Shopify’s History

Did you know that Shopify started out not as a platform but an eCommerce store selling products to the snowboarding community under the brand Showdevil?  Before being branded Shopify, the platform was known as Jaded Pixel.  Jaded Pixel was used on a select number of sites with minimal gross merchant volume and was not cloud based.  In 2006 Jaded Pixel released Shopify which has evolved into the platform we know today.  Shopify has over 1,500 merchants sign up for its sneak preview.  Shopify’s beta customers appreciated how easy it made getting a cart up and selling products.  In this era OS Commerce was the more common option and those of you whom have worked with this platform understand that the market was eager for alternatives.

Magento History

Varien the parent company of Magento known today as Adobe eCommerce began development on Magento Commerce and released it to beta in 2008.  Varien evolved from an agency doing internal development of the top opportunities to focus its efforts exclusively on the platform.  Varien funded the development of Shopify through its agency selling an eCommerce website.

In 2010 PayPal invested into Magento buying 49% of the Magento platform and in the following year acquired the remainder of the shares.  This broadened the native support for the payment gateway, and launching it to be a top tier competitor funding its growth.

Enter Unleaded

Unleaded first began using Magento when it was first released into beta.  At that time we had our own in-house eCommerce platform known as Octane Commerce.  With our eCommerce solution every deployment would encounter additional requested functionality which would lead to long development timelines.  In moving to Magento we were able to cut our development times down by more than 50% and deliver more robust and tested eCommerce solutions.  Unleaded became one of Magento first 10 partners.

In 2009 ShoeDazzle, co-founded by none other than Kim Kardashian, launched an innovative shopping approach where unlike a traditional eComemrce catalog, their customers would take a style quiz and they would be presented with a personalized shopping experience.  From a development perspective the quiz would collect a handful of data points and preferences and at the end of the quiz each customer is assigned to a persona.  The most relevant products to each persona’s expressed preferences can then be presented creating what seemed like a one-to-one shopping experience, eliminating products from the customer that they will not be interested in. 

Persona based shopping is highly effective as it removes those products which the customer is not interested in, which increases the engagement and conversion rate.  In presenting a narrow slice of a merchants catalog which fit each persona, we minimize the effort a customer must expend to filter and find what they are after.  

Personas can be used for a variety of mediums from web, email marketing and paid search engine marketing.

Taking the lessons learned from persona based shopping, websites have begun to use what we do know about a customer without the requirement of a quiz to ask the questions.  The personas can be defined on what we learn from their purchases, customer journey and browsing behavior to categorize the customer into a defined persona.  A customer may evolve from one customer persona to another as we learn more from their interactions.  Persona information could be used to prioritize the sequence or order which products are presented giving those products that we believe them to be more interested in the priority placement. 

Google Analytics can provide incredible insight, yet many merchants struggle to put those insights into actionable improvements.  With the rate of change in some sectors of the market like fashion, it can be challenging to extract insights while they are still relevant. 

Enter the AI craze of 2023, where we can now leverage AI and machine learning in several important areas to enhance persona based shopping.  AI excels in its ability to crunch massive amounts of data, and we can now leverage data from sources like Google Analytics, a to automatically create a personas based on historical data increasing the number of potential customer personas and backing that up with data.  Google Analytics can provide reports on customer acquisition, customer engagement, customer behavior and also conversions.  With the depth and views offered by analytics, AI can automate the generation of data driven personas digesting and extract insights automatically.  The effect to the customer when executed should further the feeling of a personalized showroom and shopping experience, where a customer may be in a customer group or persona of one, a true one-to-one relationship. 

Unleaded.Digital launched https://teamthinkbig.com/ in April. This is the third website Unleaded has built for customer Damion Bolton.

Teamthinkbig.com is a website that connects individual teens and school organizations with a role model, Damion Bolton, who works with teens to develop their skills that take them from the classroom to the boardroom.

“It’s so rewarding to be trusted with tomorrow’s leaders which are today’s learners. Although I’m mentoring them in many ways, they are mentoring me. It’s my heart’s desire to continue this work and be the best role model for the next generation,” says Founder Damion Bolton.

Bolton is a foremost leader in teen training and has an accomplished history of training. He’s a  Ph.D., M.B.A, and Prosci® trained expert.

Visit https://teamthinkbig.com/ to see how you can endorse Dr. Bolton’s advancements in teen training in Mississippi and the USA.

We’re not going to talk about building your first website. If you’re in business at all you’re likely on your third site version or more. Websites aren’t one and done. Websites, like the technology, evolve over time.

We’re going to give voice to the other concern about websites. Fixing problems.

When your website was first built, it probably worked alright. (At least it should have if built by the right professionals.) But over time modules become outdated and need replacement. New versions of the platform your site is built on are issued. These new versions are more hackproof (which you want if you’re selling online) to protect your customers data.

Site owners who (and this is a good thing) frequently update the text and images on their website make errors. It’s not always typos. But if it is a typo, it makes you and your product or service look less credible.

Sometimes an image added later shows up as code vs. an image. Or images that are too hi rez bog down the loading time for your website. Studies show that 47% of site visitors leave a website if it takes longer than 2 seconds to load. That’s nearly half of your potential customers, gone girl.

So put that in your biz bucket for 2023.

Unleaded has solutions for these and other problems on your website. It’s why our tagline on our email signature this year is: About your website…we can fix that for you.

Today is election day. No matter what the conditions were in the manufacturing world at dawn this day, much could differ at midnight. The cross-the-board changes that come with any election will have an impact.

Add to that the effects of 9 months of COVID on manufacturing and humankind around the globe.

Colorado’s manufacturers span the range of industries from communications and computer to beer/soft drinks/distilleries to meat packing and animal feed plus more. Manufacturing businesses are no different than any other business. Each must have a means of promoting their products and services to potential buyers.

So how do you reach the world of customers when you’re avoiding in-person contact, meeting via Zoom, having groceries delivered via Instacart and booze by Drizly, purchasing office-supplies and TP from Amazon?

Traditional advertising doesn’t work. Billboards, well, Lady Bird Johnson took care of most of that. Trade shows were last held pre-COVID. Increasingly, data shows that callers rarely leave a message if no one picks up the phone.

But one medium has thrived: 62% of consumers shop online more now than before the pandemic. Securing your share of business online, you’ve got to have a powerful web presence and SEO to boost its presence.

Unleaded can help you with that. After you vote.

Contact jarod@unleaded.digital or call Unleaded at 720-221-7126.

Many of unleaded.digital’s clients have requested Coronavirus popups be installed on their websites.

A popup is an effective and noticeable way to communicate to customers your hours of operation, any changes implemented in contact info during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s essential to let your customers know your business is operating as usual OR changes to your services caused by the COVID-19 outbreak. Business statistics demonstrate that now, like before, customers may take their business elsewhere if they cannot effectively communicate with you. All of us want to survive this trying time intact or better.

Just a note: unleaded.digital’s design, development, hosting, and sales teams began working remotely home at the start of 2020. We assure you that we are able to handle your specific web needs in a timely and affordable fashion including extending payment options.

We are intent on supporting your online business to the best extent possible.

By Mike McClanahan

When it comes to digital marketing, our clients all have a common goal—drive traffic to their business. And while the media have changed, those goals have remained the same for centuries.

Let’s take a look at those goals and how the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Goal #1—Get Seen

It’s a pretty simple premise—before anyone can learn about you, they have to know you exist. Back when, that involved signage, handbills, and newspaper ads. Then came radio and television, which, along with magazines, widened audiences to a national scale.

Today, it’s the Web, it’s worldwide, and it reaches billions of eyes. But there are also millions of businesses competing for those eyeballs. That makes it essential to have a good strategy for standing out and ranking at the top of internet searches, and a whole discipline has evolved to make it happen—search engine optimization, or as it’s commonly referred to, SEO.

But the landscape is constantly changing so it’s important to keep abreast of the latest technological developments. What worked before may not today. A good SEO strategy needs experts who understand how today’s sophisticated search algorithms work and how to use them to their best advantage.

Goal #2—Get Read

High search engine rankings are great, but unless the searcher is motivated to click on the result, it’s all for naught. That’s why it’s important that your blog topics pique interest and your social media links inspire people to follow them.

Knowing your target audience lets you direct your online content to persons who are most likely to buy your products or use your services by choosing keywords and content that drive search engine rankings your direction and motivate searchers to give your content a look.

Goal #3—Get Results

Your site ranks high and tickles the searcher’s interest enough to give you a look. Congratulations, your SEO strategy is working—so far. Now you need them to like what they see enough to motivate them to buy, join, or take whatever action you want them to take.

Are your blog articles interesting and informative? Do they position you as a leader in your field? Do your social media posts motivate readers to learn more about you? To become a follower?

Your site administrator should be able to give you statistics on things like click-throughs, page views, the amount of time viewers spend on your various pages and the number of views that convert to sales. They should also be able to tell you how your statistics measure up to others in your industry and offer suggestions on how to improve each of these metrics.

It Takes a Team to Win

Expecting a person or two to understand the latest SEO techniques, develop effective blog and social media content, analyze performance, and implement a productive marketing strategy while building and maintaining a top-quality web and social media platform is unrealistic. Each function is its own discipline and requires specialists to do the job right.

The team at Unleaded Digital includes a roster of experts who work together to build a digital marketing strategy to help your business thrive. Contact us today to learn how we build, maintain, and market business and institutional websites that work.

After all, we got you to read this, didn’t we?

One thing the internet has done is allow people to operate a sideline business without compromising their day job. The website, when built properly, works for them 24/7 (without the cost of manpower.) Unleaded has customers who have multiple websites, selling a wide range of merchandise and services too.

Our employee group operates websites of varying types—some ecommerce, others service oriented. Take a look at a few:

https://everythingbear.com features artisans’ jewelry, logoed apparel and plush animals and more. The online shop is built to attract vendors to sell through the website by featuring the vendors’ logos on the homepage. Prices are very reasonable and the products are not found elsewhere on line.

https://rainbowmotelgreeley.com/ is an iconic destination stay operating in Greeley, CO featuring 16 rooms all remodeled with plush hybrid beds and 1,000-thread count bed linens, something one would not expect to find in an average motel. Guests regularly post 5-star reviews of the place.

https://themaxhotel.com/ is a project in process, converting an 82-year-old art deco hotel that suffered 50 years of neglect into apartments, a restaurant, bar and even men’s barber shop. The website was designed to build interest in the community as it approaches Opening Day.

The point is that you, too, surely have some unique consultative service or Etsy-type product to sell. Maybe you’ve observed an unserved or underserved need that you could fill.

Then call UNLEADED.DIGITAL for a consultation.

What happens in California is usually an indicator of what will come to the rest of the USA and ultimately the world. SLATE, the online self-professed Cool Dirtbag, explained the changes in the sweeping new data privacy policy law known as the California Consumer Privacy Act like this:

 The law effectively allows consumers to access personal data companies have collected on them and to demand it be deleted plus prevent it from being sold to third parties. 

Because it’s nearly insurmountable to build a separate infrastructure just for California customers the requirements will transform the internet for everyone, Slate predicts.

If you’re a small business, this might not affect you…yet. The CCPA applies only to business earning more than $25M gross revenue that collect data on more than 50,000 individuals or sell that info for more than 50% of its overall revenue.

Facebook argues it doesn’t technically sell personal info. 

Google created a protocol to block websites from transmitting data using an opt-out add-on process.

Microsoft extended its protections under the CCPA and Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation to all of its customers in the US.

The CCPA was signed into law June 28, 2018 by Governor Jerry Brown. The state’s attorney general cannot bring an enforcement action under the CCPA until July 1, 2020. For information go to https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa.

Or read what a dirtbag has to say at slate.com.

You don’t know where your website stands in the mix unless you have a handle on these statistics gathered by industry leaders. 

• There are approximately 1.94 billion active websites in the world and 4.4 billion internet users worldwide. (Techjury.net)
• 84% of people will not make an ecommerce purchase if the site is unsecured. (Blue Corona) 
• Worldwide retail ecommerce sales will reach $4.5 trillion by 2021. (Shopify Plus) 
• 52% of web traffic worldwide is mobile. (Statista) 
• Google drives 96% of mobile search traffic. (Jody Nimetz Co.) 
• A non-responsive site is a back button magnet. (blog.sagipl.com)
• Users typically make an opinion within .05 seconds after jumping on your website. (Kinesis Inc.)
• Instagram will reach 112.5 million U.S. users in 2020, a 5.4% increase over 2019, as estimated by eMarketer, which also predicts the network will reach 117.2 million U.S. users in 2021. (eMarketer)
• Cybercrime is more profitable than the global illegal drug trade. 3. Hackers steal 75 records every second. 66% of businesses attacked by hackers weren't confident they could recover. (Stingtribunal.com)
• On average 30,000 new websites are hacked every day. These 30 000 sites are usually legitimate small businesses sites, that are unwittingly distributing malware. (Webarxsecurity.com)

Contact UNLEADED.DIGITAL for a review of your website to assess weaknesses and strengths. We will find solutions specific to your concerns.

Navigation is the primary point of engagement for users on your site, and when built effectively improve the process of getting from Point A to B. With the ever-increasing expectation for immediate access to content, we can reduce user friction if a customer is able to quickly navigate to their desired target.

Through working with various organizations to optimize the performance of their websites, we've noticed that taking the extra time and care to effectively execute a website's navigation will make a huge positive impact.

When developing navigation, we need to consider the individual user's experience. This includes the type of device their accessing your website from. Users on mobile devices have much less visual space to fit in your navigation, so everything needs to be clear and concise, not to mention touch friendly with large active areas for each link. Typically mobile navigation will be toggled by a single persistent menu button at the top of the page. Most frequently this is an icon with three bars.

Some additional options to consider are persona-based navigation groupings. This allows a customer to browse your site based on their industry or customer type and quickly get to relevant related content.

Your navigation is one of the most commonly used components of your website and putting in the investment for proper planning, organization, and great design will make for a positive impact for your visitors.

Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2019 will go down in the record books as a fail for Magento.

Fresh off the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday, online retailers using the Magento 1 in companion with Authorize.net began to experience trouble processing online credit card payments from client’s trying to make purchases.

Magento websites interface with Authorize.net to process a payment and ultimately deposit the payment in the retailer’s bank account. Only today, the process wasn’t seamless. In December, Authorize.net, the real-time payment gateway popular with online stores, posted a message to changes to its functionality:

https://community.developer.authorize.net/t5/News-and-Announcements/Changes-to-Supported-Characters-Jan-22-2019/td-p/65435

Turns out Magento did not respond with a code update or patch to address this change resulting in probably every Magento 1 site using Authorize.net to break today’s date.

As of day’s end, still no word from Magento on an official patch. In the meantime, every affected site has to be updated manually. And then updated again when the patch is released.

UNLEADED.DIGITAL’S Chief Information Officer Ian Kullham diagnosed the problem and began applying it to customers’ SOS calls. And while these Magento 1 site owners are probably too focused on the financial damages today to think about getting a new website, you can be sure that when they get past this epic Magento fail that they’ll weigh moving away from Magento to Shopify.

Compare Magento’s problem with the Shopify platform which is experiencing no reported issues with authorize.net today. Because the Shopify platform is a hosted platform, Shopify is able to make updates for changes like this behind the scenes globally so that merchants aren't affected.

“The business losses experienced today on Magento websites should be enough to sell online retailers on making the switch to Shopify,” notes Ian Kullhem, UNLEADED.DIGITAL CIO.

When Trout’s Flyfishing (troutsflyfishing.com) abandoned Magento in 2018, it represented the best advice that Unleaded could give a customer.

The complications with the platform since its release were insurmountable to some website owners and an equal amount of website developers.

The first beta version of Magento launched in August 200. Unleaded was an early adaptor, participating in this beta testing. Over time, Unleaded was named a Gold Partner and later a Platinum Partner. It was the best of times. The search functionality offered in Magento was fresh and enviable. Polls of Internet 500 Top Retailers showed that big business and small (aspiring to be big) favored the Magento platform over all other eCommerce platforms.

An enthusiastic Oz worked for the original Magento creator Roy Rubin under the label of Varien, the company Roy created as a student. Oz was the marketing gunrunner for Magento during at that time. Periodically, actually frequently, Oz reached out to Unleaded for press releases about Unleaded’s latest Magento developments. Unleaded complied happily. Oz embodied the exuberance of under-the-stair-Harry-Potter-type internet guys. Maybe it sounds like a stereotype, but Oz lived and breathed the successes Magento was ticking off day by day.

The worst of times followed.

In 2010, eBay invested in Magento in 2010, worth a 49% ownership share of the company. By midyear, eBay announced it would be acquiring the rest of Magento, which would join its new X.Commerce initiative.

Magento put the full court press on sales. If a web dev firm sold X amount of Magento websites in a year, the firm was in turn promoted by Magento. Web dev films that were once the golden child(ren) became Magento’s stepchildren.

Unleaded continue to participate in Magento annual meetings, both in Europe and the U.S. even after  that famous spring when Unleaded’s president Jarod Clark traveled to Vegas for the annual event. Unleaded had built the website for www.ecomom.com founded by Jody Sherman, besties with Roy Rubin. In the months before the Vegas meet, Sherman had gone on tilt, demanding things of Unleaded. Threatening Unleaded. At that Vegas convention where Rubin blessed Ecomom publically for its successes, Sherman verbally assaulted Unleaded’s President Clark in front of hundreds of session attendees. Clark was true to his ethics. He walked away from Sherman. He may have had a sandwich.

Karma is a funny thing. Turns out ecomom.com had raised some many many millions just prior to Jan 2013. And then Sherman drove to the Nevada desert and shot himself. Investors wanted to know where the money had gone? Obituaries revealed the underbelly of his character. A pal of Sherman’s from high school relayed that Sherman committed insurance fraud while still a teen in high school just to make a dime.

Hindsight is something isn’t it?

By 2015, Magento was spun off as an independent company by the new owner Permira private equity.

The politics foreshadowed this years senate. In 2018 Adobe acquired Magento for $1.68bn with a view to integrating it into Adobe Experience Cloud, its Enterprise CMS platform. Magento 2, released years prior, is remembered in social media as a flop.

Fast forward and Unleaded was now promoting its favority program, Shopify.

One of Unleaded’s loyal customers onboarding to Shopify, called to ask, “Why would Unleaded encourage us to go with Shopify when you’ll lose nearly $3k a month not hosting our website?”

Because Unleaded wants your business over the long haul, not just for now and for money. We want our clients to live on the best platform for their operations. In this case, no question, Shopify was best.

Increasingly Unleaded’s long-term Magento customers have transitioned (or committed to transitioning this year as Magento no longer supports the original open-source community version of its platform) to Shopify.

Trouts Fly Fishing is one of them. Trout’s owner Tucker Ladd was one of Unleaded’s customers that started out on Magento. “Due to Magento 1.0 expiration, we were forced into working through a new website build to move into Magento 2.0.  Thankfully our team at Unleaded was forward thinking, and realized the many flaws that other merchants were experiencing with Magento 2.0, and encouraged us to look into a Shopify solution as an alternative,” Ladd said.

The result? According to Ladd, “The end result has been nothing but extraordinary, as we have seen both day-to-day efficiencies and overall conversions improve noticeably.  Shopify has proved to be a tremendous step forward for our company, and from day 1 proved to be a profit driven solution.  It is also worth noting the amazing job Unleaded did with weaving our Shopify eCommerce solution with a powerful CMS that met our content needs.  Being a Fly Fishing Outfitter, we do more than just sell product, and our website demanded a CMS platform that would allow us to effectively communicate with our users, and get them to the product and information they are seeking.  The end product is a website built on two platforms, but was so seamlessly built that the end user would never know.  In the end, without the team at Unleaded we would be another unfortunate client stuck in the limitations of Magento.”

Coulda woulda shoulda. When Shopify hit the market, Unleaded was cautious. We tested. We built. We tested. We tested again.

When Ian Kullhem, Unleaded’s CIO and longest term employee campaigned for a switch to Shopfy it marked a turning point for the company and its customers. To a one, customers praised the Shopify platform and none who have made the move have looked back at Magento.

Bottom line: Our developers are among the best in the world building Magento and hybrid ExpressionEngine-Magento websites. But we’ve found Shopify to be a superior platform for nearly all market niches particularly in its hybrid iterations.

Maybe your site would be better in Shopify? If not, UNLEADED.DIGITAL will be the first to tell you. If so, we’re the best to build it.

When choosing the right hosting platform for your website business, don’t simply opt for the cheapest hosting. Your web business survival is at risk if your host is unreliable.

When visitors can’t download your site fast enough, they will bounce to your competitors’ sites.

Research proves that 40+ % of web visitors will leave a site if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds.

If your website is offline more than online, you will lose customers. Simply put, if your hosting is unreliable, site visitors will perceive that your business is also unreliable. And the more your site is offline, the more Google will penalize your site.

Because hacking is the new cyberspace pastime, all websites are vulnerable. But some hosting services are more reliable than others. Opt for a hosting service that makes regular backups. And be your own advocate by making your own content backups too.

Make sure you can get to your web host when you need help. Ask if they offer support via chat, email, phone and online.

Your online business will appear more professional if you have an email associated with your site. Spam control is essential today for email service.

Seek out a host that offers room to grow your business when you need bandwidth to grow.

Finally, make sure your host has a good reputation. You wouldn’t hire employees without a background check, so why put your entire financial business future in the hands of a host that doesn’t check out.

Contact UNLEADED.DIGITAL for hosting options that are suited to your website platform and performance.