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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.
It’s never been more important to ensure your eCommerce store is accessible. Not only does focusing on accessibility improve the number of people who can shop at your store, but it can also help you avoid legal costs and heavy fines.
Despite this, it’s not uncommon for small and mid-sized Shopify store owners to overlook accessibility.
They often assume it doesn’t apply to them or consider it a task for the future, when their business is better established or more profitable.
However, this guide to Shopify accessibility explains why WCAG compliance matters. It also covers common accessibility issues Shopify stores face, how to audit your store for accessibility issues, and some quick accessibility wins.
See Why WCAG Complicance Matters for Your Store
In this short 4 minute video, Baymard highlights how crucial the homepage is for first-time visitors.
Their UX research shows that if users don’t immediately see a wide and relevant range of product types, many will assume the site doesn’t offer what they need—and leave without browsing further.
Baymard shares real user testing from major online retailers like REI, Wayfair, B&H Photo, and Williams-Sonoma, illustrating how homepage design directly impacts user engagement and sales.
Key takeaways include the importance of showcasing product variety at a glance, especially on mobile, and smart use of categories vs. specific products to guide users effectively.
Learn Why Your Homepage Needs Product Variety
Yoast celebrates its 15th anniversary with 15 up-to-date SEO tips focused on 2025 and beyond.
The guide encourages using AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Ahrefs, and Semrush to streamline SEO tasks and focus on content creation.
Key tips include optimizing for zero-click searches, investing in video, improving eCommerce and local SEO, enhancing UX, using structured data, and pruning outdated content.
Above all, Yoast stresses creating helpful, people-first content and staying active in the SEO community to keep up with evolving trends.
See Yoast's 15 SEO Tips for 2025
It is always great catching up with Karolína Vyskočilová at WordCamp each year, and meeting in Basel for WCEU 2025 was no exception.
She's been building some incredibly useful products, and her latest plugin is no exception.
The Phone Validator and Formatter tackles one of those seemingly small but surprisingly annoying problems that every store owner deals with - messy phone number data.
We've all experienced it: customers entering phone numbers in every format imaginable, missing country codes, inconsistent spacing, and the headaches that follow when you're trying to contact them.
Karolína's plugin automatically validates and formats phone numbers at checkout and in customer accounts, ensuring everything stays clean and consistent.
Check out Phone Validator and Formatter for WooCommerce
Martijn Hols offers practical guidance for enhancing web accessibility without significant overhead. He emphasizes that accessibility improvements benefit all users, not just those with disabilities.
Key recommendations include using semantic HTML elements such as the button element rather than a div enhanced with JS.
These native elements come with built-in accessibility features, including keyboard support and screen reader compatibility.
He also underscores the importance of meaningful alt text and suggests explaining an image to someone with partial vision, ensuring that the alt text conveys essential information.
The article also touches on the use of ARIA attributes, recommending their application only when native HTML elements cannot achieve the desired functionality.
Overall, Hols advocates for a pragmatic approach to accessibility, focusing on foundational practices that enhance user experience for everyone.
Discover Accessibility Essentials Every Developer Should Know
Supahero is a curated gallery of high-quality website hero sections, offering a wide variety of design styles, from minimal to video and image-based layouts.
It's a great resource for eCommerce store owners looking for visual inspiration to enhance their storefronts.
Take a look at Supahero
Shopify store owners, we want to hear from you!
We're looking for Shopify merchants and agencies to test our new Shopify apps and provide valuable feedback. In exchange for your insights, you'll receive a free lifetime license.
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Have a great week and best of luck with your projects!
Colm and Simon from CommerceGurus
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