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What sites are referring traffic to your store? Where in the world are your visitors? How did your Black Friday Cyber Monday marketing campaign perform last year? What products are people searching for most?

You have a lot of questions about your business, your customers and your marketing efforts.

Fortunately, answers to many of those questions are in your Shopify reports and analytics.

As holiday buying heats up, the growing consumer practice known as showrooming — when customers visit a retailer to check out an item, only to buy it later online — can challenge many retailers.

We get it. Showrooming might seem like a difficult obstacle to overcome. But retail done well, especially with thoughtful merchandising and knowledgeable sales staff that represent your brand, should be rewarding for both shoppers and your bottom line.

So, how can you embrace challenges like showrooming and actually make it work for your retail business?

Shopify is rolling out a new feature to tackle this precise problem. Buy Online for Shopify POS helps retailers turn shoppers using their phones in-store from a threat to a way to boost sales.

We met hundreds of Shopify merchants during our week-long Workroom event in both LA and NYC this month. Everyone we met had an amazing story to tell.

Store owners on both sides of the U.S. shared their remarkable and unique journeys with us. Their stories may have been different, but regardless of where they live or what they sell, they all had one thing in common: a passion for what they do every day.

We asked eight store owners about their motivation to start their businesses, that cha-ching moment when they landed their first sale, and what they learned from Workroom that will help them get through the busy season.

There's usually a line drawn in the sand between for-profit and non-profit business models. But today, cause marketing has blurred the line and become a norm, encouraging businesses of all sizes to give back. 

In this episode of Shopify Masters, you’ll hear from Jess Ekstrom, who started Headbands of Hope when she was in college, and now offers a wide range of beautiful headbands and hair accessories for all ages.

Headbands of Hope is a for-profit business that donates a headband for every purchase to a child with cancer, and 10% of sales to cancer charities from their #BandTogether campaigns. Find out how Jess balances making an impact with making a living.

Shopify and eBay have partnered to give you access to eBay’s customer base of over 170 million buyers, and this new sales channel is ready to use, just in time for Black Friday Cyber Monday.

Just like Shopify’s partnerships with Amazon, Facebook, and other top selling channels, the new eBay sales channel effortlessly syncs with your Shopify store. Merchants based in the U.S. and selling in USD can easily list and sell on eBay while conveniently managing the fulfillment and inventory process within Shopify.

Expand your brand footprint on eBay’s marketplace and gain access to millions of active buyers worldwide.

Finding new customers is an obsession for every business owner, but marketing can be complicated and intimidating. Shopify aims to simplify marketing and help you reach customers with more confidence while maximizing every dollar.

Just in time for Black Friday Cyber Monday, we’ve launched a new set of Marketing Activity and Sales Attribution Reports that give you a comprehensive understanding of how your marketing efforts are performing. You’ll see clearly and quickly what’s working (and what’s not), and can use that knowledge to improve your marketing campaigns.

If you rely on revenue from a few months to sustain your business all year, forecasting your revenue and expenses isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s a must.

And yes, “forecasting revenue and expenses” sounds exactly like a line from that accounting and finance course you didn’t take (or didn’t like) in school, but it’s not as hard as it sounds. After all, forecasting is just a fancy word for planning.

Whether you want to sell products from your phone, a market, or in-store, Shopify wants to help you make the best decisions for your business.

We’re excited to announce new, easy-to-access metrics for all physical retailers: Our improved Retail Analytics put the data that matters most at your fingertips. You can now track and act on key metrics right from Shopify, like staff performance, location performance, and more.

...there are a few things you need to know.

China is a hot spot for cost-effective manufacturers, and so many entrepreneurs seek out a factory there to bring their products to life. But as they often find, there's a lot to navigate.

Take Andrew Moore, the owner of Felony Case, who started off hand-making his unique iPhone cases before travelling to China to find a manufacturer.

In this episode of Shopify Masters, he'll share how to plan your trip to China to find manufacturers and make the best use of your time—including what time of year to go and how to work with a "fixer" in China.

A working knowledge of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is useful for more than just search engine marketing and getting your site found on Google.

In fact, knowing the basics of SEO, and the tools to use, can help you become a more effective entrepreneur in general, from using search volume to evaluate the demand for a product idea or piece of content, to establishing the empathy you need for effective copywriting and content marketing.

That's why we've put together this list of useful free SEO tools that you can use for anything from keyword research to backlink analysis.

Blogging is one of the best and lowest-cost ways to generate traffic and sales for your store, so “write a blog post” is firmly planted on your to-do list… but when it comes time to sit down and face that blank Word document?

Crickets.

Augmented Reality (or AR), through your smartphone camera, lets you see and interact with virtual objects in your real environment that aren't actually there.

But even with all the potential you can imagine for technology like this, the quality of the experiences so far meant it was still fairly easy to write off AR as a gimmick rather than a game-changer in the world of commerce.

Until now that is.