Q4 Updates: A common sense guide to the Shopify Editions Updates with Chase Clymer from Honest eCommerce (episode 110)

by April Buencamino-dy

Chase Clymer is the co-founder of Shopify agency Electric Eye, AND host of the Honest eCommerce Podcast.

He’s joining us to discuss the ins and outs of the latest set of Shopify Editions updates – including giving you much needed clarity on how it can benefit you, and how you can avoid the bright shiny objects within the list.

Chase Clymer Electric Eye Shopify Editions Update

Listen now for free:

Subscribe to Keep Optimising on your favourite Podcast App

About Chase Clymer

While Chase was in a band, he also did freelancing work to make money.

He met his business partner Sean when they designed the artwork for the band’s albums together. When Sean left the eCommerce company he was working at and went into freelancing, Chase helped him get started and the two of them worked on Shopify projects.

When people started asking what their company was called, Chase and Sean picked out their favorite metal band song and that’s how Electric Eye was born.

Shopify Editions

Shopify Editions are product updates that Shopify bundles into one announcement and shares with the community all at once.

Done twice a year, Shopify Editions can include new stuff that’s going to be released or a reannouncement of previously released updates. This one is split into six sections, all related to connecting to the consumer.

Section 1: Find Customers

Chase is excited about the Shopify Audiences feature, a Shopify Plus exclusive.

This allows marketers to export audiences to their favorite ad platform and helps in finding qualified traffic or people who are likely to be interested in your products.

Section 2: Convert Shoppers

Shopify has now launched checkout extensibility, allowing you to customize your checkout. This is also a Shopify Plus exclusive.

If your store is bringing in more than a million dollars per year, this is worth considering.

Section 3: Create Your Story

This section covers updates that are developer-related. With Hydrogen and Oxygen, you now get the framework for headless storefronts and the hosting part of that framework.

Still, Chase says that 99% of brands do not need headless stores but for those who do, Hydrogen + Oxygen can mean big savings.

Section 4: Build Relationships

There is a good update for developers with the ShopifyQL Notebooks but you can choose to skip this section for now, according to Chase.

Section 5: Run Your Business

There are a lot of updates to the admin within and the backend of Shopify.

However, Chase says you don’t need to learn these updates right now because you can deal with them when you actually encounter them.

Section 6: Scale and Build

Shopify Functions allows developers to build apps that are faster to build and integrate with the website and do infinitely custom things.

This introduces better ways to solve for specific use cases.

Insider Tips

Newbie advice: If we’ve inspired someone to take their first step – what do they need to know to give themselves the best chance of success?

Get started because execution is the only thing that does it. Nothing’s going to help you learn faster than actually going out there and doing it.

Once you’ve started of course you’ve got to ‘keep optimising’! What’s your favourite way to improve performance?

If you’re doing under a million dollars right now, focus on sales and find where your customers are.

Know what appeals to them and iterate on your offering. When you have the data, that’s when you can begin to really optimize.

If someone listening wants to learn more about this is there one cheap/free resource you’d recommend?

Chase recommends three books:

Crystal ball time – what’s coming up in the next 6-12 months that we should be getting ready for?

Focus on increasing your return on ad spend and you can do this by making the experience better for your customers. Talk to your customers and find out what you can do to make their buying experience from you better. Invest in a better website and a better user experience.

Interview Links


Chase on Social media:

Sponsored by…

Klaviyo is a leading customer data and marketing automation platform dedicated to accelerating revenue and customer connection for online businesses. Klaviyo makes it easy to store, access, analyze and use transactional and behavioral data to power highly-targeted customer and prospect communications.

The company’s hybrid customer-data and marketing-platform model allows companies to grow by fostering direct relationships with customers, without giving up their valuable data to popular big-tech ad platforms. Over 80,000 innovative companies like Unilever, Custom Ink, Living Proof and Huckberry sell more with Klaviyo. Learn more at www.klaviyo.com.

Full transcript to read & download:

Click to access

Related