Ah, September. This has been one of the longest and one of the shortest years ever. Now would be a good time to start to analyze the customer behavior of last year's holiday shoppers. Did you have a lot of one-time buyers from the holidays? How many stuck around and...
Last week we had our A/C replaced. The old unit finally stopped working right before Portland's annual heatwave. We went with a previous contractor and by the end of the job they beat every expectation we had: Price, while high was close to what I expected and was still lower...
This morning I spent 30 minutes weeding a couple of areas in front of our house. This will be the 3rd time in three months I've had to do this, mostly because of some persistent weeds. This time though, I got tired of weeding and took three wheelbarrows of wood...
Last weekend I ordered from a Shopify store with free shipping for $30. Problem was that my order came out to $29.98 (two $14.99 products), just under their limit. I decided to start checkout anyways to see how much shipping would cost. I was surprised to see that I qualified...
While there are times to watch your expenses and conserve cash, there are a few areas where it makes sense to invest whatever you can. Those areas will be different from business to business but usually involve bottlenecks and constraints in your core value delivery. Your value delivery is the...
When it comes to marketing your Shopify store, you should have at least 4 assets in place: A stable free/low-cost traffic source. An additional traffic source that is under development to become profitable or scale. Simple email list that you contact all subscribers at least once per month. A series...
One quick way to plan out your marketing is to print out this year's calendar on a single sheet of page. Each day gets it's own tiny box. Then fill in the big events and sales you're going to have. Finally, count back to figure out when you should start...
Eventually we will be growing some fruit trees in our backyard. But since the soil hasn't been taken care of, if we planted a tree when we moved in it would have struggled and died. A few weeks ago we added a heavy mulch and started to grow some plants...
Have you ever looked at how often your new customers are coming back to buy again from your store? You'll probably recognize a few familiar names who keep coming back, but what about new customers? Are they placing a second order? 1 in 4 should be buying again if you're...
We just bought a bunch of Christmas lights in the middle of August. Odd right? Our old lights are pushing 13 years old so they are inefficient and breaking. We got our use out of them but they were already post-season closeout stock when we bought them. The new ones...
Each tip includes a way to improve your store: customer analysis, analytics, customer acquisition, CRO... plus plenty of puns and amazing alliterations.