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When LSTN headphones started their West Hollywood, Calif.-based audio company in 2012, they thought retail was the surefire route to customers. Their first deal was with Whole Foods, even though most of its stores had never sold headphones. They hustled, went on the Today Show and Good Morning America, and landed Best Buy and Nordstrom, plus others. They soon discovered, brick-and-mortar retail was much more demanding than they’d expected.

“We figured, naively, that it was the only true way to scale.” Co-Founder, Bridget Hilton

There were trade shows to attend. Costs for in-store marketing, including expensive displays. Advertising fees that ate into their already small margins. Flights to retailers for what seemed like endless meetings. Payments for sales teams, reps and showrooms. Retailers requested pricey new packaging changes and updates. And despite all that, the big boys in their category could always do bigger, louder, stronger marketing.

In retail, they...

Four years ago Peter Rahal was making protein bars in his parents’ kitchen in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. On October 6th, 2017 Peter sold his company RXBar for $600 million to Kellogg Co. He didn’t have a cooking background, he was self funded, and he had zero retail experience. How on earth did this happen then? $0 to $600 million in under four years…that’s impossible right? Nope. It just happened. This is a brief look at his story.

I was walking out of a meeting with Target when Pete first texted me back in 2013. He was looking for a bit of help and guidance on starting his new protein bar brand. He wanted to pick my brain and explore how to get into brick and mortar retail and how he could generate brand awareness marketing online. At that time, I was exiting one of my first companies a sports watch brand that I started with a couple friends here in San Diego back in 2010. We used social media to build the brand and gain traction. Fast forward 18 months...

Chubbies makes men’s shorts. Not jet-powered hoverboards. Not spider drones that can film every moment and beam it to the interweb. Shorts. A product that hasn’t changed since the early 19th century and their sales are north of a seven figures year over year. Here are four quick steps to launch your new Shopify venture without selling your home.

1. They started small. Really small.

Chubbies started by taking 50 shorts out to Lake Tahoe and trying to sell them to people. Within moments, people were lining up to buy them. They sold the 50 and then traded the shorts they were wearing, telling them that this was an idea worth pursuing.

2. The co-founders live the values of the brand.

The co-founders each had a quirky collection of shorts they owned, or had inherited from people. The weirder the better. And this passion flowed into their values and ultimately made the brand more relatable. They were the face of the brand, not some hired models.

3. They put content...

Tyler Haney has a motto: “Doing Things.” And it’s how this runner kept going, despite the setbacks. Her clothing line Outdoor Voices– a line of apparel with an emphasis on a playful, “human, not superhuman” approach to everyday fitness is jockeying for position in what seems like an impossibly tight race of major players in the athleisure space — Nike, Under Armour and Lululemon chief among them. Since launching in January 2013, Outdoor Voices has grown from a collection of five samples and a few bolts of technical fabrics stored under Haney’s bunk bed into a thriving e-commerce business with a brick-and-mortar retail presence in five cities, and a staff of 70-plus people.

All this forward momentum took time to build, and as any runner knows, sustaining the right pace is a matter of heart over lungs, and endurance over speed, especially on an uphill climb. Haney’s past life as a track star hasn’t just fueled...

Integrating your ecommerce marketing campaigns across your social media channels always reaps solid rewards. When you think of integrated campaigns, leveraging all of your channels like Facebook, Email, and Instagram can really give your marketing campaigns a 1-2 punch.

While it does take a large amount of strategy, creative energy, and planning the rewards on the other side can be incredible. Lets take a look at an example of how to correctly sync a marketing campaign across multiple channels from men’s grooming company – Beardbrand.

According to founder Eric Bandholz, “Beardbrand is a premium men’s grooming company. What that means is that we put the product ethos and the quality of products as well as customer service at a higher priority than we do price.”

Since they are competing in a very crowded category, Beardbrand needs to go above and beyond to… well, create a brand. One of the main ways they do this is through content-based...

Anton Willis moved to the Bay Area in 2002 and immediately encountered the struggle of getting outside while living in a large metropolitan city. Paddling solved that problem, but only until San Francisco rent prices forced him to move into a studio apartment — an ill-suited home for a sixteen-foot kayak.

Willis was leafing through the pages of The New Yorker five years later and came across an interesting article. The piece profiled Dr. Robert J. Lang, a physicist who became obsessed with the art of origami and eventually quit his fiber optics job in order to pursue it full time. Dr. Lang folded everything from anatomically correct paper insects to a NASA space telescope lens.

That’s why, shortly after reading that article in The New Yorker, Willis started making kayaks out of folded paper. He began with printer paper, then moved on to cardboard, and finally to that same corrugated plastic used to make lawn signs and U.S. Postal Service tote boxes (Oru kayaks are still...

Imagine this scenario.

You have been working for weeks contacting bloggers and influencers in your niche to hopefully gain exposure and generate more sales.

In today’s massive world of influencers on youtube, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat etc., it is extremely hard to keep track of who exactly is driving the most ROI for your business. Yes, you can give everyone their own discount code, and manually track sales and data but that is just a unscalable short term solution. You need a long term scalable way to efficiently track your ROI.

You need to be able to track each campaign to see which one was most effective, as well as which one was least effective. Guess what? There is a free tracking tool out there that you (hopefully) already have installed in your store that can track all of this for you.

Google Analytics. Yup…it’s not just for tracking traffic 

Besides tracking website visitors, Google Analytics is an AMAZING tool to use to track data on exactly which...

Email is the bread and butter of digital marketing. While it’s important to have a number of communication channels through which to engage your community, no Shopify store ( or any ecommerce store) can afford to neglect email marketing.

But the importance and prevalence of email marketing is part of what makes it so difficult. When everyone is trying to woo customers with email, it becomes that much harder to make yours effective. And the first hurdle (after building your email list) is getting people to open your emails.

Here are eight ways Shopify store owners can optimize their emails to maximize open rate. Armed with these strategies, you can expand the reach of your message and ultimately bolster brand awareness and gain more customers.

1. Step Up Your Subject Lines

This first strategy is probably the most obvious. There are tons of articles out there with tips on how to write better subject lines. After all, one study found that 33 percent of people decided whether...

We are going to take a swing at one of the most widely recommended ‘best practice’ for eCommerce websites out there. In fact, it’s so widely ‘accepted’ by the community that most Shopify themes add it by default. Some of you will agree with us, some of you won’t, but please hear us out.

Here it is:

Social sharing buttons on eCommerce product pages are most likely costing you sales and revenue, and you should remove them.

Now lets give you the reason why and then you can test it for yourself.

Social sharing widgets can have a number of drawbacks:

1. They lead to an increase in the page load time. It is no secret that page load times have a strong effect on bounce rates, decrease in conversion rates, and a loss in sales and revenue.

2. This one is simple. A low number of social shares act as negative (or unimpressive) social proof.

3. All of the social buttons on your product page take up precious real-estate that should...

The average shopping cart abandonment rate is 68.53%. While customers may decide to abandon their shopping carts before checking out for a number of reasons — such as hidden shipment costs, lack of payment options, or were simply window shopping — too many steps or complexity in the checkout process remains a top reason why a significant number of purchases are not completed. People hate filling out web forms, especially on mobile devices. They can be slow and frustrating to complete and often contain multi-page steps and validation issues.

To help make things easier for store owners, Shopify is adding autocomplete as a global function for all stores. Previously you had to install this amazing functionality manually with a bit of code, but as of today Shopify is FINALLY adding it into their checkout page. If your store doesn’t yet have it, don’t worry. Shopify is automatically rolling it out to all stores in the coming days.

We’ve found that using...