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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...

Over the past few years, emojis have become an integral part of text messaging and gradually infiltrated other media. For this reason, they can add a fun, personal tone to an email as well as increase your open rates.

Emojis appear differently across popular email clients. If an email client doesn’t support a character, the recipient will see a character instead. For example, in desktop chrome the subject line with emojis will appear as blocks but when you will open the same email on mobile it will appear fine. It has been found that the emoji didn’t appear properly in Outlook 2003, 2007, 2010 and 2013’s notification popups but, generally iOS and Android both have good emoji support. That being said we went ahead and put together a list of emojis that are universally supported by every platform. Copy and paste any of the below emojis and use them in your emails.

Enjoy’

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Shopify recently announced a new feature allowing shopping on Instagram accounts of U.S. merchants. A group of Shopify test stores (apply here) will be able to sell products right from their Instagram posts. Currently, 60% of Shopify’s 500,000 merchants sell in two or more channels. With the addition of Instagram, business owners will be able to maximize their channels in time for the busy holiday shopping season. Once selected to participate, merchants can choose to connect to Facebook’s product catalog in Instagram without any additional effort.

Shopify stores who use Instagram shoppable posts will also have access to analytics from the photo-sharing service, including how many people viewed product information or clicked through to its product page. Clickable links aren’t allowed in post captions, so shoppable tags are the quickest way for e-commerce retailers to get Instagram users into their stores. Before Instagram launched its shoppable posts feature,...