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Even if you don’t care much for football, you should care about this:

An average of 114.4 million American TV viewers watched the Super Bowl in 2015.

And that’s a conservative depiction of total viewership when you consider how many people are going to stream the event this year and the flood of tweets from those following along on Twitter.

Events such as this produce some of the best opportunities for real-time marketing, or “moment marketing”, where brands can race to position themselves to be part of the buzz as it happens.

There's a lot to learn about crafting a compelling pitch from watching entrepreneurs put their ideas to the test on shows like Dragon's Den and Shark Tank.

Some of them get shot down. Others pick up the pieces and make it all work despite failure. And in some instances, an ambitious entrepreneur manages to convince an investor or two with their compelling pitch. 

Then there's incredible cases like Anna Stork and Andrea Sreshta, founders of LuminAID, a portable solar-powered inflatable light, who managed to win over all 5 sharks on Shark Tank.

Traditionally, most ecommerce websites use SSL encryption technology to protect a shopper’s personal information during the checkout process. While this checkout process is secure, all other traffic to the ecommerce website uses the old, insecure HTTP protocol. This has been the common practice for about twenty years.

It’s time for an upgrade.

Experimentation is the name of the game when it comes to marketing. But when you finally find that successful channel, niche, or tactic that works—then you know exactly where to start drilling down for results.

In this episode of Shopify Masters, we talk to Jake Starr, Founder of Recycled Firefighter, about how tapping into the right niche was the key to turning recycled firefighting gear into a 6-figure business selling wallets and everyday carry gear.

Talking about business use cases for Snapchat is bound to raise a few eyebrows—either in skepticism or eager interest.

The public-facing social proof you get from having tens of thousands of Likes on a Facebook Page, or Followers on Twitter, can do a lot to contribute social proof and make your brand look more legit.

But Snapchat, by its nature, isn't very good at that.

Instead, Snapchat is a hybrid of social network and instant messenger that lets you engage a smaller community of your biggest fans with an incredibly authentic form of content marketing.

How well do you know your customers?

Getting to know your audience is one of the most important parts of growing a business and it can be as easy as sending a single email with a well-structured survey. With the in-depth understanding that you’ll gain from conducting a customer satisfaction survey, you’ll be able to create better online shopping experiences for your customers and build more targeted marketing campaigns that expand your influence and help you reach your ideal audience.

In this post, we’ll walk-through how you can collect actionable data by building more powerful surveys and delivering them right into the hands of your customers via email. We’ll also take a look at how you can analyze the results of your survey to anticipate the needs of your customers and design the products and services that they actually want.

Bouncing back from failure, from repeatedly being told "no", is arguably one of the most important lessons an entrepreneur needs to learn.

Luckily, it gets easier every time. And as the risks you take become greater so, too, do the rewards.

In this episode you’ll hear the story of Cory Stout, the founder of Woodies about how he went from scalping tickets to running his Shopify and Amazon business while traveling the world.

Many businesses today are investing in content marketing as a way to draw attention to their products. 

However, some exceptional brands started off producing original content before monetizing it with an ecommerce component.

Case in point: Man Outfitters scours the planet for the best products from the coolest brands like Patagonia, Filson, and Cole Haan to deliver a painless shopping experience. But before that, its creators were publishing funny one-liners on humor websites.

Many entrepreneurs are self-taught, picking up knowledge and skills as the need arises.

But despite your best efforts, there are always gaps in your experience where there’s no substitute for real expertise a specific domain. The good thing is you’re not alone — through networking you can connect yourself with seasoned veterans who have the experience you need.  

In this episode, you’ll hear from Tiffany Tibbot, the founder of The B. Side, the first transitional swimwear (1 suit you can wear 10 different ways), about what she did to build an advisory board to fill in the gaps of her experience as an entrepreneur.

One of the biggest challenges ecommerce entrepreneurs face is finding innovative ways to sell a product online when the "brick and mortar" store experience plays a huge role in the customer's decision to buy.

For two entrepreneurs with nothing to lose, overcoming this obstacle and validating their business idea involved using a spruced-up shipping container as their showroom in the heart of downtown Toronto.

In this episode of the Shopify Masters podcast, we’ll be talking with Andre Jr. Ayotte, who co-founded JM&Sons along with Mackenzie Duncan, about how they make and sell reclaimed wood and raw metal furniture, accessories and other handcrafted home furnishings. 

In fact, it's possible to create another source of income for yourself by monetizing an existing hobby. That’s our guest's story on this episode of the Shopify Masters podcast.

In this episode, we find out how Karen Kawallek, Owner of Lake Providence Lodge Scented Wax Melts, makes and sells her long-lasting scented wax melts to a community of potential customers on Facebook.