Hosted at Arnolfino on Tuesday 27th September 2016
Myself and Darren popped along to the Shopify Retail Tour to see one of the experts, meet other retail nerds and hear what is new. The whole setup was very slick and I loved the fittings they’d designed for the tour.
At Bristol Culture we currently run four Shopify point of sale (POS) instances across retail (£300K+) , fundraising and Archives.
We had booked a one-on-one session with one of the Shopify support team. We wanted to pick their brains about better ways to run our small empire online and mention a few issues we have with POS.
One of the reasons I chose Shopify originally was due to the added features that third party apps can offer. Our host was fantastic at reviewing our current online shop which has a tiny conversion rate of 0.4% and making having done a test purchase suggested ways to improve:
- Try out multiple shop inventory apps such as Tradegeeko (for our small £££ expansion) or Stitch labs
- Quick books for more useful management of our business position
- Using their newly acquired KIT for third party marketing
- Free app SEO doctor to see where our online shop could be improved
- ALT Text app (free)
- Make it clear that we offer in-museum pick-up of orders
- Read and action : 50 ways to make your first sales
- regularly review our abandoned checkout analytics
- Try Facebook sales Channel (found via report area)
- Find a better header image
- Blog regularly to help SEO – ask suppliers too!
- Photography- keep consistent background
- Organise products a in range or collection instead of long product pages
The helpful Mailchimp team also showed us 2-3 automation features we’ll be testing very soon to kick start our mailing list efforts.
I was super happy that David Seal from the POS team was at the event and I had the chance to explain how we use POS, some issues and made a few feature requests. I have been following David on Twitter for some time so it is always cool to meet twitter folk.
The new mobile phone version of Shopify was released on Tuesday which finally lets me login to multiple stores without the hassle of logging out on Android. It has only crashed once in 24hrs!
Suggestions/feedback
- Our biggest feature request is for the mobile app or bar code scanner to let us quickly scan products on the spot and get sales history. This would really help us review the position of products and any affect of moving, effectively letting us do easy A/B testing.
- As with many people i’m baffled that adding Cost of Goods isn’t possible natively within Shopify. How else do you know your profit margin?! it would immediately help you review products and maybe increase or delete a SKU.
- I also suggested that Shopify should look into partnering with retail shop fitters for pop-up equipments and fixtures.
- POS app can seem slow or unresponsive when our team are busy and we can get the odd crash – tough if it is in its locked enclosure!
- The till drawer only opens when we have wifi which sometimes falls over and unless you have the key you are in for a tough sell!
My favourite quote of the evening came right at the end when one of the speakers said “They can’t catch you if you keep running”
Thanks for having us!
#shopifyretailtour