Zipify Ecommerce News – Episode 1: Shop Pay, Community Building, Zipify Updates & More

***This post features OCU Legacy which is no longer supported by Zipify or Shopify. Click here if you’re looking for up to date information about OneClickUpsell***-

Hey! Ezra Firestone here, CEO of Zipify Apps.

Welcome to the first episode of Zipify Ecommerce News, a weekly show where I talk about:

Shopify News: New and upcoming changes to the platform, and how they could affect your business. Today, I talk about Shop Pay Installments and Shopify working with 3rd-party payment gateways.

Retail at Large: What’s going on in the greater ecommerce landscape outside of Shopify? See how one brand owner got a $45 million valuation without selling a single product!

Zipify Updates: See what I’ve added to my two Shopify apps, Zipify Pages and OneClickUpsell, including our new Product Launch Pre-sell Page, finally publishing to “/Products”, Product Variant Upsell Triggers and more.

I hope you enjoy it!

 

Shopify News

 

Shopify just wrapped their first live streamed event for business owners, Shopify Reunite 2020, which they used to “unveil features, share major announcements, and provide you with insight into the future of commerce.”

They shared a few new financial resources for business owners, like Shopify Balance and an expansion of Shopify Capital

But I thought the most interesting thing they announced was Shop Pay Installments.

Shop Pay Installments

Before, if you wanted to offer payment plans on your store, then you had to use an app like Afterpay or Klarna. But now Shopify offers it natively without any additional software.

With Shop Pay Installments, customers can choose to pay over time in 4 equal payments. Shopify pays you upfront for the full cost of the purchase and they take responsibility for collecting the payments from the customer, so there’s no risk to the merchant. It’s pretty cool.

In a way, Shopify is like Amazon or Whole Foods: they look for what’s working on their platform then use it to improve their products. If they see 3rd-party developers offering new functionality and enough of their users want it, they will try to include that as a native feature on the platform.

A lot of people wanted pay installments, so they’re adding it. (You can join the waitlist here.)

This new feature is also consistent with what Shopify sees as its core service. While they do a lot on their platform — like inventory management, point of sale, etc. — their main role is to facilitate commerce. That’s why they’re investing all this energy in Shopify Pay which now has one-click checkout like Amazon.

By focusing on payment plans, Shopify is continuing to evolve their checkout and make it much harder for anyone offering 3rd-party checkout (like I do) to compete with them.

OneClickUpsell is Going Native!

They also announced that they’re going to start working with 3rd-party gateways (like my app, OneClickUpsell) and giving them access to Shopify’s native checkout.

That means that OneClickUpsell will finally be able to use Shopify’s native checkout — instead of the replacement checkout we created — which is something we’ve been dreaming of for a long, long time. So hurray for that!

I’ll keep you posted as that develops.

 

Retail at Large

 

Now let’s look at what’s happening off Shopify in the greater ecommerce landscape.

Community Building for the Win

I read an article that I found really fascinating: “Something Navy Blogger Arielle Charnas Is Launching a Clothing Brand”

Arielle Charnas is an influencer who did a collaboration with Nordstrom that sold $4 million in a single day. Now she’s launching her own clothing line, which has been valued at $45 million even though she has no design experience.

I’m always talking about building your brand around a community and engaging your subscribers with relevant content — it’s about building a relationship with them beyond the products you sell

That’s what this influencer did, and in this case it got her a $45 million valuation without ever having sold anything!

I’m not saying you need an influencer for your brand; I don’t actually think influencer-based businesses are that compelling.

But there’s also nothing wrong with using an influencer or creating a personality-based brand to start. If you are charismatic and enthusiastic and want to talk about what’s going on in your market — do it!

I’m an influencer for both Smart Marketer and Zipify, and my ecommerce brand, BOOM! By Cindy Joseph, used an influencer for many years (we recently transitioned because we felt the brand would be more sustainable if it wasn’t built off of a single person’s persona).

An alternative option to using influencers is to get your customers to become brand ambassadors.

I wrote this article about how we use content from our ambassador program to create some of the best ads we’ve ever seen, and how you can start your own ambassador program. Check it out!

Whether you decide on influencers or brand ambassadors or another model — put out content. It’s incredibly valuable to create a relationship with your community beyond the products you sell, and I thought this story illustrated that really well.

 

Zipify Updates

 

I like to wrap up Zipify’s Ecommerce News show with the latest updates to our apps: Zipify Pages, our landing page and sales funnel builder, and OneClickUpsell, our upsell and cross-sell tool.

We keep a close watch on the latest trends in ecommerce and try to always incorporate them into our software.

Zipify Pages

Product Launch Presell Page

We just added this new template to our landing page and sales funnel builder for when we relaunch new products.

We recently used this page template for our Summer Silk Sale — so instead of using to launch a product we used it to sell an existing product during a promotion — and the results were amazing.

Here are some of the elements that we’re using on this page:

Dynamic Buy Box with an Image/Video Carousel
Call-to-action Button with responsive animation
Colored Backdrop that separates a block of text from the rest of the page
Long-form, left-right content with sales copy and high-quality images
• Additional Call-to-action Buttons throughout that anchor back to the Buy Box

This is a wonderful template to use in one-off sale events or as a sales page for products that you’re reintroducing to your customers.

My full walkthrough of this template starts at 6:00 in the video.

You can also check out our new blog post where Brittany (one of Zipify’s App Specialists) breaks down how we’re leveraging this template and the results of our latest sale.

New Headers

We’ve also recently added some exciting new headers to Zipify Pages:

1. Scrollable Text Nav Header

This header allows you to include several links in your header that your customers can navigate through by swiping or by tapping the arrows. (This is especially useful on mobile where header space is limited.)

We also like to anchor these links to different sections of the page, so that mobile visitors can easily navigate through the content.

Another cool thing about this header is that you can make it sticky, meaning that as a user scrolls down the page it stays visible at the top of their screen.

2. Timer/Title Button Header

This is the perfect header to use when you’re running a sale event or any event with a time restriction: it serves as a banner that announces the sale, counts down to the sale’s end date, and provides a prominent CTA.

Publishing into “/Products”
Lastly, Zipify Pages can now (finally!) publish into the “/Products” section of your Shopify store. With Version 1 of this new feature, you can pull in your theme’s buy box for a given product and then use Zipify Pages to add content above and below.

Soon, you’ll be able to use Zipify Pages’ Dynamic Buy Box, and we’ll have completely custom product page templates that you can use in the “/Products” section of your Shopify store. I’ll keep you posted!

(This feature is currently only available for our Front Runners, but it will be rolled out to everyone shortly.)

OneClickUpsell

Product Variant Triggers

Now, you can trigger your upsell funnels using not just a product but an individual variant of that product.

Example: For my Boomsilk moisturizer, I offer 2oz, 4oz and 8oz variants, and I can now choose different upsells based on which size a customer chooses. So if they choose the 8oz variant, I could offer them another 8oz as an upsell, rather than a generic offer no matter which size they choose.

Apple Pay, Amazon Pay & Google Pay

You can now use Apple Pay, Amazon Pay and Google Pay in the OneClickUpsell checkout.

This is especially great for OCU members using Stripe, who can now offer their customers more payment options at checkout.

Give Us Your Feedback!

Do you have anything to add to the show? We’d appreciate your feedback!

If you have new features you want to see in Zipify Pages or OneClickUpsell, or anything else you want to see in Zipify’s Ecommerce News…

Please send us your thoughts at help@zipify.com.

Not a User of Zipify Pages and OneClickUpsell?

If you have a Shopify store and you aren’t using the apps, then please check them out now!

I’ve put years of work into making them two of the most powerful tools for growing your business:

 

Zipify Pages

Landing Page & Sales Funnel Builder

This Shopify page builder comes loaded with all of my best templates, making it easy to copy the campaigns I mentioned in this article and optimize all of your pages for conversion.

TRY FREE FOR 14 DAYS | 100% MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE

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OneClickUpsell

Upsell & Cross-sell Tool

Offer upsells and cross-sells at every stage of your customers’ shopping experience — including post-purchase upsells after they buy! (On average, users increase sales 10–15% immediately after using this app.)

TRY FREE FOR 30 DAYS | 100% MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE

Get OneClickUpsell

Try OneClickUpsell

TRY FREE FOR 30 DAYS | 100% MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE

Try Zipify Pages

TRY FREE FOR 14 DAYS | 100% MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE

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