Unlocking your Plus Potential: Migrating to Shopify Plus Webinar

Megantic was invited to participate in a webinar with Shopify Plus development agency, 10SQ.

• Thinking about a website migration? Discover more.
• Learn more about our Shopify SEO services.

Below is a transcript of the live webinar.

Owen Bolwell: Hey, welcome to some of our attendees there, Jake, Sarah, Ashley see you there, Kian. , so I think we might get things going because look, we are recording this. and we will be sharing it with all, all the attendees and all the people who couldn’t make it today. So I think it’s a good time to get cracking.

We’ve got a whole lot of stuff to get through today. My name’s Owen Bolwell. I am Head of Strategy here at 10SQ. My past lives have been when my wife and I built up a DTC eComm business, which we sold a couple of years ago. I’ve been a Marketing Director at a multinational industry, and I’m now here with 10SQ.

Look, the goal of today’s session, and I’m going to try and keep all the sections really tight because everyone’s busy. I know all you guys, all you attendees are busy. So really thank you. Thank you very much for taking time out of your day for this. And if you’re watching the recording, thanks very much for watching it.

Okay. So we’re going, we’re going to, we’re really going to go through four main things today regarding Shopify, migrating to Shopify and the advantages of it. So we’re going to go through the actual migration process. We’re going to look we’re going to get a bit of a behind the scenes, look at what it is to migrate to Shopify from another platform.

We’re going to look at how going from the standard Shopify to the Shopify Plus really helps in scaling. We’ll, we’ll hear from Nicole on that. And we’re going to get some really interesting SEO tips, especially around the migration, what to look for maybe some of the pitfalls and some of the advantages of jumping over to Shopify.

As far as SEO goes, Kurt is going to give you some golden nuggets on the technical side. His brain is pretty in another universe, but he has this ability to be able to make us all feel like we know what we’re talking about. Okay. All right. So first up, I think it’s a good idea that with tennis, tennis queue and Mark Naggar Head of eCommerce from Vitaco.

Have I said all that, right? Have I pronounced that right? Mark? I think it’s Vitaco.

Marc Naggar: It’s interesting when you ask the AI to pronounce it, they pronounce it as Vi-taco.

Owen Bolwell: Okay. So do I have to say it with an accent as well? Is that right? The Citaco. Vitaco. Okay, cool. Got it. All right. Well, look, I think rather than me rattling on for, for forever, I’m going to hand it across to Kynan and Marc to talk about what it’s like to migrate from one platform into, into Shopify.

Kynon Hickman: So yeah, I’m from 10SQ. So Head of Design at 10SQ and, and this is Marc from, from Vitaco. So we had the pleasure of starting work with Marc. That wasn’t no October last 

Marc Naggar: year on. No, it’s actually June last year.

Kynon Hickman: Time flights. So Marc, did you want to give an intro about your background, how you came to work at Musashi?

Marc Naggar: Yeah. So hi everyone. My name is Marc. I’m the head of eCommerce at Vitaco. If you don’t know Vitaco, we own brands like Musashi and Sports Nutrition. We have NutraLife and Vitamin. health reason kid snacks. We are a New Zealand based company, but we have a big presence here in Australia.

And I’ve been with them for now 16 months. And prior to that, I I had my own business for the last 10 years and I had two DTC businesses. I sold the last one in July 2022. And prior to doing my own business, I was working coming from a banking background. So I did eCommerce and sorry, I did economics and finance.

So that’s briefly what I’ve been doing. Perfect. 

Kynon Hickman: Let’s jump right into it. When you were on WooCommerce, what were the main pain points as a business Musashi was sort of experiencing online? 

Marc Naggar: When we started, when I started with Vitaco, we were on WooCommerce and the main pain points we had on the front end was the user experience.

We think Musashi is a very strong brand. We are the market leader in sports nutrition. We look beautiful on shelf, but online we’re not really at the same level. So the look and feel wasn’t at the same level of the Musashi brand. Plus on the back end, the it was built it was a high touch platform on the back end, the WooCommerce.

The developer built it in a way that. For even for any small updates you want to do on the website, you need to rely on them, even moving sections up and down, very small things, price promotion, it always was very clunky on the back end. And that wasn’t really aligned with what, what we were trying to do and what we’re trying to deliver as an eCommerce strategy.

So that was the main challenge for us, the high touch on the back end. Awesome. 

Kynon Hickman: And so what initially drew you away from WooCommerce and towards Shopify Plus? 

Marc Naggar: Yeah, I’ll go back a bit. It wasn’t directly from WooCommerce to Shopify Plus. So we looked at four platforms. We looked at keeping WooCommerce and just trying to update the website, the theme and everything.

Or we moved to, we looked at BigCommerce and we looked at Vitex. It’s a Brazilian eCommerce, enterprise eCommerce platform. And we looked at Shopify Plus. We had many requirements, but today I want to focus on three or four of them. The number one for us was the ERP integration. We do, and that was one of the challenges.

We have a bit of legacy systems, so we need to work around them. So we wanted a platform that can integrate with our legacy system. We had a pricing strategy. It’s around the member price. So we wanted a platform that can help us work around our member price. And we wanted a platform that can give us the look and feel of the modern look and feel we want.

So be flexible on the front end. So when we looked at each platform, WooCommerce, we had like a bad taste from WooCommerce. We said, we want to try something different. We looked at BigCommerce. BigCommerce, the problem was the integration with ERP. It wasn’t really clear. So we said, all right, that BigCommerce won’t be possible.

Vitex. The issue with Vitex, they came to us and they were happy to help us with the integration. But in terms of we had a, we had a tech defined text stack we want to work with, and there were some limitations in integrating Vitex with some of the technology or the tech stack we want to work with.

And, and that’s when we start to realize, all right, Shopify Plus is, or Shopify is the clear winner here because it can take all the main requirements. Okay. Thanks. 

Kynon Hickman: Awesome. And so when obviously you’ve decided on the platform, what were the biggest challenges following that decision that you sort of came across?

Yeah. 

Marc Naggar: Very good question. Actually, I thought the challenges would be on the front end. Okay. We do, we are very, very big brand. We have massive traffic every day. So I was just trying to think, okay, how are we going to. Obviously convert and engage every visitor coming to the website. We get a lot of, when we do a brand, big brand campaign, we see a massive inflow of visitors to the website.

So how we can make them engage more. I just want to define the customer experience and think of every page, how we’re going to do it, structure it. But, and then I started to realize quickly, that’s not the, this is not the challenge. The challenge is for me to bring this project to life. I need to get other departments on board.

So my challenge was all right, we’re moving from WooCommerce to Shopify Plus there will be an impact because I don’t want to say we’re not a large enterprise, not a large company. We’re a medium sized company, but we have 550 employees. We have many departments and we have a process we have to follow. So how Shopify Plus will be integrated into our ecosystem without really impacting or the process we have, because if you, because we, once we move, once we decide to migrate, we decide to.

It will impact customer service, it will impact finance, supply chain IT. So there is a lot of departments that will be affected. So how are we going to communicate this move and how I make sure the minimum impact happens to zero happens to every department. And that was my biggest challenge.

Kynon Hickman: So how did you overcome those challenges? 

Marc Naggar: It’s every, every approach was a bit different. Interestingly enough, when you try to approach this project and try to make sure it embeds into our ecosystem, you want to make sure it doesn’t, like I said, it’s zero impact to every zero impact to every other department.

I don’t want to say zero. It’s either zero impact. They don’t feel that there is no change or you improve it. It takes them 10 hours to do a certain task, reconcile transaction takes them 10 hours. Say for example, now we’re moving to Shopify Plus it will take you five hours, whatever it is. And for me, we started to automate certain areas like customer service.

Once we started to work on the project, we found, we started to automate certain areas like customer service. For example, they had a lot of tasks they used to do manually. We started to automate them. So they started to see the improvement. Finance. Interestingly, we found some apps. Just very, it’s a very I think it’s a, it’s an app on the app store.

We had a problem with the integration between or the reconciliation between PayPal and our ERP. PayPal pushes are not the same order number. So and finance wants to see it. wants to make sure all the columns we have them are the same. So we, there was a very small app we found on the app store that fixed this problem.

And now, and that was one of the issues. So it just, it’s working with every department and making sure we, we, they don’t feel a big impact happening or an improvement. So that was my approach to every function in the business. Awesome. 

Kynon Hickman: And so after overcoming those challenges and migrating to Shopify Plus, what was the result after moving?

Marc Naggar: The result was phenomenal. We launched end of October, early November, and we can see the metrics they have. Every metric have has improved dramatically. So I can see three, four times improve across everything, engagement, revenue, every single metric has improved. I don’t see any one metric. I went south.

Everything is positive. Everything went up and Yeah, it was we took a bit of risk launching prior to black friday cyber monday. Everyone was advising me Don’t do it. It’s high risk I I took the risk and I think it’s the higher the risk of the higher the reward And we did one of our best weeks ever. I think the best single week of the same number we did in a single week It’s a total revenue.

We didn’t in 2021 So that’s, it was a phenomenal result. Amazing. 

Kynon Hickman: No, that’s exciting to hear. And so now that you are on Shopify Plus and you have been so for, I’m going to get this wrong, but like four or five months, how have you found the ecosystem and how has it helped you guys evolve your strategies and sort of grow the eCommerce side of the business?

Marc Naggar: I think that’s one of the pros of Shopify and one was a requirement how to how you can extend your Text tag with easily with the Shopify. So I as As I mentioned previously We had a defined text tag that can needs to work with any platform We need and Shopify the good thing with Shopify It’s extendable.

And if you want to add anything to it, it’s not really You It’s very hard to integrate with any new technology, and it’s always evolving, and there’s always something new, and it’s, it’s a perfect platform to test and learn. So it’s, it’s, it’s very easy to integrate any new technology, it’s very easy to you don’t need a whole dev team to be behind it.

So that, that was one of the benefits actually. And after launch, it’s still, it’s still the same. Steve, we contact you almost, I contact you almost get in every word. They just, Hey, did you hear about this one? Let’s try it. Or what do you think we should try this new piece of technology? That’s so that’s, that’s one of the benefits of Shopify.

Yeah. 

Kynon Hickman: Awesome. And so like for sales strategies. Have you found it relatively easy to do promotions, sales you know, change things up? 

Marc Naggar: Oh yes especially when you compare to WooCommerce. So we now, I think we do have more power in-House to help like the brand team when we launch a brand campaign.

How we can work with them better just to align the website to the, to make sure that the website is aligned with the brand campaign. Any sales sales campaign, we do what we, we do have more power now in house and flexibility to do things. And it, it. It helps us a lot. 

Kynon Hickman: Amazing. I want to talk a little bit more specifically about one Shopify feature which is Shopify flow.

How has, you know, tools like Shopify flow assisted you guys in sort of streamlining parts of your business? 

Marc Naggar: Yeah. Look, the big advances for us, for Shopify flow it’s just direct, it’s a it’s For fraudulent transactions. So with WooCommerce, I think last year we had about 0. 8 to 0. 9 percent fraudulent transactions.

Now with Flow, we started to, we do like early detection for fraudulent transaction. The, the, the automation on the backend will alert us if it’s a high risk based on the Shopify algorithm, Shopify payments algorithm for and if it’s a high risk, just cancel it and refund it. And that helped us a lot. So since we migrated to Shopify, we only had one single one, only transaction fraudulent.

So using Flow to do that early, the for fraudulent transaction, that’s helped us a lot. We use Flow as well ’cause flow, I think I would imagine like Zaia. In built in in Shopify, we use it sometimes to transfer to automate Data between apps so we can clavio we can automate some few things between clavio and other apps as well using flow And we use it as well for even minor things like tagging VIP customers or a wholesale customers We use it as well.

We use flow on the back end. So it helped us automate a lot of simple tasks and some Other tasks as well similar to like Zapier, for example.

Kynon Hickman: We kind of covered this It’s roughly earlier, but how have you found that your conversion rate, you know, that’s a metric that people love to throw around. Have you found that that changed after moving to the new site and Shopify Plus?

Marc Naggar: Changed dramatically. As I said, the numbers were like phenomenal. We just, we went from, especially on mobile, it increased more than 120%. If you compare the the months of November with Shopify compared to WooCommerce, there was more than 120 percent increase in conversion and especially on mobile.

Because our, as I mentioned before, mobile needed a lot of work and we, and we get as anyone else, most of the traffic to mobile now. So that was a big impact for us. Yeah. 

Kynon Hickman: Amazing. Moving towards planning for the migration and sort of working out where you needed to invest in order to make sure it all went smoothly.

How did you determine how much to invest into the SEO? And if you had the time again, would you invest more, less or the same? 

Marc Naggar: Yeah, that’s a good question. It’s good as well. We have Megantic with us today and they will be presenting a part about Musashi. But we we started working with Megantic prior to the Shopify migration.

So, and they did an amazing work helping us push the, our ranks our key, our reach for non branded keywords. And organically I think that for planning, I think the benefits or maybe should not the benefit, but we do have a small catalogue. So was, and we are a single brand. So there was not, it’s not like we’re marketplace with I don’t know, a lot of collections or categories.

So the, the, the catalogue for us was small. So, and we did, there was a lot, we have, we, in terms of collection and products, we worked very closely with Megantic to make sure minimal impact happened to to, to our rankings. And it’s actually. there was nothing in terms of impact. I think it’s zero impact happened to us.

We if you look at our chart in terms of growth organically, you won’t notice there is a platform because sometimes if you look at companies, you will see a drop and mommy is happening for re platforming. But for us, there was minimal impact. zero impact. And in terms of cost, the good thing working with magnetic very closely.

And as I said, it was a small catalogue, not relatively very big website. So I was part of our already retainer with magnetic. So we went, we didn’t go above and beyond. 

Kynon Hickman: Nice. It’s good to hear that it didn’t affect sort of organic because I know for some, some businesses probably massage included plays a huge role.

Moving on to your, your team. So I know we work closely with Vicky but how have you found that the UI? Of Shopify helps the team to manage day to day updates and bits and pieces like that. 

Marc Naggar: Look, yeah, that’s, that’s the beauty of Shopify. I don’t think there is a single solution better than Shopify when it comes to the simplicity in executing anything on the front end or even on the back end.

So it is, I tried multiple platforms before and Shopify by far is the simplest. It’s very easy to use I’m talking for the main just updating pricing, changing sections on the page. Like the, the, the, the thing that you the, the minimal task that you feel like you don’t need the developer to do that.

So anyone can do it. And it helped us a lot, do a lot of things. Would you have more power in house to execute on a lot of things, change the whole structure of the website, create a new page, align a page for a specific retailer, do something different on it for a certain product page. That gives us a lot of flexibility to test and learn and try new things.

So I don’t think there is not a single platform better than Shopify in this area. 

Kynon Hickman: And I also want to understand how, from a management perspective and an investment perspective, now, let’s say you invest. 20 hours in working on the WooCommerce store versus 20 hours on, on the Shopify store. How do those two compare in terms of output and sort of outcomes from, from that time investment?

Marc Naggar: In terms of, look, we still now, because we can see the more the value we add now. So we just like, we, we feel like we were very motivated to try other things. So we, instead of wasting our time, 20 hours updating, say executing. A promotion now we there is a lot of things we can do to I think cut it.

I would say that 50 percent less in terms of hours to execute a certain promotional campaign But at the same time that’s what I want because we have more control so we want to spend more time on trying few things we want to spend more time on analyzing certain areas of the website So it’s We still spend a lot of time on the website, but instead of spending part of fixing issues or updating, taking a longer time to update certain tasks that used to take, I don’t know how many hours with WooCommerce, now it takes less, 50 percent less in terms of time with Shopify.

We have more time now towards trying new things. So that’s, I think that’s added a lot of value to us. And we’ve trying to update the website to try new things almost every week. 

Kynon Hickman: Amazing. And then I suppose another important aspect of migrating platforms is, is how it affects the customer and how the customer perceives the change.

Were there any sort of negative impacts to the customer and, and, and issues you found with the migration that the brand should expect? 

Marc Naggar: We, that’s a good question. That’s that was one of the other things as well. We we just want to make sure once we move platforms. minimal impact on the customer experience.

So the current customer base, and we used Shopify. account management integration called status. So status now manage our customer accounts and the login is more similar to the new Shopify accounts. So you just enter a password, enter and then they send you a code to your email address.

You enter the code and then you access the account. And we use this at launch. And that was part of why we use that is just to give the customer will feel there is nothing impact. So we migrated all the orders, all the content on the back end, and once they log into the website with their email address, The status will connect the accounts and we’ll show them all the, all the history.

So they won’t feel any impact at all. And they don’t have to change passwords. They don’t have to update anything. We didn’t have to send them an email saying, Hey, we’re changing platform. We’re changing websites. Please update your password. Now we didn’t have to do that. So it was a minimal impact. 

Kynon Hickman: Were there any customer complaints or, or anything like that and influx of issues?

Marc Naggar: No, not at all. Zero. 

Kynon Hickman: Amazing. Awesome. And then I suppose another good question I wanted to ask is obviously it is quite a substantial investment in migrating to any platform. How quickly did you find that the migration to Shopify Plus paid off?

Marc Naggar: Straight away from day one. So, cause as well, we, we, our previous platform wasn’t really good.

So any, I think it just, it’s. You can really notice the improvement. So we’re going from zero to 10 in speed and just like A day so it just it impacted as I said every metric possible because we did every I think the the the look and feel of the website is different. It looks on desktop on mobile.

It’s The custom experience is seamless. We moved to Shopify. Everything was we did was there is not something we did that will I think will impact the the migration negatively. So everything we did we We did, we did it fast and it was calculated. So that was the two things for us just to, we wanted to move fast and we made sure everything we do is calculated.

And that’s working with you, working with Megantic, working with CluedUp just to make sure we, we don’t miss on any thing. And I believe what we did in, I think we did it in four or five months. That’s exceptional. When I spoke with Shopify Plus, they said, Oh, a project like this will take six to eight months.

And I think we delivered it in five months. No one, like, no one believed. Even our IT here internally, they were sending me emails. Are you sure the website is working fine? We didn’t get any complaints. Make sure we didn’t get complaints. Something is not right. We didn’t get any complaints. So it was really like yeah, everything went very, very smooth and with minimal impact and all, everything positive went happened to, to us.

So just, it’s it’s, it’s great. It’s great. We’re very happy to move to Shopify Plus from WooCommerce. Amazing. 

Kynon Hickman: And then final question before we wrap up for anyone who is evaluating Shopify Plus today, what is the one piece of advice that you’d leave them with? 

Marc Naggar: Yeah, look, every company is different and every requirements are different, but I would say if even Shopify as a startup platform.

It’s a platform for small businesses. Even our small to medium businesses, it can fit within your considerate, even if your enterprise look at what’s the pros and cons of each platform. And I don’t think in, if you really, for you a priority to have a seamless experience on the front end and very easy to manage on the backend, I don’t think you will find a better solution than Shopify.

Awesome. 

Kynon Hickman: Well, thank you so much for your time, Mark. Thank you. I hope everyone found that sort of insightful. I know I did. But yeah, thank you. 

Marc Naggar: Thank you. Thank you, Kenan. Thank you everyone. Thank you for listening. 

Owen Bolwell: Thanks Mark and Kenan. I think a couple of really interesting takeaways out of that one, three to four times improvement across all the metrics.

That was pretty impressive and 120 percent increase in conversion rate. That’s yeah. I’m even surprised about that. All right. Okay. Next up we’ve got Nicole Mitroff. I said that correctly, Nicole. Yes. Yes, you did. So Nicole is E comm manager at the collagen co very close relationship with 10 SQ.

Over the past 12, 18 months, I, I believe. And it’s like if you go onto College Co. ‘s store, it’s just a, a beautiful experience. Anyway, I’ll leave that there. Hinen will be talking to Nicole and going through what it’s like going from normal Shopify up to Shopify Plus. Yeah, so 

Kynon Hickman: I believe, Nicole, we’ve been working together for 

Owen Bolwell: what, two to three years 

Nicole Mitrov: Yeah, it does feel like yesterday, but it’s been a while, 

Kynon Hickman: Yeah. It’s been a long time and I think both our business and your business have, have changed drastically in that time. So I think that’s what makes this, this part of the discussion super, super interesting, but let’s go back to the end of 2022, just before we sort of made the switch to Shopify Plus and step me through where the college and co was at.

And sort of what made it the right time to, to make that, that move? 

Nicole Mitrov: Yeah, absolutely. So I think at that point we had been up and running for just over a year. And before then, and I think this is the same with a lot of You know, e com brands starting out, our primary focus was around brand awareness and getting as many eyeballs on our website as possible.

But I think at the end of the day, you know, it’s all well and good getting people onto your website and having that great product which we knew we had. But if you aren’t making that first great impression then you could potentially be having those missed opportunities in terms of. you know, engaging a customer and then ultimately converting them, which is, you know, that end goal.

So. We started to look at our marketing strategy as a whole because we knew that, you know, once the customer tried our product we’d have them hooked. So yeah, we had that really strong social strategy and that really strong retention strategy, but we knew that when. What we wanted to focus on was the entire customer journey.

And that next step was optimizing our digital storefront. You know, being an online brand, you don’t get to have that face to face interaction with your customers. So we wanted to ensure that the experience on our website was something that they remember. And the way to do that was to be able to fully customize every touch point in that journey.

And that with the continual rise of customer acquisition costs, you know, we didn’t want to neglect a major part of our business. Since at that time, I guess we hadn’t made that big investment into our online store and being a beauty supplement, we wanted to. Be that one stop shop for everything collagen, whether it was science, educational content and of course everything in between.

So ultimately that’s when we decided to do that full website rebuild with 10 SQ where we wanted our online presence to become one of authority in the space. I think, you know, to your question of Was it the right time to invest or how do we know? It wasn’t so much a matter of if we should invest in Shopify Plus at the time, because we were starting to grow at a more rapid pace.

You know, like I said, we had the strong social strategy and retention strategy and our brand was gaining a lot of traction, so it felt more like the. Missing piece of the puzzle in order to elevate our growth with a platform. So allow it, allow us to do it. And I think we were pretty lucky to have you guys at 10, 10 SQ with us at the time, because, you know, you knew what our business objectives were and even more so your understanding of the capabilities of Shopify Plus.

Yeah, 10SQwas able to provide us insight of where exactly Shopify Plus could unlock those opportunities for growth.

Kynon Hickman: I know Kurt and I have always been in awe of what you guys have achieved at the College and Co. Like, it’s outstanding and I think for context for everybody else, like, The collagen co started with a really, really solid product that the people genuinely love.

And it, it has a genuine positive impact for, for the cost, which means, as Nicole said, once someone tries the collagen code, you’re pretty much hooked for life. Like they’ve, they’ve mastered a collagen supplement. And. I think the, the strategy that the college and co used was investing where as a startup, the money would have the most impact and the best outcomes and up until, you know, we started working together at the end of 2022, in all honesty, The website was pretty atrocious and neglected.

I think there was an app on the store for everything. Like, even just to have the buttons rounded, there was an app. And I think the day Kurt saw that, he almost had a heart attack. But yeah, I’d love to, to understand from you. And I can jump in as well if, if, you know, It’s a little bit more technical, but how moving to class at the same time as undergoing a website project sort of helped you transform the entire digital strategy overnight, essentially.

Nicole Mitrov: Yeah, I think it’s good to kind of use that example of our clunky website before we did Have our bundles the way we used to, the way we set that up at the very start by ourselves with the app with different apps was a little bit clunky. So in moving to Shopify Plus, we were able to implement that custom discounting strategy with the Shopify scripts editor.

And that not only allowed us to Discounted bundles in a more seamless way from the front end perspective or from the customer’s perspective, but also from an inventory and fulfillment perspective yeah, just because the way we had it before was so clunky. I guess when, you know, those things are small issues when you’re just growing, but when you are scaling, especially that starts to become a lot more challenging.

More of a big impact on the business. So having that to be seamless was yeah, really important for us. 

Kynon Hickman: Yeah. Amazing. So for additional context, we took the move to Shopify Plus as the opportunity to implement status. So that’s the same account system that we have on Musashi, which I suppose for us, when we’re looking at websites, we look at them as the first opportunity to establish loyalty to a brand.

And if. Your website experience is terrible. Then there’s no amount of points that you can sort of throw at someone to go through the pain of trying to add to cart. Everything’s going everywhere. And I think Webflow does the best ads on what it is like to use a bad website, but essentially during the period of rebuilding the website, we, we looked at the tech stack holistically and whereas it could have been build the website six months later, moved to Shopify Plus and sort of reevaluate everything, then we decided to do it all together and sort of, I think we ended up moving to the plus before we moved to Shopify.

Moved across to the theme, so it gave us a little bit of a head start to fix some of the stuff in the background and then smooth, smoothly sort of transition to the new theme, which was, was relatively smooth, like Musashi, we wanted to do it quite quickly and, and off the back of the move to Shopify Plus and the new theme, how have things changed for the College and Co.?

Nicole Mitrov: Yeah, I would say some of the results were pretty instant when we did do that for website rebuild. We definitely saw an increase in conversion rates, same as, you know, what Mark kind of saw on his website. And that’s the ultimate goal, I guess. And at that time where we did launch our new website we were driving a lot more traffic to the website.

So we, I think we were starting to drive, you know, double the traffic from previous months where you kind of expect that conversion rate to take a slight dip because you are bringing so much more people onto there. But the fact that that was increasing was really telling that with the changes that we had made were really resonating with our customers.

Kynon Hickman: So to clarify on that point, you guys were driving a lot more social traffic, which traditionally we would consider, you know, colder or like less likely to convert. And despite you doubling, tripling the social traffic, you were driving to the site. Whilst paid search and organic stayed the same, conversion rate increased.

Nicole Mitrov: Conversion rate increased. And I think that’s because we had a lot of more, a lot more educational content on the website and a whole lot more different landing pages so that when they were coming from an ad, for example, about hair, they were being taken to a page about everything collagen for hair.

So yeah, and of course, you know, what’s great about Shopify is. that we are continually customizing and realizing the benefits of the platform. I think it’s flexibility allows us to continually refine the site to better serve our customers and better serve our profitability as well.

Kynon Hickman: Awesome. I’d love to touch on the ecosystem of Shopify Plus, because I suppose what can sometimes be neglected when considering Shopify Plus as a platform is the ecosystem that surrounds it. And I suppose can’t cover all of that today is two of my favorite apps, which is Clavio and, and gorgeous. So maybe we’ll start with gorgeous and customer service.

How has that allowed you guys to excel as a brand and retain customers? 

Nicole Mitrov: Yeah, I think you know, touching on the gorgeous integration. I mean, I know our customer service team can speak a lot to how efficient it has made and product productive and has made their roles. But I think having that website chat on our platform just so easily converts those customers that might have a question that they might not find on the website.

And that’s just a quick win right there. That integration with gorgeous, gorgeous. Also, I know for our customer service team, definitely increases their efficiency because, you know, every, when a customer does reach out to you, all your auto, their auto information is there. So our team doesn’t have to go to different tabs and find different, you know, areas of the website where that information is. So that’s kind of all in one place.

I could talk about Clavio for a very long time because that is one of our most important platforms when it comes to our retention and our retargeting strategy. But for Shopify Plus to integrate with Clavio seamlessly, it was definitely non negotiable for us.

And it definitely does. So you know, we’re able to pull through customer data straight from Shopify. So we have all that data from when a customer is active on the site to if they viewed a product, all the way through that conversion funnel where they’ve placed an order and we’ve got all of that history in our Clavio you know, database.

So, yeah, that’s been a major part of our retargeting strategy being able to know exactly what interests our customers. and having their purchases, purchase history and Clavio, you know, we can engage with them at every point in that journey and create a really personalized experience. For example, I guess, you know, now that we’re growing and we’re releasing more and more products with that integration, we’re able to, you know, pull through dynamic product feeds into our marketing campaigns for products our customers may have recently purchased or recently viewed. And I think being able to do that just takes out the guesswork of You know what to market to them. 

Kynon Hickman: Another one that popped into my head that I remember maybe six months ago or maybe longer.

We all know my timeframes are not great, but we jumped on the site and all of a sudden you guys had created an Akendo quiz and it was a quiz up that we didn’t even like have any involvement and you guys just managed to integrate it all. How does being able to just implement strategies like a quiz and let’s talk specifically about A kendo quiz in this case.

How did that affect the customer journey, especially for like new customers? 

Nicole Mitrov: Yeah, definitely and this kind of talks to also The ease of use of the platform. We’re able to create that quiz within a Kendo. And it’s literally as easy as clicking an app in bed button into, that’s why we did it by ourselves without you guys, clicking an app in button, putting it into the site.

We designed it in the Kendo, put it in there. And you know, there’s no coding needed. Yeah, and that really helped that customer journey at the very beginning of the customers. you know, maybe they don’t know what collagen is good for or what benefits they need from it. So we’re able to have all those questions there and it recommends a product for them to take.

And that’s another thing that also integrates well with Clavio. So able to then use that data again going back to Clavio and retargeting them based on their benefits. So, you know, everything I think in the platform just integrate so seamlessly together that you really are able to optimize every single point with that customer journey.

Kynon Hickman: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think you’re lucky enough to not appreciate just how good Shopify is because unlike Mark, you never had the pleasure of sort of trying to fight with a platform like WooCom. But no, I suppose on elaborating on that, how do you find, because I know you guys, it’s a lot of fun because every time you have a sale, we sort of change up the site probably more significantly than what.

An average brand would be whether it be banners and sort of tags and whatnot. How do you find setting up different sales? And I know black Friday was the fun one as well. 

Nicole Mitrov: Yeah, I suppose I can speak to like a particular feature in Shopify. That has been a pretty big game changer for me in particular as a team.

So launchpad on Shopify that basically lets you schedule a. sale or a product launch or even a script, a customized discount way in advance. You know, the way I used to do this was so inefficient. If we had a sale going at midnight, I’d stay up till midnight and make all of those changes.

You know, right before it was meant to be live. But I think the issue with that is, you know, if you miss something, you know, it is midnight, you are probably pretty tired at the end of the day. Which, you know, at the beginning, when you’re kind of at a small scale, If you do miss something, it’s probably not that big of an issue.

But again, like I said, when you start to scale, those little things that you miss can start to become a lot more of a bigger issue, especially when you’re dealing with more traffic and more customers, which has definitely made the way that I work a lot more efficient. And, you know, the way the team works a lot more efficient, it also has that reporting side of things.

So, you know, once that event ends, you get those analytics of the total sales in that time period and the total orders in that time period. And that’s allowed us to make future decisions on the types of events that are most profitable, profitable to us. For example, you know, last year we had the 12 days of Christmas and we ran a different offering for each of those 12 days.

So, you know, I didn’t have to start till midnight every single night. I could just schedule it. But the good thing about the reporting tool, I think once that’s over, we can look back at that information now and see which one of those offerings did best. And then, you know, for Christmas 2024, or just even for sales in general we’re able to see what works best and use that information to give our customers what they really want and drive better conversion in those sales periods.

Kynon Hickman: I remember the 12 days of Christmas every other day. How do we do this? How do we do that? But yeah. That’s amazing. Cool. So I’ll leave everyone with the final question that I asked Mark as well, which is for the people who are evaluating Shopify Plus here today, what, what is the one message you’d encourage them to sort of take home and think about?

Nicole Mitrov: Yeah, look, I think we’ve understood in this process that, you know, every customer does have a different journey. And it’s really about doing each part of that journey really, really well. And you know, using a platform that allows you to be flexible in the way that you target all of your customers.

But also, you know, the potential with Shopify Plus is pretty limitless. You know, as limitless as your imagination, I think Kinnan. I don’t think there’s ever been a time where I’ve said, and I think this is a testament to you guys as well where I’ve wanted to try something or I’ve said, can we do something like this where we haven’t been able to yeah, If you are thinking about migrating, you know, I wouldn’t do it with anyone else, but TennisQ by your side, because, you know, not only have they executed our visions but you know, I think you guys are truly ahead of the curve when it comes to this space and you’ve got some really invaluable insights on the Econ world.

Kynon Hickman: Well, with that, we’re just about out of time. So thank you so much, Nicole, and for those kind words at the end in particular. But yeah, thank you for joining us. Thank you. 

Owen Bolwell: Yes. Welcome to the Shopify Plus and 10SQ love fest. I can just feel it, feel it in the air.

Actually, it’s interesting. Don’t we love that launchpad? It’s just, Yep. No more midnight change off. No more midnight pressing the button business there. Yeah, I’m with you. Actually, we in our, in our business, we act, we switched over from WooCommerce to Shopify in 2014, so that’s. How long I’ve been in love with the Shopify platform.

Anyway, stop with this Shopify love fest. I think one of the big takeaways out of that was that you actually don’t need a developer. All right. So it looks like we’re out of a job in testing these things, but no, look, there’s some really yeah, incredible. Things going on there and college and co is just going incredibly.

So yeah, we’ve played it. We’ve played a very, very small part in that. So great to be along for the ride. Okay. Next up Mark Tran, the other Mark he’s going to talk SEO and migration and look, some of the, some of the pitfalls, some of the positives. Mark, the other Mark in Vitaco has already mentioned that they, you know, there wasn’t really any significant drop off in their SEO when they used Megantic in their transform, in their transition.

So Mark’s going to walk you through probably a little bit of what they did or how they did it, or some of the ideas behind it. So Mark, I’ll hand over to you, mate. 

Mark Tran: Awesome. Thanks, Owen. So like, it’s been, it’s been incredible hearing from Nicole and Marc, just like from your experience moving over to, to Shopify platform.

I think as an SEO, it’s very easy to think SEO makes up a big part of, you know, all the clients businesses, but we just make up a small fraction. So it’s great to sort of hear all the sort of challenges and, you know, the moving parts that. Happen outside of our SEO world. A little introduction about myself.

I’m, I’m an account manager here at must magantic and we focus predominantly on eCommerce SEO. And I’m just going to quickly run through what SEO migration looks like and what to consider. So I’ll just share my screen. I’ve got a few slides that I’ve prepared.

Cool. Can you guys see this? Okay. Yeah. Awesome. All right. Cool. So I like to use this analogy a lot of businesses that have moved to a new platform or even just physically expanded to a second store moved houses. You can appreciate. With enough forward planning, it’s a manageable task, but along with the excitement of all the opportunities that come with having a better location potential cost savings expanding and increasing your staff count.

is a lot of forward planning that is required. Otherwise it can be quite a daunting task and similar to SEOs with enough forward planning a lot of things can go right. So I think they’re pretty similar in that sense. Now expectations. So in terms of the actual move, most businesses are pretty optimistic and they tend to underestimate the planning required to move in terms of staff training, stuff, relocation.

And with enough planning it can be, it can be pretty possible. But in terms of reality most people sort of leave things the last day and expect things to go smooth. But with a lot of moving parts, it can be a downright nightmare if not managed correctly, same as SEO migrations. Now Kynan and and the rest of the guys have mentioned a lot of the great things about Shopify already.

But the things that we like from an SEO perspective is being able to optimize the content. So being able to have the freedom to update titles, descriptions, URLs, and carry content across. Every now I should say like every platform has its compromises, but I think over time I’ve come to see that.

Out of all the platforms and all the compromises made, I think Shopify is the one that makes like the fewest compromises. You’ve got features like SEO friendly static links that are being rolled out with new updates, strong apps, stakeholders, and we really liked it for fast SEO implementations.

Now in terms of SEO migration, there’s a long list of considerations we make as. SEO agencies. But I won’t bore you for the details. I just sort of write it right off a couple of days. So you’ve got your structure, you’ve got heading structures, meta titles, descriptions transferring content and the list goes on.

But what does, what can you sort of distill this down to? So I’d say that SEO migration is actually three main functions. So you’re looking to redirect any. Existing pages for one to one onto the new web page. And you’re looking to transfer across all the content. Copy SEO metadata and blogs, product pages, category pages, and so on.

And then finally, indexing. So making sure that all of the new categories and pages that you’ve created on the new Shopify website are in fact crawled and indexed on Google search results page. Now, in terms of a SEO plan, migration We typically look at it in terms of research, the pre migration, the actual migration itself, and then the post migration.

But the main takeaway from here is you should be thinking about SEO migration 12 months or at least six months before the actual move itself. And in fact you should be talking to your SEO agency as you’re going through the discovery and scoping phase for the new build itself. And I guess, what are the potential risks if you don’t have any of this planning?

So, this is I asked AI to actually show us what it thought a failed SEO migration would look like. And this is the image it came up with. So this is meant to be a metaphor for broken links, scattered content, lost traffic, robots in Basically complete this array. So just a fun little slide there.

So just wanted to show actual numbers and like a, like a case study. So this was one of the five failed migrations that came across our our business. It was in a niche in the supplements fast moving consumer goods industry. You can sort of guess where where the re platform happened. So right here, you could see a large drop off in rankings.

And this has yeah, this led to 82 percent of the first page keyword rankings dropping off. And this led to a big drop in revenue as well. So 82 percent decline or 1, 375 keywords and 50 percent decline in revenue compared to the year before. Now this is example number two. So this is a large pharmacy, Australian pharmacy and retailer.

So they actually had a, they had a 65 percent decline in keywords. Looking at the sheer size of this business, they actually had a 45, 000 keyword drop. So that’s massive. And now on a more, I guess on a more positive side, what should a planned migration actually look like? What can go right? So massage has been fantastic.

I like to sort of under promise and then over deliver and sort of set the worst case scenario. I think most people sort of underestimate what can potentially go wrong. And from here you can see the purple arrow represents where we joined the team. With Masashi. So we’d worked with them for six months before we were discussing the collaboration between cotton and, and tennis skew with Masashi in the build for the Shopify website.

And you can say the red arrow there is when we had the very platform. So as Mark sort of alluded to, there was really no. Dip that we actually prepared him for. In fact, we sort of just saw growth over the last six months. So this has been incredible. And the main takeaways, so we’ve gained 1, 066 first page keywords two and a half times increase in key words.

So, you know, business owners, you want to know sort of tangibly, what, what did this actually lead to? Cause we often talk about rankings, but how does that affect commercials? So we looked at the data and. Without. going through the specific revenue. We looked at the last quarter from through December through to February, and we compared that year on year.

Now everyone in the eCommerce space understands like this last three months has been a little bit softer than the year before market conditions have changed a little bit. Despite this, we saw a 44 percent increase in revenue at 31 percent increase in transactions. 12 percent increase in conversions and 21 percent increase in users.

So quite remarkable to be honest. And a little bit like Mark’s IT guy, like we’re really surprised that there were no hiccups. Now what did that actually look like, the migration? We mapped out all the categories, filters and pages. We mapped their keywords to their respective pages. We mapped out the implementation, including page paths and 301 redirects.

And and then we transferred the information architecture. So a fancy way of saying we moved over the SEO titles, descriptions, page paths, page headings, content itself. And this is kind of what it looked like for the protein powders page I guess so. What’s the key takeaway here with enough forward planning?

Like a relocation things can go relative relatively smooth and they do present a lot of opportunities for growth I think Shopify hands down is like, One of the best platforms out there without with the fewest compromises again, I don’t think it’s perfect You should engage with your seo agency And your web developers and encourage them to set up a meeting with each other as Each partner is going to be an expert in their own domain, but they probably don’t understand what each other actually do.

So I think in terms of understanding the requirements, the limitations and working with those, you can get a really great result. The migration itself can actually be an opportunity because you understand the requirements and you avoid double handling it. What we’ve seen in the past is a developers created a new website, SEO has come in and then they’ve said, look, you’ve undone all our work.

We’re going to have to do it again. And that ends up being a double up in time costs and effort. And nobody wants that ultimately the business pays for it. And what the main benefit is protecting and building upon your existing organic revenue. And protecting a channel that you’ve poured money into as a business.

So, I think SEO migrations are, are very achievable as long as you have that forward planning. Now I’ll, yeah, I’ll pass it over to Kenan to go through yeah, to go through his section. 

Owen Bolwell: Oh, thanks, Mark. I’m a little bit better looking than Kynan. But we’re going to go, go to Kurt now, who is lead dev at 10SQ and also co-founder.

And every time I talk to him, he’s always got some yeah, lateral thinking. Solution going on. So Kurt, maybe take it away, mate. And yeah, tell us what you’re thinking at the moment.

Kurtis Tozer: I don’t know what was going on there either. I don’t know how to use air pods. I’m just having a bad day, but I was muted. I mean, unmuted. You could see in the chat. So it’s a good 

Kynon Hickman: sign for the lead technical person to know how to use zoom. So, 

Kurtis Tozer: Yes, well, either way hopefully you’ll still trust that and know how to use technology despite the false start.

But what I’ll do is I have a quick presentation I just want to share. And we’re going to go into a little bit more detail around some of the technical and planning aspects that go into a migration from our side. So I guess when you come to a migration, every migration is going to be unique. It’s unique typically is your brand, you have different tech stacks and different elements.

So there’s a lot that goes into a migration that kind of needs to be considered on a case by case basis. Thank you. Now, very similar to Mark’s discussion about planning, planning is going to be really the difference between a successful migration and a bumpy or even a catastrophic migration. And one of the best things to establish at the start is who is actually working on this project.

And it’s not just the internal and external stakeholders, it’s the separate agencies that people are working with on an ongoing basis. So for example, your SEO agency, your advertising agency, your email marketing agency. And establish those lines of communication from day zero. What that’s going to let us do is kind of work with each of the parties on their respective areas.

And just make sure that we’re delivering awesome end product and that we’re all on the same page. There’s no kind of questions that are lingering there. Secondly, you want to establish your timelines and milestones quickly. So basically, what you want to do is look at your launch date and work backwards from there.

We want to be looking at kind of your QA timeline, your remediation timeline, and have those cutoff dates really set in stone from day zero. Then we kind of want to look at what your tech stack currently looks like and in pretty big detail too, because we can’t migrate what we don’t know exists. And then have a look at where your future tech stack is positioned.

This is a really good time too, to have some open and honest discussions with your agencies And trying to understand some of the risks that are out there. The only way you can tackle the risks is if it’s tabled early and it’s not like a last minute thing that pops up. There’s a lot more that goes into a migration plan, but these are just some of them.

We’ll be sending the slides out later, so I’m not going to get too caught up on them, but you definitely need to be touching on each one of these. Now, another thing that we should really be doing when we’re looking at migration is developing checklists. Now, this is a checklist that you might see one to two weeks out from a launch, but it’s really just establishing who’s doing what.

So you’re not left in a position where someone thinks they’re waiting on someone else. And has it been done and have it like, so it’s a spread, spread, spreadsheet. So everyone can access and update it real time now, finally. And this is the thing that’s going to make you wake up in the morning and feel prepared.

It is a running sheet for going live. The running sheet and typically span anywhere between the day off to, you know, two or three days before. And that’s basically outlining not minute by minute. We typically do 15 minute blocks. Exactly what is happening on launch day and the days before. So these are kind of things where you need to have everyone involved, a spread doc, shared document.

And some of the other things we like to have in our GoLive ROM sheet include points of contact. So we know exactly who’s managing the project at each respective side. Just so the communication lines are very clear. And then also any links to external kind of vendors or platform vendors. So for example, your DNS provider have their like help support phone number there.

And with a lot of these online companies too, you need a support pin. So what we want to have is a link to actually get that support pin. Because sometimes if stuff does go wrong, you don’t want to be running around like headless chook. You want to know exactly what you can do so you can action it real time and feel as if it’s not just chaos.

Now, we get this one asked a lot, is when to go live, and it’s different for every store, but here are some of the metrics we use to try and identify a good time to go live. So it’s pretty much going to be any day in between Tuesday and Thursday, inclusive, because if you launch on a Friday, it’s a good way to say goodbye to your weekend.

And then launching on a Monday isn’t advised if you rely heavily on US based vendors with no Australian support. We might consider doing a launch on a Monday. If they’re using Australian vendors or they have Australian support, but we kind of shy away at it because we don’t want to be trying to contact them on what effectively is their Sunday.

Then you want to be looking at when your sales and traffic are at its lowest. And finally ideally don’t launch into a sales period. And if you do understand some of the risks that do come with that. Now, what to go live with. It’s our belief that a migration isn’t a time to change everything and just throw it all out and start from scratch, is you really need to take what’s working for the brand and then build on top of it.

It also might not be the time to slap on every feature under the, you know, sun. And it’s for a few reasons. First of all, we don’t want to overwhelm your customer base. Let’s say we’ve just restructured the entire way that products are purchased. They’re going to come to your site, it’s possibly going to look different, and it’s going to almost feel foreign.

You’ve instantly lost that kind of brand connection that you have. And then also we don’t want to overwhelm your internal teams. Changing things overnight for everyone is a good way for there to be internal issues. People not know what’s going on. So it’s about progressively adding things once you kind of have that stable base.

And then finally, one of the biggest reasons that you don’t want to just do everything at once Is that you’ll never be able to really evaluate the baseline of what moving to Shopify has done for you. One of the biggest problems we see is merchants with 50 different apps that do their upsells and their recommendations and this and that, and they’re not sure which one’s actually driving revenue, especially if they’re trying to attribute the revenue to each other and it gets into this weird mishmash where you’re not really sure.

So what we can do is if we progressively add things, then we can just monitor. And kind of evaluate what’s really performing for you. Now, these are just a few quick gotchas that come with kind of migrating that you should be thinking of. Now, of course, these are things that we think about out of the box.

But if you are with another agency, definitely want to cover this. So first of all, be explicit with your vendors. One thing that we’ve kind of seen a few times now is someone will try and do a migration, but they won’t contact their reviews company. And what ends up happening if they all DIY it themselves is they’re sending double review requests to people because you’ve got the audit data and the two different platforms.

And it just becomes a bit of a mess. So definitely speak with your vendors and make it clear from the start as to what you’re doing. And so they’re across it. Now this is a bit of a nerdy one, but on your DNS records, you’ve probably seen if you’ve ever been in the admin, something called TTL and you just set it to something random or that might be like 86400 or something like that.

Well, essentially that’s the time that it takes for your data to be cleared out of their like DNS cache. But what we want to do 24 hours before you migrate is set that down to five minutes. By having it at five minutes, it basically means the data is going to come through when you adjust those records a lot quicker and get people to your new site.

About 24 hours after your migrations, all stable and clear and good to go, then we’ll bring that back up to like 24 hours. And then also make sure you have a way to access your old site post launch. Because one of the problems you’ll run into is that if you’ve migrated and then, you know, you need to check something on a random page on a page somewhere, you can’t access it.

So we encourage you to make sure you have a way of accessing it before we do that transfer, because it’s a little bit painful to do it post. Never skip the validation stage. When it comes to making sure you’ve migrated stuff correctly, Just don’t because, you know, you’re migrating a million records.

You’re not going to be able to check everyone manually. So you really want to be across all of the things in there. And then also make sure to migrate all of your domains. Not just, you know, the main one you’re doing for business. So if you’ve got a. com and you’ve got, you know, another domain that’s just floating in there, you don’t know what it’s printed on.

EDM, migrate at all. Now, when it comes to, I guess, evaluating what Shopify Plus can do for your business, I would encourage everyone to leave their, you know, conceptions of what you can do on Shopify out of the box. We’ve received a lot of tooling in the past, I would say year or so. It allows us to really get in the middle of some of those core Shopify processes.

So for example, functions lets us get in the middle of literally the backend functions checkout extensions. We’ve got the storefront API. We’ve got platform features that are coming out, you know, every six months. So come to us with what your core business requirements are. Let’s flesh them out. But more times than not, we’re being able to pull off some really complicated stuff with just core Shopify as a platform.

So keep that in mind too. Now when it comes to data migration, there is so much that can go on in here. I’m sure some of us might be familiar with automated tools, but for our larger merchants, it doesn’t start and end with automated tools. You’ve got that entire structure here that, you know, might be mapped loosely.

But I would really encourage you to work with your developers here to identify what data silos you’ve got so that you can use those data to migrate it to the platform with as little manual entry as possible. You know, with some of our recent migrations, we’ve been creating custom scripts that take all of the data out in weird formats and bring it back into Shopify.

I guess what I’m getting at here is that if it’s in a digital format, if it even be a Word document, we can do some pretty cool things to automate that process. Now, one of the things that you are going to struggle with migrating, no matter how good your devs are, is the password aspect to a customer account.

Now, if your platform has been built to, you know, PCI, DSS security standards, you’re actually not going to be able to pull that password out of the platform. This is just the way in which servers store passwords. They don’t serve, save it in like a, You know, an exact format or anything that’s like cryptographically hashed.

And it’s really complicated, but in short, what that means is that we can’t migrate passwords. So we have a few paths here and the first one, which is arguably probably the worst one is we can get everyone to reset their own passwords, which. Is not a good user experience. Now, the second option is keeping your old web service live and using an awesome technology called Multipass to essentially use your old website as the login function for your new website.

We can make it feel seamless and the user doesn’t even know it’s doing it. But definitely an option if you didn’t want to look at the other two. So, our other two options, which we think are the best options, is get rid of passwords altogether. But then we don’t have to migrate them. So basically there are two ways of doing this.

So you’ve got new Shopify customer accounts, which basically logs in with an email code. And then you’ve got status accounts, which also use the same login process. So you put in your email here, and next thing you know, you get a code in your inbox that you use to authenticate. What status does is it kind of brings the entire customer account experience into a widget, meaning that it’s not obstructive for the customer journey.

And it just really adds value. You know, you’ve got your recently viewed and you don’t actually have to be logged in. And when you log in, it pairs it all up and, you know, wishlist and all of that actually makes accounts a function of your website instead of just something on the side that you have to have.

Now, I kind of want to also just touch on the offer we’re running today. So essentially what we’ve got here is we’re partnered with some of our amazing agency partners and also app partners to put together an offer that for certain merchants could be worth upwards of like 30, 000 Australian dollars.

There are some terms and conditions attached to the offer, but essentially some of the offers, you know, elements include, I believe, Shopify Plus we’re covering about like 15, migration credit. So that’s the work that we do. 15, 000 cost reduction there. Clued Up, I believe, if you’re not on Klaviyo they will actually be able to get you 10 percent off on Klaviyo for the first 12 months.

Megantic, I believe, is offering an SEO migration package to make that entire thing smoother. So there’s a lot else here with the different apps. In general, the rule of thumb is that it’s only available for free merchants and it’s first in best dressed. I feel a little bit like Oprah right now, but basically you know, getting contact.

If that is something of interest, you can look at the terms and conditions on the landing page, which we’ll link in an email following up this. But yeah, that’s kind of a few of the small components that go into migration. So I’ll pass it back to Owen there. So thank you.

Owen Bolwell: Thanks Kurt. As always. There’s always little nuggets in there. I love the the TTL. thing. I had no idea. And I’m sure most of us had no idea, just speaking for everybody. Okay. All right, Rattan, glued up. You’re going to give us some insights here, mate, on migrating for the next 10 minutes and Then we’ll, we’ll be wrapping it all up.

So thank you everybody for listening. And here’s Rattan. 

Rattan Muttoo: Perfect. Thank you. And, and apologies in advance. I do sound slightly more sniffly. It’s a bit windier and colder in Sydney. Definitely a lot better than Melbourne, but still colder. So what I wanted to cover today was just how we migrated Masashi and what that integration between Flavio and Shopify looks like.

I think some of the previous speakers did, including Nicole talked volumes about how well. Clavio can work. So jumping straight into it, if I can actually make it go to the next slide. There we go. So Clavio Shopify besides just the Shopify Plus and Clavio integration, the sync between the two platforms is immensely powerful.

What that means is there’s a sync between. Clavia to Shopify and Shopify back into Clavia. So taking an example with Michelle sheet, we’re actually integrating information from Shopify back into Clavia and vice versa, few platforms, both from an ERP or email, any of these platforms that you look at.

In this graph that all of them can be brought into Klaviyo so you’ve got one source of information and when you’re emailing a customer, you truly understand everything about that customer and you know why you’re emailing them what you’re emailing them and any communication is tracked. The second point, the integrations hub, you’ve synced everything in.

You know, be it a shipping platform, loyalty, gorgeous as customer service, a kendo for reviews, all of it sits within Plavio. You have that information ready to use, send customer communications based on any of those Properties. You understand why you’re emailing someone. And if someone’s left you a bad review, you can tag them within your Klaviyo flows so that you understand that you shouldn’t be emailing them and asking them to come back and review something else you should first solve for that streamlining all your customer communications.

One of the great advantages with Shopify Plus and Klaviyo is you can bring all your transactional emails and communication into Klaviyo. And the great benefit of that is branding. Whenever we speak to our brands that we manage the same thing that occurs, oh, the developers will look after that. No offense to the developers in the room.

But often branding and development doesn’t always go hand in hand. So we’d go, right, let’s take it over and we can brand all those emails and they’ll look really nice and pretty and easy to manage. Now, coming into what we can do around the benefits, obviously seeming seamless tracking. And what I mean by that is literally when I’ve worked with, we work with pretty much every email platform that’s on market, especially the large ones in Australia, and all of them will have their own tracking methodologies and what they’re doing.

With Klaviyo and Shopify Plus, it’s literally the click of two, three buttons and you’re done. There is literally no more activity required. Anyone with next to no dev experience can do it themselves, and it makes it really easy. From day dot you can launch customer journeys, such as welcome, abandoned car, all the basic things that we hear about, but customer win backs, review requests.

For the likes of Machiatri, who are a more sophisticated brand and other brands that we work with in the beauty or FMCG space, a lot of the activity that we do ties in How many times has a person purchased from a brand? What was their last activity? What are their loyalty points? So there’s a lot of information that is being fed into the system.

So we’re sending emails that are going to be engaging and actually help you convert the customer over. The last thing which I always say to brands is extremely, extremely important is being able to grow your subscriber list. Now, more than ever, the important thing of being able to grow your subscriber list is, is super key because we’ve now got, I think there was a statistic that customers are receiving 70 percent more emails than even compared to last year.

When Owen started his D2C business, he probably sold it, it would be about 500 percent more. You know, in volume, if you look back in your own inboxes on any given day, after payday last week, you would have received on average, at least 30 communications from different brands that you probably don’t even remember signing up to telling you about after payday.

So. Getting new subscribers, keeping them, keeping them engaged, as Nicolette said, is super important. Now, touching on Musashi and Klaviyo games, apologies about the pun, but it was, it was necessary. The key thing there was about how we actually scale. As Mark had said, it’s a mature business. We weren’t taking someone who’s a startup.

It was a mature business. And I feel sometimes when you’re working with mature businesses and transforming their email and CRM program, it’s a bit harder. What you’re trying to do is actually go back to the customer and say, Hey, we’re here, come and purchase from us again. Now, the challenge for us was creating marketing flows.

And when we transitioned them onto Shopify Plus with the 10 square team, the idea was how do we actually ascertain everything about the customer, all their customer properties, be it around loyalty, be it price purchase, everything, and create journeys that are targeted the individual across those journeys and understand everything about them.

We introduced personalized recommendations. So we have different flows based on what you’ve purchased in the past replenishment so that we actually understand and predict when you’re going to be done with that order. And then send you a cheeky email to say, Hey, We’ll order it again for you and comes from a customer service agent.

So it all looks very personalized and then very much a speedy deployment of new apps. Everyone in the call has spoken about how easy, fast, and simple it is to deploy apps on Shopify. We were able to deploy reviews, loyalty, customer service. Within the space of a few weeks, and the importance for us was having a seamless process and a very much a customer focus.

Everything needs to be on point for a brand like Musashi for any brand, really. So everything was seamless and it moved in sync with each other. The last thing was leveraging Shopify customer data. We’re targeting people on site engagement, and not a lot of people would know this or talk about it. But Google and Yahoo have released new rules that if you’re emailing your customer too often and you have a spam complaint rate of more than 0.

03%, It’s a terribly small number. Then you are going to go straight into spam. And if anyone on this call has ever lost the Instagram handle or had it locked, it’ll be the same process. You’ll never recover it again. And it’s going to be a very, very difficult process to actually get back into the inbox.

So we often say to brands and customers, let’s actually think about segmentation based on what people are doing on your website, what are they doing in terms of purchase history, in terms of loyalty, so we’re emailing your customer in a way that actually helps us. CRM revenue, email revenue, increase your click rates, but also drive more people back to the website.

So that is everything from a Klaviyo perspective.

Owen Bolwell: Yes. And don’t we all love Klaviyo? Yeah. It’s, it’s actually quite incredible, isn’t it? Yeah, we’ve been doing a whole lot of work in, in that, in that way. That’s really interesting on the spam front. Rattan. That’s a, yeah, that’s a big one to watch.

It’s quite top of mind at the moment. And also, Klaviyo actually alerts you to all this stuff too. So you have all these notifications if, if you haven’t used Klaviyo before it does alert you. To what you have to do and guide you through the process of what you need to do also. But that’s why we have Rattan for include up.

So thank you, mate. That was really, really good. All right. We’re going to wrap it up now. There’s a lot to unpack in that presentation. We will have recorded it and we will be sending that out to everyone. So you can, you can jump in and, and. And watch the pieces that you’ll be most interested in.

I think some of the key takeaways though when we’re talking about migrating, you know that 120 percent increase in conversion rate, I can’t get that one out of my head at the moment, so I’m going to keep that one, but that’s, yeah, that’s just silly stuff. Scaling. I like the idea. Well, I don’t like the idea of no need for developers for testing and operations, but I kind of do as a former merchant.

You know, so yeah, I’m, I’m torn. Absolutely. But yeah, no, it’s, it’s, it’s actually, it’s, it’s, yeah, quite incredible. SEO planning, planning, planning, as Mark said technical insights. Kurt, obviously the planning side, but I think what I’ve found with the way Kurt does things within Shopify and for, for clients is that client will come to him with a business idea or a problem or something that they want to do.

And they’ll have a list of apps and he’ll go, well, hang on a second. Maybe we can use this and a bit of this all Shopify native. And do that. And he creates this natively, very quite effortless, seamless solution. So little shout out there to you, mate. Okay. So I want to just quickly show you something just before you go.

And it, this is a, this is a two slides that Shopify gave to us very recently. They’ve done a whole survey on the total cost of ownership. of Shopify versus all the other platforms. Now, again, we can share these slides with you. That’s fine. But I just thought during this presentation, I will quickly show you okay.

Right. Can you see that? So this is what Shopify shared with us this week. So total cost of ownership in commerce, generally 33 percent better across the board platform costs, 23 percent better 19 percent better on operations and maintenance costs. Now I do have the methodology here and I can share that all with you.

That’s fine. But I just thought as top line percentages, these are really interesting. The second slide that they shared with us, Was that the, the cost of competitor platforms those that shan’t be named here, well, I will Salesforce, Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, those guys they actually come in at around about 57 percent more than Shopify.

That was interesting. That was kind of a bit more than. than I I originally thought. So I can share this, these slides with you. I can show you the methodology that they came to those numbers with. Look, I think we’re going to wrap it up now. Thanks everyone for coming. Michelle, Matt, Jan, I’m reading your names, Emily.

And don’t forget we have the, for the first three merchants, you can save 15, 000 on your migration to Shopify Plus with 10SQ and Kurt at the helm. We all, we can all sleep. soundly at night, knowing he’s there. So look, thank you very much for coming to this one. We’ll see him in the next one. If you’re watching the recording we are going to be having more, more webinars we’re going to be deep diving into different different areas in future webinars. And I think one of the next ones is really going to be diving into the world of unified commerce and how Shopify’s point of sale can fit into a retail brand strategy. So thank you all very much for coming. And hopefully we’ll see you next time. And thank you to all our panellists.

We’ve got Rattan, we’ve got Mark, we’ve got the other Marc, we’ve got Kurt, we’ve got Nicole and we’ve got Kenan, and I’m Owen, and I’ll see you on the next one.