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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.
Enjoy!
Email marketing, especially for eCommerce, gravitates toward robust, splashy HTML emails. Epic product shots, lots of fonts and colors, big call-to-action buttons, and even videos and GIFs.
After all, your emails are battling against so many other emails to earn clicks, you might as well use every weapon in your arsenal.
So this might sound counterintuitive, but sometimes it’s worthwhile to strip away all of those bells and whistles and send out a plain text email.
This is a great article by Jilt on why sometimes simpler really is better.
Read about plain text email conversions
Have you heard about Notion?
It's been gaining rave reviews from people over the last couple of years as an organization tool.
But it's hard to define it simply as that. You can also use it for writing, tracking tasks, collaborating, and lots more.
You can even publish simple web pages using it and share the link with others. It's a very useful app and the Notion personal plan is now free.
Take a look at Notion
The team at Barn2 have released a new plugin and it might be a useful one for certain kinds of stores.
It takes your product variations and lists them in a matrix-style grid format. Each product attribute is listed as one of the axis of the grid. For example, you might list the ‘Size’ attribute horizontally as columns, and the ‘Color’ attribute’ vertically as rows.
This would be an excellent solution for certain wholesalers, and shops selling clothing in bulk - just to take two examples.
Check out Barn2's WooCommerce Bulk Variations plugin
Baymard has an excellent article on homepage carousels and their UX dangers.
This quote really stood out for me:
Indeed, our UX benchmark reveals that only 41% of the sites that have a homepage carousel have an implementation that’s largely free from usability issues.
I've been sceptical about the benefits of sliders for a while and Baymard's article brings up some excellent research on the topic.
This is well worth reading if you or your client is looking for one.
Read about homepage carousels
If you're a bit of a speed nerd, you'll love this post by Harry Roberts from CSS Wizardry about optimizing fonts.
He tested a number of different approaches and recorded exactly what impact each had on loading speed.
In the conclusion he shares what he thinks is the definitive code you should use to include Google fonts.
If you design websites there are some great learnings in this piece. Making client websites as fast as possible and eking out every bit of speed optimization is a great way to differentiate yourself from other developers.
Read about how to optimize Google Fonts
Latest Shoptimizer updates
We have a big update for our Shoptimizer WooCommerce theme in the latest version 2.1.3.
It includes among others two features which we've been looking forward to adding for a while.
- Option to have ajax add to cart on single product pages.
- Option to flip and display a different product image within product cards on hover.
There's a lot more included besides.
See everything on the theme's changelog page.
And for a sneak peak at what we're planning for a future update, see our advanced mega menu style we tweeted earlier on.
The one bit of silver lining in the current coronavirus cloud that's been a delight to see, is the abundance of creativity and innovation from millions of people who've been using this uncertain time to finally tackle all those projects that our pre-coronavirus lives never seemed to let us get to.
This week I'm proud to tell you my very own brother-in-law released his first self published children's book titled The angry bee and the final sting.
It's been in development for quite some time and features wonderful illustrations of Frizz and her friends 'The Bee team' as they journey through yummy meadows encountering danger and adventure along the way.
You can get it today for the special launch price of just €3 with 20% of all profits from the online sales going to charitable organisations supporting environmental conservation. It's a great little book to help keep any little ones you have in your home entertained these days.
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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