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Hi there, hope you're having a great Friday!
This is Colm and Simon from CommerceGurus, with a handpicked weekly roundup of eCommerce articles.
Shoptimizer 2.5 Preview
We're in the final stages of testing our next Shoptimizer release and it's a big one.
We've been working on it since September 2021 and it includes a lot of new features, especially within our companion plugin, CommerceKit.
I've recorded two five-minute videos on how to create a fantastic looking variable product with the new update.
Part 1
- Setting up image and label attribute swatches
- Creating a grid gallery layout, which includes a video
- Creating product attribute galleries
Part 2
- Adding an accordion and positioning it to the bottom
- Hiding some elements using single product settings
- Adding a product description with the block editor
- Ensuring that the reviews tab is displayed
Shoptimizer 2.5 is coming very soon. We're hopeful of releasing it during the second week of February.
Colm came across a very interesting article about Shopify's difficulties in building a logistics and fulfillment network to compete with Amazon.
Shopify is shrinking its network of warehouse and fulfillment partners by about half.
Any merchants that use custom packaging, do wholesale, or kitting, won’t be serviced by the new offerings.
Shopify cannot absorb the increasing complexity of the shipping industry, not even with world class software. Why? Because it’s a people and vehicle business. Software can optimize manpower; it cannot replace it.
Learn more about Shopify's difficulties in competing with Amazon in this area
A potentially very serious court ruling was delivered from Austria recently concerning website analytics.
It ruled that continuous use of Google Analytics to violate the GDPR as it transfers EU data to the US.
This ruling affects any company that receives traffic from the EU.
And the implications are beyond what one could imagine, as this doesn't just apply to Google Analytics; it applies to EU-US transfers as a whole.
Right now, the majority of websites on the internet are violating the GDPR by processing EU personal data on US-owned cloud infrastructure.
Read more about this ruling over on Fathom's Blog
We're big fans of Ahrefs, a tool to help improve your website's SEO, track pages which rank, and an excellent method to better analyze your competitors.
They've just launched a dedicated WordPress plugin, which is perfect for WooCommerce stores. The plugin shows you how each page performs for a chosen target keyword based on Ahrefs, GA and GSC data.
Then, it suggests what you can do to improve their performance.
Each audited page is placed in 1 of 4 buckets based on their performance: Well-performing, Under-performing, Non-performing and Excluded.
Take a closer look at the new Ahrefs WordPress Plugin
Matt Mullenweg is of course the co-founder of WordPress, and in this interesting chat he discusses plans for WooCommerce.
A couple of snippets from the conversation stood out for me.
"I feel like selling digital goods and membership sites is something that could be a lot smoother in WooCommerce. So, I really want to get that super, super good and super, super dialed in, including paid newsletters. That should just be so easy, like a few clicks to set up."
"I want Woo to have the most beautiful checkout in the world. I want it to be the checkout that every other service is like, 'Oh, we have got to copy that.' "
The last comment was particularly interesting, especially since we compared the checkout experience between Shopify and WooCommerce in a recent blog post.
Read (or listen) to the full interview with Matt Mullenweg
With an unusual domain, Lapa.ninja is an excellent gallery of inspirational landing pages across a wide range of industries, including many eCommerce sites.
If you're designing a new site, this is well worth bookmarking.
Take a closer look at Lapa.ninja
That's it for this edition. Simply reply to this email if you have any questions or suggestions, we read every message. Have a great week and best of luck with your projects!
Colm and Simon from CommerceGurus
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