing as Amazon. But with each wave of releases, Shopify is closing the UX gap (on both the front and back end) and making a case to earn more attention from retailers.
Earlier this year, Shopify took another big step forward in rolling out over 100 releases for Winter Editions, which our team quickly dug into and began testing. Most marketers I know don’t have time to digest all of the releases, so here’s my CliffsNotes-level take.
AI is front and center
Whether it’s even more functionality in Shopify Magic or separate roll-outs like Semantic Search (intended to help marketers understand customer-intent insights, not just match keywords), Shopify’s releases have a common AI theme.
The benefits to Shopify-based advertisers are two-fold: first, the features give the platform more flexibility and give resource-strapped SMBs shortcuts for advanced merchandising and creative production. Retailers who don’t have graphic artists or photographers on hand, for instance, are going to want to dig into Magic’s image editing capabilities immediately. If you do have resources to do your own human-produced work, I’d recommend using Magic only to speed up the little things – good artists are still putting out better creative than AI.
Second, given Shopify’s wealth of customer data (which, although it doesn’t touch Amazon’s, is a whole lot deeper and richer than any retailer’s first-party data supply), it’s a smart play to invest in synthesizing that data effectively enough to help advertisers with targeting. I don’t expect the results to be perfect yet given what we’ve experienced from other AI releases in marketing, but getting familiar with the tools now will pay off as the algorithms improve.
As with any and all AI features, the usual caveats apply: test before rolling them out, cast a critical eye on output, and make sure you’re refining your methods for feeding your tools the right input as you learn how they work.
Shopify is lightening the development load
Great developers can cobble together just about any UX and data solutions on Shopify, but that often comes with the complications (read: bugs) of implementing third-party tools. Shopify’s Winter Updates bring several desirable functions into the Shopify app itself, cutting down the need for developer resources that many SMBs don’t have at their disposal.
One significant example of this is the Combined Listings app, which empowers store managers to merchandize product variants like colors, styles, sizes, and more without needing to create duplicative product pages or plug in third-party apps. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fielded questions from SMBs looking to come up with solutions for this outside of the Shopify app, so this is a very welcome (and overdue) update. In an advertising age where product catalog ads are becoming prevalent (and effective), the ability for retailers to spin out product-page variations is important on several levels.
If you do have dev resources at your disposal, make sure they’re aware that Shopify released a feature that lets them experiment with new theme blocks. Those themes, which have new features to play with and nifty customizable pre-sets, aren’t ready for release yet, but developers can and should start working with them in preview mode to start planning how to use them when they’re officially launched. Given the rate of innovation across marketing right now, I highly recommend taking any opportunity you have to get fluent with new features as soon as possible, so jump in and start playing around.
Prioritize testing these releases
Magic’s updates to speed up image editing and the Combined Listings app are two of the biggest releases of the bunch, and Shopify marketers should get familiar with both as soon as possible to make their lives easier. The Combined Listings app, by the way, is best used in conjunction with a brand’s Collections page, where each product gets its own URL, media gallery, and description field.
The other release I’m most excited about is the Subscriptions app. Stores that sell one-and-done products don’t need to invest too much time in this one, but for brands with bigger catalogs that rely on growing customer retention and LTV, Subscriptions is a big deal. At the simple end of its features is recurring order/subscription functionality for single products. At the more complex end, store managers can build customized subscribable bundles (up to 30 products) that will provide, among other things, very necessary flexible pricing on products often sold together. This solves a huge frustration for SMB retailers (and customers) on Shopify, as artificially rigid shipping costs and overall order pricing often had the effect of pricing multiple-product orders out of whack and tanking conversions.
Retailers with the necessary resources were sometimes able to piece together third-party solutions to this, but Subscriptions (which essentially put Shopify’s merchandising functionality into overdrive) represent a (very) long-awaited native solution that levels the playing field quite a bit. One important note: you’ll need to be on Shopify 2.0 and have a compatible payment gateway (e.g. Shopify payments, Stripe, PayPal) to plug in Subscriptions. If you’ve been dragging your feet on implementing those, Subscriptions might be reason enough to take the plunge.
All in all, Shopify’s latest releases solve a lot of lingering headaches for SMBs, both in helping create better user experiences and in saving back-end development resources. It might not be enough to convince SMBs to pull all their products off Amazon, but it’s a significant improvement in helping retailers maintain margin by creating enticing customer experiences on their owned platforms.
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