Company

Kimberly Aya is the founder of FunCakes: stunning rental cakes for weddings and parties at an affordable price. She's been in business for over 10 years and has appeared on Shark Tank.

On this episode of Shopify Masters, you’ll learn how she scaled her online success by going offline with grocery stores, working with brokers to offer her products at 1000 locations.

Businesses have gone online and, in the process, have also made themselves susceptible to duplicity and identity theft on an unprecedented scale.

Now, fraudsters can recreate entire websites that look just like your own, and may even create social media pages claiming to be the voice of your brand. The worst part? If done right, consumers cannot tell the difference.

Here are some ways you can protect your brand from identity theft online.

“Community management” is often used interchangeably with “social media management”. And while it’s definitely a key part of any social strategy, managing your community becomes more and more important the bigger your brand becomes.

Community management, at its core, is about relationships and how your brand seizes opportunities to interact with your community in public online spaces.

And if you hope to grow a long-term business and strong brand, it should be an ongoing effort that you invest in.

An A/B test (or split test) is a common method used to improve your website, ads, or any other digital property you can measure. You simply pit variant A against variant B (all other conditions being equal), and see which one performs better.

Instead of assuming what color, copy, or layout might work better, it's a data-driven way of choosing which changes you stick with and which ones you scrap.

Megan Bush is the co-founder of Kopari Beauty and attributes a large part of the company's growth to relentlessly conducting these tests.

On this episode of Shopify Masters, you’ll learn how she goes about A/B testing every aspect of her site 

Today, as you log in to Shopify to check your sales or fulfill orders, you’ll notice a change: we’ve had a makeover. The new look and feel is part of a broader effort to build the future of Shopify and supporting apps with one design mind, using the same set of guidelines.

But why does it matter to you?

We know that change can be hard sometimes, but these changes were actually designed to simplify your day-to-day. The fresh look brings consistency across Shopify products, helps pages load faster, and makes content and menus easier to find and read.

On the Atlantic coast of Canada, sea kelp, a natural vitamin-packed wonder, became the inspiration and central ingredient for a personal care brand. It wasn’t just that sea kelp had a cornucopia of benefits in skincare, or that the plant was abundant in the area—the founders of Nova Scotia Fisherman were simply fiercely proud of their heritage.

Every decision in the business, from ingredients (like locally-sourced kelp) to manufacturing to their chosen suppliers and partners, are deliberately made to support the local economy.

Today, Nova Scotia Fisherman is a 5-year-old thriving business, shipping its “extreme skincare” line to retailers in eight countries, and direct to customers through two ecommerce stores.

They have never, though, compromised on their made-in-Canada values.

Small towns exist in snow globes, as time capsules of a simple, forgotten way of life, perfectly preserved and fiercely dedicated to “the way things always were”. At their cores are the original moms and pops: the proprietors of local hardware stores and salons and arcades – people you know on a nickname basis.

One such town is Almonte, Ontario, Canada, population 5000. Like a lot of towns recuperating from dying industries and factory closures, it’s a place reinventing itself since its collective bread and butter went stale in the 1980s.

Now, in 2017, Almonte's main street is a shopping destination—the cherry on top of a community already rich with galleries and arts events—drawing its own share of the tourism.

Long-standing antique stores and staples are now padded on all sides with gift shops, independent apparel and footwear boutiques, a hip café, a kids’ store, and a handful of small businesses all working together for the common good.

Some customers require more convincing than others, which usually makes them more expensive to acquire.

That's why a good place to start for new stores is to focus on those customers who need no convincing at all, who are the easiest to convert: your low-hanging fruit.

In this episode you’ll learn from Monica and Mark Klausner, the entrepreneur couple that created Veestro, gourmet plant-based meals and juices delivered to your door.  

Find out how they created customer personas and then used the data to market to their easiest-to-convert customers first. 

SEO, social media, email, ads—these are the usual suspects when we talk about marketing.

But marketing is about sifting through a world of possibilities and unearthing opportunities to get in front of your customers.

Anything can become a potential marketing channel.

That belief is at the heart of guerrilla marketing—a scrappy, unorthodox, and aggressive approach to getting your brand in front of could-be customers by establishing a presence in the physical world around you.

Competition can be healthy in business, but there's a lot to be gained from cooperating with other brands that share mutual interests and similar target audiences.

Amina Belouizdad of Bartaile sells bold travel goods and accessories for those going places. 

In this episode of Shopify Masters, you’ll learn how she and her business partner find and collaborate with complementary brands to multiply their reach and grow their business.

It’s no secret that Facebook offers one of the largest, most robust advertising platforms for businesses of all sizes to reach their target customers.

But as a do-everything-yourself entrepreneur, it can be frustrating to discover just how much trial and error and learning is involved in the beginning, especially as you bet real dollars on real outcomes.

Whether your Facebook ads haven’t gotten you a single sale or it feels like you’re not seeing the right return on what you’re spending, here are some common (and sometimes costly) Facebook advertising mistakes and how to fix them.

With the rise of the creator class—YouTubers, bloggers, and Instagram stars—influencer marketing has emerged as a new way for brands to reach their target customers through already-engaged and already-established audiences.

Influencer marketing doesn’t just get you exposure, but also endorsements through content that features your brand, which can make it worthwhile for businesses of all sizes. 

So we know influencer marketing can have a big impact. But that begs the obvious question:

Where do you find influencers you can work with?