The TL;DR:

• Let’s Chat D2C: My Analysis of Shopify Editions Winter ‘24.

• The D2Z Podcast: In this week’s episode, I sat down with Alex Back, Founder of Couch.com, a platform that simplifies furniture shopping in the digital age.

• App Highlight: Black Crow AI - helping Shopify brands get more value from their existing tech stack.

• Upcoming Events: I’m super excited for EEE Miami on February 22nd in my backyard in Miami! Last year was my first year at the conference, and it was by far the most insightful and tactical event I attended all year. Take 20% off your EEE ticket with the code BRANDON20. And if you’re a brand doing more than $5M in revenue per year, email me!

Let’s Chat D2C - My Analysis of Shopify Editions Winter ‘24

Shopify Editions Winter 2024 was released today with over 100+ exciting product updates! Here's what you need to be paying attention to...

🔎 SEO improvements: With the Shopify combined listings app, a product that comes in multiple colors or styles will get a separate URL for each variant. For example, if you sell a protein powder in 3 flavors, instead of getting one URL for protein powder, you'll now have 3 URLs for "Vanilla Protein Powder," "Chocolate Protein Powder," and "Caramel Protein Powder" helping increase your organic search visibility.

🛍️ APIs supporting up to 2,000 variants per product as Shopify looks to tap into net new verticals with more complex product requirements, such as automotive.

🛒 Checkout.liquid is getting turned off in two stages. On August 13, 2024 it will be turned off on information, shipping, and payment pages. On August 28, 2025, it will be turned off on the thank you and order status pages.

💳 Saved payment methods are here for enterprise merchants!! One of the biggest hurdles in migrating over prospective clients to Shopify has been the inability to save payment methods, so I'm excited that this has finally been worked out.

🚀 It feels like half of this release was made up of POS and B2B enhancements. Shopify is investing heavily in creating an omnichannel experience for its merchants and picking up a significant amount of new GMV through these product offerings.

🌍 Shopify continues to make it easier for merchants to sell around the globe with enhancements to its Markets Pro offering, including multi-currency, language translation, merchant of record services, inventory management, and more.

💰 Shopify Audiences 2.2 expands retargeting audiences by almost 2x while also providing benchmarks for comparing your performance.

😎 Harley is bullish on the creator economy, and it shows with significant updates to Shopify Collabs, making it easier for brands to find and recruit creators, pay commissions, and create new offers. Perhaps these creators will eventually start up their own storefronts as well?!

📲 Shop Campaigns is gaining traction, and enhanced features such as shippable videos, product recommendation quizzes, and an AI-powered assistant are now available in the Shop App to increase conversion.

🤖 Shopify Magic is adding AI-enabled image editing features, allowing you to generate, match, or remove backgrounds of existing images, and Shopify Mobile now allows you to create 3D product models in minutes.

💲 Shopify Lending is getting a major facelift with an easily accessible line of credit directly in the admin, terms loans customized for you, and more.

📦 Lots of shipping & fulfillment updates, but one of the bigger ones is the exchange functionality being added natively to Shopify (returns were introduced last year).

👨‍💻 For developers, there are new theme blocks in the developer preview, updates to Hydrogen to get you to production faster, a ton of updates to Checkout extensibility, and more!

This Week’s The D2Z Podcast

#92 – The Future of Furniture Retail

🎧 Listen Now 🎧

In this week’s episode, I sat down with Alex Back, Founder of Couch.com, a platform that simplifies furniture shopping in the digital age. Previously co-founder of Apt2b before exiting last year, we cover a lot of highs and lows in entrepreneurship as well as:

💰 The chicken and the egg problem

📲 Build versus buy decision when it comes to business technology

😎 Leveraging content and SEO for organic growth

🚀 Launching Couch.com

App Highlight - Black Crow AI

What is it: AI tool that helps Shopify brands get more value from their existing tech stack.

Differentiator: Black Crow makes what you already do better by using AI to uncover patterns that can fuel your brand’s performance. In 2 clicks, you can sustainably grow your email/SMS lists, efficiently retarget on Meta, and start seeing additional revenue that you would have otherwise missed in paid marketing ads and abandonment flows.

Price: 30-day free trial, then fixed month-to-month contract based on size

How we use it: To see incremental revenue and

• Grow email and SMS lists through AI-timed popups in Klaviyo + Attentive

• Pass rich and accurate data to Meta to improve ad performance

• Identify users and send targeted opted-in email and SMS flows (e.g. abandoned cart)

Upcoming Events

I’m super excited for EEE Miami on February 22nd in my backyard in Miami! Last year was my first year at the conference, and it was by far the most insightful and tactical event I attended all year.

Take 20% off your EEE ticket with the code BRANDON20. And if you’re a brand doing more than $5M in revenue per year, email me!

I’ll also be heading out to:

• Vinexpo: Feb 12 - Feb 14 in Paris

• ShopTalk: Mar 17 - Mar 20 in Vegas

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