Gift cards, gifting and the January returns wave
January returns are made in November. The levers that change the outcome are a return rule set before the orders arrive, and an exchange offered before a refund.
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Writing from the people doing the work
Specific, opinionated writing on Shopify Plus architecture, migrations and selling internationally — including, often, the argument for not buying the more expensive option.
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Product data governance: who is allowed to change what
Nobody owns “products”. Somebody owns price, somebody else owns the SKU, and the argument about who owns the description is the one that breaks your catalogue.
Building a Shopify app: the decisions before the code
Most briefs that arrive as “we need an app” are a Flow, a metafield or an extension. If you genuinely need one, four choices made in week one decide what it costs for years.
Support volume as a product signal
Every ticket is a customer paying you in their own time to report a defect. Most stores treat that as a cost to reduce rather than the cheapest research they will ever get.
Post-peak: what your data is telling you in December
Peak data is the least representative data you will collect all year, and most of the conclusions drawn from it in January do not survive February.
Core Web Vitals after every app you installed
Apps do not damage performance in general. Each kind damages a specific metric in a specific way, and knowing which is the difference between fixing it and guessing.
Wholesale ordering: making a B2B buyer faster, not prettier
A wholesale buyer is not shopping. They are completing a task against a deadline, and every design decision should be judged by how many keystrokes it removes.
Black Friday: the changes to make and the ones to postpone
Whether a change is safe before Black Friday has almost nothing to do with the change and almost everything to do with the month you make it in.
Zero-result searches are a merchandising report
Customers typing words you have no answer for, in their own language, sorted by volume. Most stores never open it.
Tax across states, countries and marketplaces
Three different regimes, one order table. The engineering problem is not calculating the tax — it is proving afterwards which registration you collected it under.
The search box is a merchandising surface
Somebody curates your home page every week. Nobody has ever looked at what the search box returns for your best-selling product.
Theme CI: testing a Shopify theme before it ships
Lint, preview and a performance budget, run on every pull request. Three stages, all of them built from tools Shopify already ships.
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