Newsletter Signup

At Gorgias we recently switched our flask & celery apps from Google Cloud VMs provisioned with Fabric to using docker with kubernetes (k8s). This is a post about our experience doing this.

‍

Note: I'm assuming that you're somewhat familiar with Docker.

‍

Docker structure

The killer feature of Docker for us is that it allows us to make layered binary images of our app. What this means is that you can start with a minimal base image, then make a python image on top of that, then an app image on top of the python one, etc..

‍

Here's the hierarchy of our docker images:

• gorgias/base - we're using phusion/baseimage as a starting base image.
• gorgias/pgbouncer
• gorgias/rabbitmq
• gorgias/nginx - extends gorgias/base and installs NGINX
• gorgias/python - Installs pip, python3.5 - yes, using it in production.
• gorgias/app - This installs all the system dependencies: libpq, libxml, etc.. and then does pip install -r requirements.txt
• gorgias/web - this sets up uWSGI and runs our flask app
• gorgias/worker - Celery worker

‍

Piece of advice: If you used to run your app using supervisord before I would advise to avoid the temptation to do the same with docker, just let your container crash and let k8s handle it.

‍

Now we can run the above images using: docker-compose, docker-swarm, k8s, Mesos, etc...

‍

We chose Kubernetes too

There is an excellent post about the differences between container deployments which also settles for k8s.

‍

I'll also just assume that you already did your homework and you plan to use k8s. But just to put more data out there:

‍

Main reason: We are using Google Cloud already and it provides a ready to use Kubernetes cluster on their cloud.

‍

This is huge as we don't have to manage the k8s cluster and can focus on deploying our apps to production instead.

‍

Let's begin by making a list of what we need to run our app in production:

• Database (Postgres)
• Message queue (RabbitMQ)
• App servers (uWSGI running Flask)
• Web servers (NGINX proxies uWSGI and serves static files)
• Workers (celery)

‍

Why Kubernetes again?

We ran the above in a normal VM environment, why would we need k8s? To understand this, let's dig a bit into what k8s offers:

• A pod is a group of containers (docker, rtk, lxc...) that runs on a Node. It's a group because sometimes you want to run a few containers next to each other. For example we are running uWSGI and NGINX on the same pod (on the same VM and they share the same ip, ports, etc..).
• A Node is a machine (VM or metal) that runs a k8s daemon (minion) that runs the Pods.
• The nodes are managed by the k8s master (which in our case is managed by the container engine from Google).
• Replication Controller or for short rc tells k8s how many pods of a certain type to run. Note that you don't tell k8s where to run them, it's master's job to schedule them. They are also used to do rolling updates, and autoscaling. Pure awesome.
• Services take the exposed ports of your Pods and publishes them (usually to the Public). Now what's cool about a service that it can load-balance the connections to your pods, so you don't need to manage your HAProxy or NGINX. It uses labels to figure out what pods to include in it's pool.
• Labels: The CSS selectors of k8s - use them everywhere!
• ‍

There are more concepts like volumes, claims, secrets, but let's not worry about them for now.

‍

Postgres

We're using Postgres as our main storage and we are not running it using Kubernetes.

‍

Now we are running postgres in k8s (1 hot standby + pghoard), you can ignore the rest of this paragaph.

The reason here is that we wanted to run Postgres using provisioned SSD + high memory instances. We could have created a cluster just for postgres with these types of machines, but it seemed like an overkill.

The philosophy of k8s is that you should design your cluster with the thought that pods/nodes of your cluster are just gonna die randomly. I haven't figured our how to setup Postgres with this constraint in mind. So we're just running it replicated with a hot-standby and doing backups with wall-e for now. If you want to try it with k8s there is a guide here. And make sure you tell us about it.

‍

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ (used as message broker for Celery) is running on k8s as it's easier (than Postgres) to make a cluster. Not gonna dive into the details. It's using a replication controller to run 3 pods containing rabbitmq instances. This guide helped: https://www.rabbitmq.com/clustering.html

‍

uWSGI & NGINX

As I mentioned before, we're using a replication controller to run 3 pods, each containing uWSGI & NGINX containers duo: gorgias/web & gorgias/nginx. Here's our replication controller web-rc.yaml config:

‍

apiVersion: v1
kind: ReplicationController
metadata:
 name: web
spec:
 replicas: 3 # how many copies of the template below we need to run
 selector:
   app: web
 template:
   metadata:
     labels:
       app: web
   spec:
     containers:
     - name: web
       image: gcr.io/your-project/web:latest # the image that you pushed to Google Container Registry using gcloud docker push
       ports: # these are the exposed ports of your Pods that are later used by the k8s Service
         - containerPort: 3033
           name: "uwsgi"
         - containerPort: 9099
           name: "stats"
     - name: nginx
       image: gcr.io/your-project/nginx:latest
       ports:
         - containerPort: 8000
           name: "http"
         - containerPort: 4430
           name: "https"
       volumeMounts: # this holds our SSL keys to be used with nginx. I haven't found a way to use the http load balancer of google with k8s.  
         - name: "secrets"
           mountPath: "/path/to/secrets"
           readOnly: true
     volumes:
       - name: "secrets"
         secret:
           secretName: "ssl-secret"
And now the web-service.yaml:apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
 name: web
spec:
 ports:
 - port: 80
   targetPort: 8000
   name: "http"
   protocol: TCP
 - port: 443
   targetPort: 4430
   name: "https"
   protocol: TCP
 selector:
   app: web
 type: LoadBalancer

‍

That type: LoadBalancer at the end is super important because it tells k8s to request a public IP and route the network to the Pods with the selector=app:web.
If you're doing a rolling-update or just restarting your pods, you don't have to change the service. It will look for pods matching those labels.

‍

Celery

Also a replication controller that runs 4 pods containing a single container: gorgias/worker, but doesn't need a service as it only consumes stuff. Here's our worker-rc.yaml:

‍

apiVersion: v1
kind: ReplicationController
metadata:
 name: worker
spec:
 replicas: 2
 selector:
   app: worker
 template:
   metadata:
     labels:
       app: worker
   spec:
     containers:
     - name: worker
       image: gcr.io/your-project/worker:latest

‍

‍

Some tips

• Installing some python deps take a long time, for stuff like numpy, scipy, etc.. try to install them in your namespace/app container using pip and then do another pip install in the container that extends it, ex: namespace/web, this way you don't have to rebuild all the deps every time you update one package or just update your app.
• Spend some time playing with gcloud and kubectl. This will be the fastest way to learn of google cloud and k8s.
• Base image choice is important. I tried phusion/baseimage and ubuntu/core. Settled for phusion/baseimage because it seems to handle the init part better than ubuntu core. They still feel too heavy. phusion/baseimage is 188MB.

‍

‍

Conclusion

With Kubernetes, docker finally started to make sense to me. It's great because it provides great tools out of the box for doing web app deployment. Replication controllers, Services (with LoadBalancer included), Persistent Volumes, internal DNS. It should have all you need to make a resilient web app fast.

At Gorgias we're building a next generation helpdesk that allows responding 2x faster to common customer requests and having a fast and reliable infrastructure is crucial to achieve our goals.

If you're interested in working with this kind of stuff (especially to improve it): we're hiring!

The Peak Season is a stressful period for most merchants. According to a recent study, 75% of them are concerned about the rising customer service needs during that time of the year. Let’s walk through some of the best practices to make the most out this increase in customer service needs.

But first, let’s read about a customer support story that happened a while ago.

The Black Fridge Story

Dan is hanging-out in his kitchen when he realizes that his fridge is no longer working. He decides to contact the customer support team of the fridge merchant and waits for an answer. Unfortunately for Dan, this happens a week before Black Friday and the merchant team is lost under the huge spike in tickets.

So Dan waits three days before his request is taken care of by a contractor hired two days ago to help with the workload. Dan gets redirected to the manufacturer of the fridge and, also after 3 days, gets a first answer.

Dan gets into what is called ‘the maze’ and gets redirected to another person. Seven days after he first contacted the merchant, he finally gets a technician to come at his place fix his fridge. The technician comes over but realizes he need some parts to fix the fridge that take another 7 days to be delivered. The parts that arrive are not the right ones and a new order needs to be made.

It’s been more than two weeks since Dan first tried to get help and this makes him crazy. He goes back to the fridge merchant to ask for a fridge replacement and gets a response after 4 days. He gets told that replacements cannot be made as it goes against the merchant policy.

Dan starts telling the story on social media to kill the merchant reputation. The story goes viral and eventually Dan gets his fridge replaced.

Nobody wins in this story, and this terrible situation could have been avoided with a few of the coming tips.

Tip #1: Leverage support to promote your marketing efforts

What’s the open rate of your email promotions? 5, 10, 20%? And what’s the open rate of customer service messages? Probably close to 100%. So what if you made these promotions in those customer support tickets to leverage on the support you’re making?

Tip #2: Your support staff should be your sales associates

Make sure your customer support heroes provide the same experience to your potential customers as if they were physically going to a store and being advised. You’ll end up making relationships with your customers and turning them into ambassadors for your brand.

Tip #3: Create macros for the most common Peak Season questions

We pulled out the tickets of 600 customers to understand some of the most common questions that your team can expect to receive. Here are the results we got.

Those make up for 40% of your requests. You can actually prepare for it to decrease your response time. There are three ways to do so:

1. Make sure you have one macro for each question. If you are not familiar yet with macros, check this out.
2. Make sure your FAQ sectionis up to date to answer these questions.
3. Set up automatic responses so they get answers straight away to these common questions.

Tip #4: Respond faster to wow your customers

People usually expect you to answer within two hours if not more. By responding in a few minutes you’ll make your customers amazed by your efficiency and will prevent them from going to your competitors. Best, they’ll spread the word on how professional you are and you might end up gaining a few more customers on the way. Here’s an interesting graph we came up with using our customer service statistics.

The repeat rate is the % of your customers who are going to make a new purchase after they already made an order. As you can see, people who already called for the customer service help and got a good experience out of it are way more likely to make a new purchase.

Tip #5: Staff to handle the support spike

You might want to hire a few temporary people to handle the spike in tickets. Bear in mind however that these guys don’t know your product so make sure to train them a few days before accordingly. Make it a rule that if one of your support guys can’t answer a question within five minutes, then it’s best for them to pass it over to somebody else, instead of rushing into giving a wrong answer and end up like Dan in our fridge story.

Tip #6: Build a wall of love to boost morale and track comment

While your team maybe be stressed out by the workload, make sure you build a system that highlights the best reviews and show them they are making people happy and doing a good work.

Takeaways

By increasing the number of people on your customer support team (tip #5) to handle the tickets spike and focusing on not only answering requests fast to impress them (tip #4) using of macros and other tools (tip #3) but also giving them a proper experience (tip #2), you’ll be sure to turn your customers into ambassadors for your brand but also increase your repeat rate. Make sure to also leverage the support spike by including promotions in your requests answers (tip #1). Finally, don’t forget to cheer up your team by creating a wall of love (tip #6) to let them know about the great reviews they get from happy customers.

Instagram is really the perfect social channel for Ecommerce brands. You can show off your products, share user-generated content, and engage with your community to build brand loyalty. 

All that engagement is great, except it adds a task to your plate that quickly multiplies as your brand grows: You have to interact back. Or at least you should, if you want to capitalize on all that engagement!

Sometimes your marketing team or social media manager will handle Instagram replies, but sooner or later you’ll start to get the “Where is my order?” (or “WISMO”) question from shoppers, regardless of the content being shared. This can result in an inefficient workflow between social and support teams to communicate the question, track down an order status, and get a reply back to the customer. 

That’s why Gorgias integrates directly with Instagram (and other social media platforms), to streamline the management and interaction with top-level comments, ad comments, private messages, and replies. Instead of going back and forth between your Ecommerce platform, the social team, and the support team, you can empower your agents to reply quickly and accurately to any question that comes in, thanks to over 50+ integrations with the leading Ecommerce apps. (So all the context they need will be in one single browser tab!) 

You could even have your marketing team or social media manager help create Macros, so your support agents can use templated (and on brand) messages that speed up their replies. Getting everything centralized in a single place is the first step to providing excellent social support for your store. The next is to start automating replies to common engagements, so you can free up your agents to focus on more important conversations instead of saying “Thanks for the mention!” for the hundredth time. ‍

To help your store start managing Instagram support more efficiently, I’ve collected a list of Rules that Gorgias customers are using to engage with their shoppers, resolve questions faster, and keep their agents focused on the most important conversations. 

Here are 10 Rule ideas for more efficient Instagram support: 

1. Auto-close tickets from giveaway posts 
2. Auto-close all Instagram tickets
3. Auto-tag all Instagram interactions 
4. Auto-tag likely buyers & create a specialized view 
5. Auto-tag interactions from influencers for VIP support
6. Auto-tag public comments vs private messages
7. Auto-tag Instagram tickets with questions
8. Auto-close Instagram tickets the don’t mention support or order status
9. Auto-tag negative comments 
10. Auto-assign Instagram tickets to an agent or team

1. Auto-close tickets from giveaway posts

Giveaway posts are great for brand awareness, but can also result in a large increase in tickets in your help desk. To stop this from ever becoming a problem, you can set up a Rule to auto-close tickets generated from giveaway posts, based on the message content. 

In this example, we’re auto-closing tickets without the words “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “why,” and “how,” in order to avoid accidentally closing an actual question that your team might want to respond to. You could also customize this to close tickets that include a specific word or phrase, based on the criteria of the giveaway. I recommend working closely with your social media manager whenever a new promotion starts, to make sure your helpdesk is set up to triage tickets accordingly. 

2. Auto-close all Instagram tickets

If you want to see Instagram engagements in a contact’s message history, but not necessarily respond to them from Gorgias yet, you can auto-close any ticket generated from Instagram, that way it doesn’t fill up the open queue. 

By doing this, your agents will have the full cross-channel message history when interacting with a shopper, so they can customize the conversation and know exactly what they’ve asked in the past. 

3. Auto-tag all Instagram interactions

Tagging tickets in Gorgias is a great way to measure channel statistics and create customized Views. While your agents will always have the option to manually add tags, you can create a Rule to do the tagging automatically, that way it’s one less step in their workflow. 

Then when you go to Statistics > Tags, you’ll be able to see how many tickets are generated from Instagram during a given period, and what percentage that is of all the tickets you receive. 

Pro-tip: If you haven’t started managing Instagram tickets in Gorgias yet because you’re not sure what exactly the ticket volume would be, you can Auto-tag and Auto-close tickets in order to see the stats without conversations counting toward your plan’s ticket count yet. 

4. Auto-tag potential shoppers & create a specialized view

Prioritize the messages and comments from those most likely to purchase. By detecting message sentiment and filtering by common phrases, you can automatically tag tickets with a high purchase intent, allowing your agents to answer questions quickly or send along a discount code to speed up the purchase. 

Once you’ve set up the Rule, you can create a View to filter tickets that only contain this tag, that way your agents can easily see right in the left-hand sidebar whenever there’s a ticket from Instagram from a likely lead!

5. Auto-tag interactions from influencers for VIP support

If you work with influencers, it’s critical to reply to them right away to maximize the impact of their community. To make sure your team never misses an opportunity, you can auto-tag tickets created from the partners you’re working with based on their email address. 

Once the Rule is auto-tagging these tickets, you can also create a view to segment these messages from the others. Depending on how many partners and influencers your brand manages at a time, it may be helpful to set up one View per influencer (in which case you’d want to use separate tags), or group them all together in an “Influencers” section. 

6. Auto-tag public comments vs private messages

Whenever you reply to a ticket in Gorgias, you’ll see a small icon next to the customer’s name that signals what channel you’re replying on. If you want some extra assurance that your reps are only replying with personal details in private channels however (such as Instagram messages) you can automatically add tags to designate “public” vs “private,” so everyone can see right at the top of the ticket which type of communication it is. 

7. Auto-tag Instagram tickets with questions

Prioritize interactions that are asking your brand something, instead of just commenting with emojis. If your brand receives a lot of engagement, this can help you filter out what needs to be addressed and what can likely just be closed out (or handled by the social team). 

8. Auto-close Instagram tickets the don’t mention support or order status

If your support team is only interested in responding to the Instagram tickets that specifically mention customer service, you can auto-close everything else (and assume the brand team will take care of it). To do this, create a rule that closes tickets that do not include phrases like “order” “status” “support” or “customer service.” 

9. Auto-tag negative interactions

Escalate the tickets that have negative intent to get them a response faster. You can add keywords (or emojis) and use our sentiment detection to auto-tag negative comments, so your agents see right away what kind of ticket they’re opening. 

10. Auto-assign Instagram tickets to an agent or team

If you have a specific person who handles social media, whether that’s an agent or the social media manager, you can automatically assign tickets created via that channel to them, so those tickets never get routed to the rest of your team. 

I hope these 10 Rules help you engage with your shoppers, resolve questions faster, and keep your agents focused on the most important conversations. If you haven’t connected your Gorgias account to Instagram yet, follow this guide to get started.

Alternatively, keep reading about social media for customer service, or check out our list of the best social media integrations for your Shopify store.

You asked Google “how to sell on Instagram for free” and found yourself on this page? Good for you! You’re about to learn 9 ways to make a lot of money on this social platform without spending a dime.

Selling on Instagram has been red-hot since it introduced several ecommerce features like Instagram Live Shopping and Instagram Guides. 

Whatever you’re selling, you can make use of Instagram to increase sales for your ecommerce business. 

Excited to learn? Let’s waste no time.  

{{lead-magnet-1}}

1. Optimize Your Instagram Business Profile 

First things first, you should create an Instagram business profile and optimize it as much as possible. It matters a lot. 

Why? Because more and more customers are turning to Instagram instead of Google to search for brands, sales, product reviews, and recommendations. 

• 145k+ posts using the hashtag #flashsales
• 10m+ posts using the hashtag #discount
• 39m+ posts using the hashtag #giveaway 

These numbers don’t lie.

Another reason is an Instagram business profile offers a bunch of extra features and tools you can use to grow your business, compared with a normal profile. For example, Instagram Shopping, Instagram Ads, Instagram Guides, Instagram Reels Shopping, and Instagram Insights. 

Tips for creating an Instagram business profile that sells: 

• Use a branded Instagram profile picture. It should be the same picture you’ve used for your profiles on other social media platforms. Doing that will help strengthen your brand presence. 
• Choose a simple, recognizable, and easy-to-find name for your Instagram username. 
• Include a short description (a maximum of 150 characters) of your business. Explain who you are, what you’re offering, and what makes you different.
• Add a compelling call to action to urge visitors to take a specific action, for example, “shop now” or “download a free holiday gift guide.”
• Optimize your call-to-action link. Use tools like Bitly to create a trackable link to your store or a promotion landing page. This is the only clickable link you can add to your Instagram page, so ensure you use it!
• Showcase content and offers with Instagram Stories Highlights. 

Take a look at Skirt Society’s Instagram business profile:

What Skirt Society does well:

• Use the same name for username (@skirtsociety) and business name (Skirt Society)
• Emphasize the benefits of their products, “modest, classic, affordable XS-3X”
• Show a compelling offer, “free shipping on orders $150 and up” for U.S. customers
• Include a strong call to action, “shop now, wear now, pay later with @afterpayusa”
• Use Instagram Story highlights to showcase new arrivals, customers wearing their products (lovelies), shoutouts, restocks, shop small, blog posts, and reviews. 

See? Skirt Society’s Instagram bio is all about their customers or what customers will get when shopping with the brand. 

{{lead-magnet-2}}

2. Set up Instagram Shopping to Sell Products

Instagram Shopping allows you to create an Instagram shoppable feed and a digital, shareable product catalog right on Instagram. 

With Instagram Shopping, people can learn more about your products and purchase your products directly from the app (with Instagram Checkout) or click through to complete the order on your ecommerce store.   

Instagram Shopping’s key features:

• An Instagram Shop as your customizable digital storefront
• Product detail pages display your product information
• Product collections showcase products in a curated category
• Shopping tags allow you to tag products from your catalog in your Stories or Instagram posts
• Instagram Checkout allows your customers to complete their purchase without leaving the app. This feature is currently available in the U.S. only.

Here is an excellent example from @camillerosenaturals. Their Instagram profile is filled with many posts with a shopping bag icon tagged in the top right corner. Tap on the product tagged, and you can see additional product details like this: 

To set up Instagram Shopping, ensure your business checks a few boxes for eligibility: 

• You have an active Instagram business account
• You own an ecommerce website (Shopify, BigCommerce, etc.)
• You connect your Instagram profile with a Facebook page 
• You sell eligible physical goods
• You comply with Instagram's merchant agreement and commerce policies

Want to use social to sell? Check out our list of the best social media integrations for your Shopify store.

3. Create Instagram Stories Shopping

Instagram Stories allows you to connect with your followers on a more personal, casual level. It brings you a huge opportunity to build trust and increase engagement in a short time. 

Mention’s 2020 Instagram Engagement report reveals many interesting statistics about Instagram Stories. Here are some of them:

• 58% of Instagram users watch personal stories multiple times a day
• 19% of users watch Stories from beginning to end
• 26% of users comment on or share personal Instagram Stories
  they watch
• 67% of users have ‘swiped up’ on the links of branded Stories
• 44% of users use Instagram Stories to promote products or services

That’s awesome, right? 

Here are some Instagram Stories’ sales and conversion features you should keep in mind:

Shopping stickers: Use them to tag physical products in your stores. There are four types of stickers, including a shopping bag icon, a sticker with a product name in rainbow or grey, and translucent text. 

What makes this feature so great is that no matter how many followers you have, you can drive traffic to your website through your stories. 

Swipe up: Once you reach over 10k followers, you can add a “swipe up” to your Instagram Stores — another big opportunity to promote products, blog posts, and sign-up pages. 

For example, @covergirl includes the View Product button at the bottom of their story. Viewers can simply tap on the button to access the link. 

Note that you must have an Instagram business profile and over 10k followers to access this feature. 

4. Establish Partnerships With Instagram Influencers

According to Morning Consult’s The State of Consumer Trust 2020 report, 69% of consumers say it’s very important brands deliver consistently on what they promise when considering trust. Nielsen’s research also shows that consumers trust personal recommendations above paid ads. 

How can brands gain customer trust? One of the best practices is working with Instagram influencers. 

Instagram influencers are a reliable source for product reviews, recommendations, opinions, and more. They share content in an authentic way, helping them gain a high level of trust from their followers.

By partnering with Instagram influencers, brands can take advantage of their influence on their audiences to promote products, encourage purchases, and gain a loyal following. 

Another great thing about Instagram is that you don’t need to work with mega influencers like Selena Gomez and pay them thousands of dollars for a sponsored post. 

Today, ecommerce merchants and small business owners have many choices to establish a partnership with an influencer. 

If you have a tight budget, you can find nano-influencers (having 1k-10k followers) or micro-influencers (10k-100k followers) and offer them free products in exchange for sharing branded content on their profiles. 

According to Mention, an enthusiastic micro-influencer with a smaller, but keen and dedicated following, provides better value for money. 

Also, micro-influencers are experts of their niche and more personally invested in their online presence. They spend a lot of time creating high-quality content, reading comments, and addressing their followers’ inquiries personally.

5. Run Instagram Giveaways 

Want to give your followers a bit of fun while still making a lot of sales? Enter Instagram giveaways.

With a giveaway, you can invite your followers to join a competition in which they have to do a couple of things to have a chance to win a prize. 

For example, you can ask them to share a video of themselves using your product, use your branded hashtag, or tag a friend in your post. The rules should be as simple as possible so your followers can follow them without taking much effort. 

Here is a great example from Pacifica Beauty (@pacificabeauty):

Some tips for creating a successful Instagram contest:

• Determine your prize. It doesn’t have to be something big. You can offer a discount, a free gift, a free consultation, a book, a sample of your latest product, or anything else as long as you know it’s valuable and relevant to your followers. 
• Decide how people will participate in your contest. You can make two or three simple criteria for entry, like “follow this account, like this post, and tag a friend below.”
• Be sure to include the hashtags #contest, #giveaway, and #yourbrandname in your giveaway post. 

6. Offer Instagram-exclusive Offers

One of the most common ways brands leverage exclusivity in their Instagram marketing strategy is by giving their followers exclusive access to deals… just for being part of their Instagram community. 

Sattwa Skincare (@sattwaskincare) knows how to start off on the right foot. From their post, they state clearly what they’re offering and frame the offer around exclusivity.

What’s more, Sattwa Skincare limits the offer “until Sunday evening,” giving followers a little push to take action before the deal ends. This is an excellent example of creating a sense of urgency with an exclusive deal. 

7. Show Your Followers You Care

Gaining audiences’ attention is one thing; getting them to stay longer (and forever) with you is another. 

When you show people you’re truly interested in them and want to create a meaningful relationship with them, they’ll show their caring back to you.

Follow these tips to build great connections with fans on Instagram:

• Communicate with your followers. Respond to their comments and mentions, tag them in your photos if you reshare their post, watch their stories if you can. 
• Send a direct message to foster a more authentic relationship with loyal followers. Be careful with this tactic because you don’t want to look spammy. 
• Be friendly and flexible when dealing with customer complaints on Instagram. When you receive negative reviews or comments, do your best to resolve them quickly, directly, politely. Don’t let your customers wait so long to receive your support. 
• Install customer service tools like Gorgias to create a seamless omnichannel support experience for your customers. Gorgias allows your agents to handle Instagram comments, mentions, and messages in a centralized dashboard, helping them remove distractions, work more effectively, and have more time to close the deals. 

Related: Learn how to use social media for customer service. Or, if you're just interested in Instagram, check out our in-depth guide on Instagram for customer service.

8. Sell through IGTV

IGTV is both a standalone video-sharing app and an extension of the existing feature on Instagram. IGTV supports vertical and horizontal videos with a 10-minute length for most Instagram accounts and up to one hour for larger accounts. 

Done right, IGTV can bring a great opportunity to build engagement, collaborate with influencers, drive sales, and many other things. 

Here are some ideas for your IGTV videos:

• Create tutorial videos. For example, if you’re selling cosmetics, you can create a series focused on lip care tutorials or maybe another about body care routine. 
• Host a Q&A session. It’s great for answering questions about your shipping, payment, etc. 
• Go behind the scenes. You can share how you source ingredients, how you manufacture products, or how your company looks like. Use it to build transparency for your brand. 
• Stream an event. If you plan to host a flash sales event, be sure to share it on IGTV.

9. Sell through Instagram Reels 

Instagram Reels allows you to create interactive videos, add effects, and stitch the video together right within the app. It’s a new way to make fun and engaging video content on Instagram. 

With Instagram Reels, you can record and edit together 15 to 30-second video clips set to music and share them to your Stories, Instagram feed, and the Reels tab on your profile. 

Brands use Reels to share stories, user-generated content (UGC), new product teasers, and tutorials. They even collaborate with influencers to promote products, announce sales, and more. As an online store, you should start creating Reels right away to reach more potential customers. 

Start Selling on Instagram!

Many merchants think they have to make huge investments on Instagram to get a significant level of return. But that’s not true. You can start selling on Instagram for free with these 9 tips:

• Optimize your Instagram business profile
• Set up Instagram shopping to sell products
• Create Instagram Stories Shopping
• Establish partnerships with Instagram influencers
• Run Instagram giveaways
• Offer Instagram-exclusive offers
• Show your followers you care
• Sell through IGTV
• Sell through Instagram Reels

In case you’re looking for a help desk tool to manage Instagram customer requests, give Gorgias' social media features a try. Sign up for an account to get a full-featured 7-day free trial. You’ll be amazed at what Gorgias can do for your customer service experience. 

‍

As an ecommerce store owner, the prospect of losing 70% of your sales probably makes your heart drop. But according to the Baymard Institute, that’s exactly what’s happening: 69.82% of online carts are abandoned.

Even with the ecommerce shopping cart best practices in place, brands of all sizes struggle to get customers to place an order. The good news is that a handful of tweaks to your site’s user experience can greatly reduce cart abandonment. 

Below, we’ll dive into some actionable solutions — ranging from offering free shipping to simplifying your checkout process — to lower your abandonment rates and boost your sales. 

What is Shopify cart abandonment?

Shopify cart abandonment occurs when a customer who’s online shopping on a Shopify store adds items to their cart but leaves the website before making the purchase. Ecommerce businesses that track cart abandonment do so by determining the rate of customers who add items to their cart against the rate of purchases.

How to calculate your cart abandonment rate

The formula to calculate your cart abandonment rate is:

[Completed purchases / Carts created] x 100 = Cart abandonment rate

Online shopping is a bit like browsing a shopping mall because you can browse a wide variety of stores without much buying intent. You may carry a few items around the store while you consider buying them, but you may put them down on a shelf and leave for another store — especially if the store associate doesn’t catch you in time to close the sale.

Shopify cart abandonment represents the online version of that lack of commitment — with even less commitment because online shoppers can get distracted by a text message or leave your store without moving an inch. Fortunately, you can tweak your Shopify store to reduce cart abandonment, just like the in-store associate. 

But before we share the steps you can take, let's explore the frequency and impact of the overall Shopify cart abandonment problem.

{{lead-magnet-1}}

9 strategies for decreasing Shopify cart abandonment

1. Use your data to prioritize changes
2. Offer free shipping (or low-cost) shippin
3. Create a rewards program and offer discount codes
4. Use proactive live chat to guide customers through checkout
5. Offer as many payment options as possible
6. Simplify your checkout process 
7. Ditch the mandatory account registration form
8. Use exit-intent pop-ups to catch shoppers before they leave
9. Use push notifications, SMS, and abandoned cart emails to recover abandoned carts

Reducing shopping cart abandonment is one of the most effective ecommerce growth tactics. Rather than spending tons on ads to get new audiences to your site, you’re instead maximizing the value of the visitors you already get. (And what’s the point of more visitors if they don’t end up placing orders?) 

Here are nine of our best tips for reducing cart abandonment to grow your ecommerce business. 

1) Use your data to prioritize changes

You could pick one of the tactics below and cross your fingers that it improves your cart abandonment rates. But you’ll see much better results by using your store’s data to come up with a strategy based on the highest potential impact for your unique store. 

Dig into your cart abandonment data to strategize where you can make the most impactful changes. Specifically, you’ll want to pull data like:

• Date and time of cart abandonment
• Total abandoned order amount
• Items abandoned
• Shopper information (e.g. new vs. repeat)

With information like this, you can better identify trends that can affect other areas of your ecommerce strategy. For example, if you notice that the majority of your carts are abandoned before the winter holidays, you may want to consider running a Black Friday promotion. Alternatively, you may also learn that your abandoned carts:

• Usually contain the same item, indicating you might want to revisit that item’s pricing or the product page 
• Don’t meet your threshold for free shipping, indicating you might want to lower that threshold
• Are from first-time shoppers, indicating you may need more social proof like testimonials and positive reviews to boost new shopper confidence

2) Offer free shipping (or low-cost) shipping

As we mentioned above, unexpected taxes, fees, and shipping costs are the most common reasons shoppers abandon carts. For context, 82% of shoppers say they’d rather have free shipping than expedited shipping. And shoppers are used to free and fast shipping because of services like Amazon Prime, so it’s becoming an even bigger disadvantage to require paid shipping.

For some ecommerce stores, especially new or small ones, free shipping for the entire site catalog isn’t always a sustainable option. So instead, offer free shipping for carts that meet a free shipping threshold. 

Check out our article on how to offer free shipping for more information.

Once you have a compelling shipping offer, use it as a marketing tool. Mention your free shipping in website banners, on checkout pages, and even on product pages. Look how Jaxxon, a luxury men’s chain retailer, clearly lets the shopper know how much they’ll have to spend to unlock free shipping right from the product page:

3) Create a rewards program and offer discount codes

Rewards, timely discount codes, and other incentives can push customers over the edge to make a purchase. 

Parade, a DTC underwear brand known for its referral programs, uses a refer-a-friend program to get discount codes into the hands of people who haven’t yet shopped at your store. This is particularly smart because first-time shoppers tend to be the most hesitant (and therefore abandon the most carts). But the discount code and social proof from the referring friend work together to push shoppers toward a purchase:

Discount codes and referral programs available to everyone will likely reduce cart abandonment but you should target customers with items in their cart (or customers who recently abandoned a cart) for the greatest impact. Live chat can help you target customers still shopping while exit-intent pop-ups and follow-up SMS or email can help with customers who already left your site. We’ll cover both strategies below.

4) Use proactive live chat to guide customers through checkout

Incorporate live chat, including proactive chat campaigns, as a way to help your customers during the checkout process and boost sales. A whopping 79% of stores that have live chat enabled report its positive impact on their sales and customer experience.

Every store should enable live chat for support because it’s such a fast, appealing option for customers, especially when they’re actively considering a purchase. Say that a customer isn’t placing an order because they’re not sure whether a small or medium size would fit. If you have a visible (but not intrusive) live chat option in your ecommerce store, the customer can quickly type in their question and ideally have a resolution from your support team or chatbot in minutes:​

With certain live chat apps, you can also take a more proactive approach to drive sales through your live chat widget. You can automatically reach out to certain customers (like shoppers hovering on the checkout page for more than a minute, or shoppers with a certain amount of merchandise in their cart) to ask if they have questions, offer discount codes, or remind them that you offer free shipping if they reach a certain amount (to drive upsells).

With Gorgias’ live chat campaigns feature, you can customize your greetings — the below example gives a friendly welcome to people who visit a specific product page:

5) Offer as many payment options as possible

One simple way to reduce cart abandonment is to offer as many payment options as possible. If customers make it to your checkout page only to find they have limited options to pay — especially if those options require them to divulge personal information — they are more likely to abandon the purchase. 

If you have a Shopify store, you can use Shopify Payments to easily accept a wide variety of payment options like credit cards, Apple Pay, and Google Pay without any third-party fees. If you don’t have Shopify Payments enabled, you’ll still be able to use major payment providers (like Paypal) to accept payments, but you may be stuck with limited payment options and fees.

6) Simplify your checkout process 

Reducing friction throughout your checkout process is another way to reduce abandoned checkouts. Get rid of unnecessary forms, fields, and questions that may turn your customers away from your store. Likewise, create large checkout buttons that make it obvious how to complete a purchase with the fewer clicks possible. If you’re still creating your store, you may want to try finding a Shopify theme with a streamlined checkout page. 

One tip to optimize your checkout process is to include a Buy Now button on the product page itself. This streamlines the buying process and gives shoppers fewer off-ramps away from your website. Check out CROSSNET’s clear button guiding users to make a purchase — not just add items to a cart that will later get abandoned: 

7) Ditch the mandatory account registration form

This is technically an additional tip to simplify your checkout process, but it’s impactful enough to warrant its own section. While you want customers to create an account for future marketing opportunities, forcing shoppers to create an account in order to place an order halts momentum during the checkout process and turns people off from your store. 

Instead, offer a guest checkout option with the choice to make an account for easier purchases next time they come to your store. Or, to make checkout even easier, consider adding one of Shopify’s dynamic checkout buttons. With an express checkout option like Amazon Pay, customers can complete a purchase without even typing out their billing and shipping information by retrieving that information from another service.

Check out CROSSNET’s store, which offers multiple express checkout options:

8) Use exit-intent pop-ups to catch shoppers before they leave

Making your checkout experience simple is a great start, but some customers may need one final push to place an order. Exit-intent pop-ups, or pop-ups that appear when a customer attempts to leave your store, can be the last-minute nudge (or discount code) that convinces customers to place an order.

You can add a pop-up to your Shopify store through a Shopify app like Privy or Pop-Up Window. However, practice caution with any sort of pop-up. Some customers will get frustrated if pop-ups interrupt their browsing experience, so make sure you provide value with each pop-up and keep a close eye on your purchase data to ensure they don’t hurt your store’s performance.

Check out our guide to Shopify pop-ups for more information. 

9) Use push notifications, SMS, and abandoned cart emails to recover abandoned carts

Personalized push notifications can also be a helpful follow-up tool to help customers return to their carts. Push notifications give the customer a visual of the products still in the cart with clear calls to action. This helps remind customers that they still have unpurchased items waiting to be checked out. 

SMS and email are other great options to reach customers even if they don’t return to your store. You can even create a full SMS or email campaign with an automated workflow that triggers emails to customers after a certain amount of time has passed, or after they revisit your website.

Check out this example of a cart recovery email from Braxley Bands, which is a great example of how you can recover carts with humor and attitude — or whatever your brand voice may be.

10) Consider retargeted ads to remind customers about what they left behind

Another technique you can consider to help bring customers back to their carts in your online store is retargeted ads. Retargeting allows you to get ads in front of customers who visited your website and gave you their information — but didn’t purchase an item. 

Most retargeted ads appear in the shopper’s social media feeds in the days after the abandoned checkout. They typically feature an image of the abandoned product, a new-and-improved discount, and a clear call to action (CTA) to purchase the item. 

Take a look at this example of a retargeted Facebook ad from Pact Apparel:

While retargeted ads work better than most ads, they still have a clickthrough rate of only .7%, so they may cost more than they provide in terms of recovered purchases.

{{lead-magnet-2}}

8 tools that help decrease Shopify cart abandonment

To limit shopping cart abandonment and encourage customers to make their purchases, you might need the help of some additional apps and tools.

1) Gorgias

A better overall customer experience can significantly lower your business’s cart abandonment rate. Why? Customers depend on things like an FAQ page, clear returns policies, and customer support to gain the information and trust they need to make a purchase.

Gorgias is a customer service platform specifically designed to help ecommerce merchants boost revenue through customer experience. Some of the features that help Shopify stores reduce cart abandonment include:

• Live chat: For proactive chat campaigns and targeted discounts, when customers are hovering on a checkout page or have items in their cart for a certain number of minutes 

• Shipping and returns integrations: Lets you offer free/easy shipping, and promise returns if the customer isn’t happy
• SMS and email: On top of being great support channels, you can use SMS and email marketing campaigns to remind and incentivize shoppers to complete an abandoned purchase

Sign up for a demo of Gorgias to see how we can help you reduce cart abandonment rates, improve customer experience, and drive revenue.

2) Recart

Recart is an app specifically designed to help you recover sales from cart abandonment. It uses Facebook Messenger to send out push notifications on social media to your customers. It can send out reminders for abandoned carts and order-related messages like shipping notifications and receipts, and has pre-written templates for messages to help you save time and optimize your ecommerce cart recovery processes.

See how Gorgias integrates with Recart.

3) LoyaltyLion

LoyaltyLion is a loyalty-building tool that helps you stand out from your competitors and offer great benefits and rewards to your customers. When a customer is happy with your brand and knows that checking out leads to great rewards down the line, they are much less likely to abandon their carts and instead will return due to the positive experience and relationship you have established with them.

See how Gorgias integrates with LoyaltyLion. 

4) Smile

Smile is an app and platform that helps with customer retention. It gives points and rewards to customers that invite others to join them and sign up for your ecommerce rewards program. This helps to increase your customer retention rates and expand your ecommerce business’s customer lifetime value. You can also use Smile to nurture your customers and encourage them to engage with your rewards program.

See how Gorgias integrates with Smile.

5) Bulk Discount Code Generator

Bulk Discount Code Generator allows you to save time and effort while reducing coupon abuse. You can generate reliable discount codes and coupon codes to use with orders on your ecommerce site without difficulty. You can then use those codes in pop-ups, email sequences, win-back strategies, loyalty programs, and more.

6) PushOwl

PushOwl is a push notification app that directly sends push notifications to mobile devices or desktops. You can quickly get out short, punchy messages that readers can easily consume and respond to. PushOwl is also a great tool with functionality for gathering important data and information from users and is especially effective for mobile shoppers, which are responsible for the highest rate of abandonment per platform.

7) Omnisend

Omnisend is a complete marketing app for Shopify. It offers advanced segmentation, pre-built automated emails and workflows, email templates, drag-and-drop editors, email list-building capabilities, and powerful analytics. In addition to all of this, Omnisend also has SMS marketing and push notification tools that you can use to create a sense of urgency for your abandoned carts with limited-time deals and time-sensitive rewards. You can also use A/B testing on your email subject lines and track open rates for your cart abandonment emails. Omnisend takes a lot of the work out of using Shopify and increases checkout purchases.

See how Gorgias integrates with Omnisend. 

8) Privy

Privy is an ecommerce marketing platform that helps ecommerce store owners increase their store’s conversion rates. The platform offers SMS, email marketing, and pop-ups to stop customers before they leave without making a purchase (or draw them back if they’ve already left).

Must-know cart abandonment statistics

Cart abandonment is a major issue that affects most ecommerce businesses. As we mentioned above, nearly 70% of all carts are abandoned. 

The type of device your customers are shopping on can play into your company’s cart abandonment rate. According to the study linked above, the average cart abandonment rate per device is:

• Desktop: 69.75% 
• Smartphone: 85.65% 
• Tablet: 80.74%

The time of year impacts cart abandonment as well. For example, the surge in people shopping online during Black Friday and Cyber Monday typically results in a higher cart abandonment rate due to the higher number of shoppers. 

Some people who abandon their carts do eventually come back to buy the items. Statista’s 2021 study of U.K. shoppers uncovers the following interesting information about consumers’ post-abandonment behavior:

• 31% return at a later date to purchase on the same website
• 26% purchase the item online from a different retailer or ecommerce business
• 23% weren’t looking to purchase and didn't return to buy
• 8% go to a physical store for an item

In order to know where the majority of your customers fit into these numbers, it’s important for you to first understand why your customers are abandoning their carts and leaving your ecommerce site before they can checkout.

Top reasons shoppers leave items in their cart

Understanding why customers leave your checkout page in the first place is key to reducing your number of abandoned shopping carts. According to Baymard Institute, there are five top reasons why online shoppers abandon their carts without making a purchase:

1. Extra costs too high (48%): Shipping costs can be a major turnoff to customers, along with other fees like taxes and handling charges. These types of extra fees can sometimes be almost as expensive as the item or items themselves. This can turn away customers and cause them to abandon their carts.
2. An account is required (24%): Customers simply want to buy their items and avoid friction or irritation at checkout. Forcing people to create an account and give out their personal information can seem like too high a price to pay for the items in the cart.
3. Delivery too slow (22%): Today’s customers expect expediency when it comes to deliveries. With so many huge ecommerce stores offering next-day or same-day delivery, you can expect to lose potential customers if your shipping takes longer than a few days. 
4. Don’t trust the site (18%): Customers today are rightly concerned about problems like digital theft and identity fraud. If a site appears untrustworthy, many customers will get cold feet and abandon their carts when credit card information or other personal information is required at checkout.
5. The checkout process is too long or complicated (17%): Long forms with many different fields and requests for information are another turnoff for customers at checkout. 

Gorgias helps you put a stop to cart abandonment by providing world-class customer support

Despite how frustrating cart abandonment is, there are solutions to help guide your customers to complete your checkout process and boost your bottom line. Take a look at how Gorgias customer, Lillie’s Q, was able to increase total sales by 166% with cart-saving support:

“Gorgias' chat allows us to respond to our customers in real time. We can answer customers' questions about a product and how to place an order without them leaving the site or abandoning their cart. We have seen a 75% increase in direct sales as a result of this quick communication.” - Nicole Mann, Marketing Director

Gorgias is an ecommerce helpdesk platform that turns your customer service team into a revenue-generating machine. With Gorgias, you can create an exceptional customer experience that not only encourages your customers to check out, but to come back to your ecommerce business for future purchases. To learn more, check out our case study of three businesses that increased sales with live chat or sign up for Gorgias today.

Inventory management and order fulfillment are often two of the more time-consuming tasks of running a Shopify store. However, the ability to ship orders on time is also key for ecommerce businesses to deliver a great customer experience. 22% of online shoppers will abandon their order if they see that it will take too long to be delivered.

Relying on a third-party fulfillment solution is one way to mitigate the challenges of order fulfillment and provide the speedy fulfillment services that today's customers have come to expect. Of the various fulfillment providers online retailers have available, the Shopify Fulfillment Network is one option to consider for merchants who sell on Shopify.

In this Shopify Fulfillment Network review, we'll cover everything you need to know about outsourcing your order fulfillment responsibilities to Shopify. We'll dive into what the program is and how it works, the biggest benefits it offers to online retailers, comparable alternatives, and a conversation with Supply CEO and co-founder Patrick Coddou on his company's experience with Shopify Fulfillment Network.

Don't have time to read our full review of the Shopify Fulfillment Network? Here’s a summary of our thoughts on the program:

Joining the Shopify Fulfillment Network won't reduce your order fulfillment expenses. As a matter of fact, it will more than likely increase them due to the various fees that Shopify charges as part of the program. However, joining the network will allow you to:

• Save time by completely outsourcing your inventory management and order fulfillment responsibilities
• Offering faster and more reliable fulfillment to customers
• Boost conversion rates by advertising expedited shipping delivery on your website

If you can afford to join the network and don’t have the know-how or in-house capacity to handle fast fulfillment, the SFN. If you’re a small operation and longer shipping times haven’t hurt your purchase rates, then you might consider an alternative fulfillment solution.

What is the Shopify Fulfillment Network?

The Shopify Fulfillment Network (SFN) program is similar to Amazon's FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon). It lets you ship your products in bulk to a single Shopify warehouse, where they are then distributed to a network of fulfillment centers across the United States and Canada.

Along with inventory storage and warehousing services, SFN also offers ecommerce fulfillment services. When a customer orders one of your products, Shopify will pick and pack the product from the nearest fulfillment center and ship it to the customer on your behalf.

This program allows business owners to reduce the tedious tasks associated with ecommerce fulfillment. It also offers additional benefits as well, such as the ability to provide faster shipping and access to powerful analytics for demand forecasting and improved inventory management.

{{lead-magnet-2}}

The launch of Shopify Fulfillment Network: A brief history lesson

In June 2019, Shopify announced that it would be spending $1 billion to launch the Shopify Fulfillment Network. A few months later, in October 2019, this plan was accelerated when Shopify acquired 6 River Systems — a company that produces robotics for warehouse management.

By October 2020, the SFN had increased its shipping volume by 2.5x compared to the first quarter of 2020. One driving factor behind the network's faster-than-expected growth was the increase in online shopping driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. In comments made to the Wall Street Journal, the program director stated that the pandemic pushed the program's development forward by about 10 years.

In 2022, the SFN continues to go through some understandable growing pains. The program continues to add new merchants and fine-tune its services. Today, the network has nine different centers in North America that are all operated by third-party fulfillment partners.

The key benefits of the Shopify Fulfillment Network

Joining the Shopify Fulfillment Network offers merchants plenty of benefits, allowing them to create a fulfillment operation that essentially runs itself. The biggest benefit of outsourcing your order fulfillment is saved time.

As Sergio Tache, CEO of Dossier says, “I shipped everything myself and made a lot of trips to the post office. It was intense and pretty tough. You quickly reach that breaking point, where you cannot do it any longer, and it’s not worth the compromised quality of life.”

Along with saved time, the SFN offers several other noteworthy benefits, including:

Free customizable packaging

One key benefit of the SFN compared to similar networks such as FBA is that the SFN lets you customize your product packaging. This enables you to develop branded packaging for your products to help market your store instead of shipping your packages in Shopify-branded packaging. This gives you greater control over your branding and marketing overall.

Best of all, packaging comes free to SFN merchants. While there is still a fulfillment cost associated with using the FSN (and it might be higher than your current shipping costs — more on that later), paying for packaging is not one of those expenses.

Simplified inventory management

Even if you sell from multiple marketplaces and sales channels, partnering with the Shopify Fulfillment Network makes inventory management a breeze. All you have to do is ship your products in bulk to a single SFN fulfillment center, and Shopify and its partnering third-party logistics companies will take care of the rest. Shopify even provides recommendations for minimum inventory levels, allocation, and when it's time to reorder products.

All these tedious logistics being handled elsewhere can be a huge weight off your shoulders — and a great way to lighten the load on your employees as well.

By simplifying your inventory management responsibilities, joining the SFN can free you up to focus on other tasks and ensure that you don't encounter any inventory management mistakes that lead to out-of-stock products and unhappy customers.

Real-time analytics for demand forecasting

Another way that the Shopify Fulfillment Network helps simplify inventory management and ensure fulfillment success is through insightful real-time analytics that you can use for demand forecasting. Members of the SFN can look forward to having a wealth of customer data at their disposal — data to forecast demand so that your inventory is kept at optimum levels all year long.

Potential same-day fulfillment

One of the biggest benefits of the Shopify Fulfillment Network is the potential for expedited shipping. Thanks to the network's streamlined and automated order fulfillment process and its strategic inventory distribution, the SFN can ship products to most US customers within two days. In many cases, merchants who are members of the SFN can even offer customers same-day fulfillment. This is nearly impossible for most brands — especially smaller brands — that manage fulfillment in-house.

Given current customer expectations, this ability to offer faster shipping is something that could make your products far more appealing to online shoppers. Research by Deloitte indicates that 67% of online shoppers want their items delivered in two days or less.

Customers don’t just want fast shipping, they want free shipping. Learn how to offer free shipping in our guide.

Seamless inventory distribution through machine learning

One of the ways that the Shopify Fulfillment Network can expedite order fulfillment is through an optimized inventory distribution strategy. By distributing products across a network of fulfillment centers that spans the U.S. and Canada, the SFN can ship orders from the fulfillment center closest to the customer for faster delivery times. And faster delivery times lead to greater customer satisfaction.

Shopify doesn't just spread products across these warehouses blindly, though. Instead, the SFN uses machine learning to predict demand and strategically distribute inventory. This is a strategy that large corporations have been using to optimize their supply chains for several years now. Thanks to the SFN, it's a strategy that ecommerce stores of all sizes can now leverage to meet consumers' increasingly short delivery window expectations.

Shopify Fulfillment Network cost

There's no denying the fact that the Shopify Fulfillment Network offers great functionality and a number of considerable benefits. However, these benefits do come at a cost.

There are several different fees that you will incur as a member of the SFN, and these fees will vary depending on factors such as your inventory volume, the number of product returns that are processed, and more. Shopify doesn't provide pricing for most of these fees and instead requires merchants to apply for the program to receive a custom quote.

However, Shopify does include an interactive tool to estimate the domestic fulfillment rate per item, depending on the number and weight of items, on their website:

One of the more substantial fees that you will incur as a member of the SFN is storage fees. Shopify doesn't charge storage fees for products sold within six months of being shipped to an SFN fulfillment center. But if your products sit for longer than six months, you will begin incurring storage fees of $2.25 per cubic foot per month. This makes it essential to develop an inventory management strategy that limits the number of products sitting in storage for long periods.

If you have any additional requirements, such as the need to put together special bundles for the holiday season, you will have to pay a one-time "special projects" fee. This fee is variable depending on the project's scope but can often be substantial.

Is it worth it? A review of the Shopify Fulfillment Network

Now that we've looked at the benefits and costs of the Shopify Fulfillment Network, the question is whether its benefits outweigh its costs. As with the fees themselves, though, the answer to this question will vary from business to business. To help you decide if joining the SFN is the right choice, let's look at a few instances when it is and is not worth the cost.

There comes a point in a company's growth when many business owners have more money available than time. If you are trying to scale your ecommerce store but are too bogged down by day-to-day responsibilities such as order fulfillment, the SFN can be a great way to take a lot of burdens off your shoulders. However, it won't reduce your shipping costs and will likely increase the money you spend on inventory management and order fulfillment rather than reduce these expenses.

Of course, you need to factor the potential revenue-boosting benefits of the SFN into this calculation. Along with freeing you up to grow your company and make it more profitable, the expedited shipping that the SFN allows may also directly boost your sales by making your offerings more appealing to potential customers.

A few other qualifications can easily determine whether or not your business is a good fit for the Shopify Fulfillment Network. For one, you need not apply to the SFN if you are shipping less than 10 orders per day; the program does not accept merchants with lower volumes, and it wouldn't be worth your time even if they did.

The program is also only available to sellers in the U.S. or Canada, and only to companies with under 2,000 unique SKUs.

If you meet all of these qualifications and can justify the fees, joining the SFN can be an excellent way to scale your company without building your own supply chain from the ground up.

ShipBob: A worthy alternative to the Shopify Fulfillment Network

ShipBob is a third-party order fulfillment provider that offers services similar to those of the Shopify Fulfillment Network. Like the SFN, ShipBob enables you to ship your products in bulk to a single ShipBob warehouse, where they are then distributed to fulfillment centers all over the globe.

The "All over the globe" is actually one advantage that ShipBob has over Shopify’s fulfillment services — with ShipBob, you can ship products from 30+ fulfillment centers across six different countries. Ecommerce businesses that sell to a lot of European and Australian customers are therefore likely better off choosing ShipBob than the Shopify Fulfillment Network.

Like SFN, one of ShipBob’s biggest benefits is helping brands of all sizes offer fast shipping — ShipBob even guarantees two-day shipping everywhere in the US.

ShipBob is a 3PL, or a third-party logistics provider. Shopify itself is not a 3PL, it’s a middleman between Shopify stores and other 3PLs and warehouses. This isn’t a bad thing, per se, but it introduces an additional player and potential for disconnect, confusion, and lack of accountability that you wouldn’t have by partnering directly with a 3PL.

As with the SFN, pricing for ShipBob varies depending on your needs, and ShipBob requires you to contact them for a custom pricing quote. This makes it difficult to compare the cost of ShipBob vs. the cost of the SFN in a blog post. However, ShipBob packs quite a bit more value than SFN due to its focus on order fulfillment and maturity. Here are a few of the pros ShipBob has over Shopify’s fulfillment system:

• Integrations with ecommerce platforms other than Shopify, like Magento and BigCommerce
• More control and visibility into order fulfillment than SFN, which outsources to third-party warehouses
• Five more years of experience than SFN, having operated its own fulfillment centers since 2014
• Better customer support: Because Shopify outsources parts of the process to third parties, you risk finding yourself in a situation where the Shopify support team isn’t sure what went wrong
• Additional features to manage your inventory and supply chain management that Shopify has yet to develop
• The ability to work with brands that ship 80,000+ orders a month (whereas SFN maxes out at 6,200 orders/month)
• A deep integration with Gorgias to sync and display historical and real-time fulfillment data in your helpdesk

Learn more about how Gorgias and ShipBob work together to improve your end-to-end customer experience.

How to apply for the Shopify Fulfillment program

Applying for the Shopify Fulfillment Network is a quick and simple process. All you have to do is create a Shopify account, ensure that your business meets the qualifications to join, and apply online by contacting Shopify. You can start the process by clicking “Learn more” on this page.

Once Shopify receives your application, their team will review your business to see if it is a good fit for the SFN. If accepted, Shopify will provide you with a custom quote detailing all the one-time and ongoing fees you will have to pay. If you choose to proceed, you will gain access to the Shopify Fulfillment Network app within your Shopify store.

How Supply was chosen to be in the Shopify Fulfillment Network

To better understand the value of the Shopify Fulfillment Network, we sat down for a discussion with Patrick Coddou — co-founder and CEO of Supply, the personal-grooming ecommerce store. You can listen to our conversation in the last third of this podcast episode:

From what Patrick remembers, Shopify reached out to him about Supply being one of the early adopters of the Fulfillment Network. Since he has long supported Shopify and openly acknowledges that it allowed him to accomplish his dreams, Patrick was excited about the opportunity. He told us that he sees this as another way that Shopify will continue to change people’s lives for the better, and he wanted to be a part of it. He was also interested after hearing all the buzz about Shopify's new program.

So, he said yes (obviously).

He told us that right now it’s still a small program — almost the equivalent of a beta project — and they have strategically dispersed warehouses that are white-labeled for their merchants.

We’re here for it. And so far, Patrick is, too: After months of experiencing it firsthand, he’s still loving it.

Supply's Shopify Fulfillment Center is in Austin, Texas, and across the U.S. there are about three centers in total with approximately 10 or fewer merchants (Note: This is Patrick’s best guess on numbers). As Shopify continues to test and perfect the program, these numbers will undoubtedly increase.

One of the biggest value-adds from the Shopify Fulfillment Network is that the software actually lives in your online store. There’s a fulfillment app, which is how Patrick and the Supply team review their inventory levels, along with other settings that really come in handy.

Though it’s not a very robust software right now, and merchants such as Supply are still waiting on Shopify to work through some of the kinks, there’s a very clear and strong potential here that could help countless ecommerce businesses.

{{lead-magnet-1}}

Optimize your order fulfillment, shipping, and inventory management with Gorgias

Joining the Shopify Fulfillment Network can be an excellent way to streamline your order fulfillment process, speed up your delivery times, and reduce your daily workload. However, it isn't the only order fulfillment solution available today.

At Gorgias, we recognize how important it is to have effective inventory management and order fulfillment. That's why we've designed our comprehensive customer support platform to integrate with numerous inventory management and order fulfillment solutions, including ShipBob, ShipMonk, LateShipment.com, and more.

To learn more about these powerful integrations, check out our full list of shipping and fulfillment integrations.

‍

Building and promoting a Shopify store can be a grind. That's why more and more stores are looking for ways to boost their cred (and profitability) through brand marketing partnerships.

Teaming up with another brand to boost awareness and profits is nothing new. Everyone from Bonne Belle & Dr. Pepper to BMW & Louis Vuitton has joined marketing forces in the past—with epic results.

The good news is, you can use some of the past brand marketing partnerships to build your own partnership ideas for your Shopify store.

In this guide, we're going to walk you through six examples of successful brand marketing partnerships, and how you can replicate their success stories into your Shopify store.

Why should Shopify stores look to partner with other brands?

Partnering up with another brand is one of the oldest marketing tricks in the book.

However, a lot of Shopify owners struggle to see how a partnership can work in eCommerce. The reality is, it's the message behind the partnership, and the way a campaign is built, that makes it successful—not the platform the products are being sold through.

The positives for partnering with another brand are endless. Firstly, your store builds up a strong partnership with another brand and boost your bottom line. And if the partnership is successful, it can make your store a more sought after choice for other stores wanting to partner up.

The big win of partnering up is, more often than not, one of the brands is a little less known than their partner. Not everyone will be willing to spend their hard-earned cash in an eCommerce store that hasn't built up its name yet. But partnering with a brand that's doing well in the eCommerce space? Yeah, that's going to drive traffic straight through your doors.

Not only will partnerships make you more reputable, but it can also decrease the risk for shoppers that are making a purchase on a new site for the very first time.

But other wins come out of successful brand marketing partnerships.

#1. You can join PR forces

When it comes to marketing budgets, it's only natural that one partner will have a larger budget than the other. If you're joining up with another brand, the budget burden of marketing a new campaign or product is instantly halved.

But it's not just about chopping your marketing budget. Any influencers, bloggers, and high-level journalists that your partnering brand has relationships with can also be opened up to your store. Use them to your advantage.

#2. More resources = better offers and giveaways for your customers

Okay, so the advantage of being able to join budgets with a partnering store is a big one.

If you do decide to join forces with another store, you can pool money for a cash award or products for a bundled giveaway in exchange for a customer's email address.

The reward? You will be collecting a bunch of new email addresses for remarketing campaigns later, long after the partnership has run its course.

#3. Partnerships can create a ton of awareness for both brands

Whether the partnering store is selling similar products to yours or they're in a completely different field, combining brands means you can bring a ton of awareness to your brand through new audiences.

According to Gregory Pollack from MarketingProfs, the secret to a partnership's success and awareness relies on integration.

"Well-crafted partnership brand marketing should include every possible touchpoint that your business has with its customers—both traditional and non-traditional marketing, including the Internet, special events, advertising, promotions, public relations, packaging, merchandising, and a host of other marketing components," he writes.

"Marketing alliances don't just present an opportunity to create promotions; they also establish a base from which to create distribution opportunities, providing a great chance to leverage either geographic distribution or merchandising within a store."

Okay, so now you know why you should be partnering up with another brand. Let's look at how you can use past successful brand marketing partnerships to supercharge your own successful campaigns.

6 examples of successful partnerships you should steal

1. Apple and Hermès

The popularity of the Apple Watch has been insane. The product has outsold every last one of the biggest names in the watch industry over the past two years:

In 2018 alone, Apple sold 22.5 million of its trademark watches. It makes sense, then, that fashion giant Hermès was keen to get a piece of the (Apple) pie.

The partnership between the two brands was first carved out in 2015. It proved so popular that Apple geared the release of the third Apple Watch around the new Hermès Apple collection.

It's a super smart collab. Not only has Apple been able to market the Hermès version of the watch at three times the regular sales price ($1400 a pop), it has also exposed their product to more fashion-conscious consumers.

Fashion Director Roseanne Morrison said the collab has proven a success for both brands.

"I think some of those collaborations have been good for both brands because it elevates some of these long-term heritage brands to a new level of technological synergy that can help them get younger customers," she said.

How can you use it in your own store?

If you are struggling to crack into a new market, this type of campaign is perfect for getting consumers to look at your products in a whole new light.

Has a tech store caught your eye recently that you can see matching up with the quirkiness or edginess of your own store? Do you own an office supply store that is struggling to crack into the millennial market?

Reach out to a brand which is absolutely nailing the market you are trying to crack. See if they would be interested in building a product, or joining promotional efforts. Chances are, your potential partner is also struggling in the market that you're dominating.   

2. Spotify & Hulu

Spotify and Hulu have recently decided to bundle up their products and offer them both at a discounted price.

The partnership works on a two-tiered system.

For the first 3 months, the user gets Hulu for $2.97. After that, they will get both services for $5 cheaper than if they were paying for both services separately.

It's super smart if people were already thinking about signing up for Hulu (it might be the push they need to sign up). And if a customer is already paying for both services separately, it will be saving them money.

It's also a win-win for Spotify and Hulu. Both brands are opened up to a different target audience, and a lot of consumers may be curious to give the products a try purely because of the low price tag.

These partnerships take a lot of work, but the benefits can be worth it.

How can you use it in your own store?

Even if you aren't selling tech, you can still use this example in your own store. Pair up with another Shopify store, and ask them if they would be willing to bundle some products with yours for a discount.

The best way to do this would be to run a promotional campaign that boosts both brands. Try selling the product bundles on a separate landing page, so you're able to track and measure their success effectively.  

3. HDX Hydration and Clean Bottle

Everybody loves free samples.

The key to making sure you aren't throwing away money with free samples is partnering up with a store that aligns with your target market.  

It was this formula that drove the partnership between HDX Hydration and Clean Bottle.

HDX Hydration sells clean, healthy hydration mixes for bottled water. They were only just starting out in their Shopify journey when they approached Clean Bottle to collaborate.

HDX Hydration knew they had to crack their target market to succeed. By teaming up with a company that produced easy-to-clean water bottles, they quickly narrowed in on their target market.

The company approached Clean Bottle and asked them to ship free samples of their product with their purchases. This ensured that their freebies were landing in the hands of customers that were already qualified for their product.

How can you use it in your own store?

Team up with a company that could include your free samples in their shipments. Or go one step further, and offer to include their free samples in your shipments as well.

By having a minimum spend, your partner will also increase their profits on their sales. The allure of a free gift is sometimes all it takes to push the customer to spend more.

4. BuzzFeed & Best Friends Animal Society

There is a reason so many brands team up with a charity. Consumers love to feel like they're helping out society when they make a purchase.

BuzzFeed recently teamed up with Best Friends Animal Society to boost pet adoption numbers.

The idea was simple. The animal charity would tap into BuzzFeed's 200M+ readership, and BuzzFeed would publish an article called, "We Interviewed Emma Watson While She Played With Kittens And It Was Absolutely Adorable."

Obviously, not everyone has a massive readership like BuzzFeed, but the idea is used by charity groups everywhere. Pair up with a company, and consumers will feel better making purchases when they know their money is going to charity.

How can you use it in your own store?

Pair with up a charity for social cred. Studies show that consumers are more responsive when there is a single charity involved, so approaching one and inviting them to partner up is enough.  

Pick a charity that will align with your brand. A 2015 study by the Huffington Post found 92% of companies said brand alignment is the single most crucial factor when selecting a charitable partner, so choose wisely.

For example, if your store sells organic candles, then a charity that helps with environmental causes would be a better fit than a charity that helps with cancer research. Apps like Easy Donation can be customized to include your chosen charity at your checkout.

Making it easier for a customer to donate can be crucial to the success of the partnership and the amount of money you end up raising for them.

5. H&M & Alexander Wang

Who remembers when Alexander Wang partnered up with H&M? Yeah, it was weird. But it worked.

While H&M is known for their bargain purchases, an entry-level Alexander Wang product can cost hundreds of dollars. The collab seems like an unlikely partnership—until you strip it back to find out what each brand gained from it.

While H&M were able to boost their status as a credible and fashionable brand through the partnership, Wang was also exposed to a new target audience. Customers that might not have thought about high-end fashion before were suddenly being exposed to it in their typical purchasing environment.

The success of the collaboration isn't a one-off. Karl Lagerfeld, Stella McCartney, and Balmain have also had successful partnerships with the clothing shop.

How can you use it in your own store?

If you're selling up-market items of any description, you're already limiting your market to those with expensive taste.

Think about stores that share a similar style, but offer products at a completely different price point. Reach out and ask if they would be willing to run a cross-collaboration, where you each featured your products on each other's sites for a month.  

JCPenney ran a similar campaign recently with brand Sephora. They included a link to the brand in their top navigation, that allowed customers to shop from the Sephora collection directly on JCPenney.

This allows for one-stop shopping and is ideal if you're collaborating with another store but want to retain traffic.

Better yet, you could connect with a brick and mortar store that doesn't have an online presence. Offer to sell their products on your site for exposure, and in return, ask them to give coupon codes to every customer that makes a purchase in their store.

6. LucasFilm & CoverGirl

Makeup and… Star Wars? It happened.

In 2015, LucasFilms paired up with CoverGirl to create Light and Dark Side makeup lines to win over a younger, female audience.

The partnership meant both brands were given extensive press coverage during the lead up to the film's premiere. And it paid off. 8 weeks of high impact Primetime TV promoting and micro-targeting resulted in a 725% boost in retailer sell-in, and the campaign became the #1 trending topic on Facebook.

It's not the first time CoverGirl had paired up with a film. In 2013, they teamed up with The Hunger Games in a similar campaign that resulted in a 400% sales increase for CoverGirl.

How can you use it in your own store?

This campaign should be mirrored by stores who are already successful and are looking to open up new target markets. If you are just starting out, try a less-risky partnership from one of the other ideas on our list.

If you're up for it—think outside the box. Reach out to a store that you would never think of partnering up with.

If you own a clothing store, why not try collaborating with a fellow pet supply store? As of now, 70% of all U.S. households now own a pet, and the market was valued at $72.1 billion in the U.S. alone last year. It's statistics like this that prove thinking outside the box could be worth its while when it comes to brand partnerships.

Brand partnerships are perfect for Shopify stores—if they are executed correctly

There are a ton of reasons why brands enter into partnerships (and you may be wondering why you haven't tried it before now).

Using another brand can boost your credit and your marketing capabilities. Plus, brand collaborations also offer your store a unique way to expose your brand to an entirely new target audience.

But partnerships aren't easy. To make brand collaborations work, you need to pick the right partner, and put in the groundwork. Use famous collabs (that have worked) from the past to brainstorm ideas about how you could partner up with another brand, and don't be afraid to think outside the box when you're approaching brands to join forces with. Sometimes, the most unlikely brand marketing partnerships turn out to be the most successful.