Hey! Ezra Firestone here, CEO of Zipify Apps.

Welcome to the second 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 Shopify’s growing partnership with Walmart, and Yotpo’s latest round of funding.
• Retail at Large: What’s going on in the greater ecommerce landscape outside of Shopify? BigCommerce is about to go public (and I actually think it’s a smart investment!).
• Zipify Updates: We have two exciting updates to Zipify Pages, my Shopify landing page and sales funnel builder: we can finally edit your native product pages and publish them into the “/Products” section of your store; and we have a new template — the “High Value Home Page”.

Let’s dive in!

Shopify News

Growing Partnership with Walmart.com

Shopify just announced that they’re strengthening their partnership with Walmart.com.

This is super exciting because Walmart is the fastest growing ecommerce channel on the internet. It’s been growing by 30% year over year, and is now the #2 digital sales channel (behind Amazon).

This is really good news for ecommerce merchants. Right now, if you sell on Amazon, not only do they take a giant percentage of your revenue but they also control your customer data. It’s kind of a pain in the butt.

But Amazon has a community of 3rd-party merchants (giving them a marketplace with a wide variety of products that attract customers) and Walmart doesn’t. But by tapping Shopify to get merchants and more products, Walmart hopes to give their customers more options so they can compete from a product diversity perspective.

And as Walmart and Shopify get more enmeshed, it’s going to be easier for us ecommerce merchants to list our products, run ads, and get access to the customer base that’s shopping on Walmart.com.

These are shoppers who might not buy from Amazon, social media, or our websites. It’s a subsegment of customers that we can now get access to, and it’s a large subsegment.

If you’re not already signed up for Shopify’s Walmart Marketplace integration, I recommend you do that now. Over the next year or two, it’s going to continue to grow as an ecommerce channel, and it’ll be great opportunity for you to generate sales.

Retail at Large

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

BigCommerce is Going Public

Remember BigCommerce, the ecommerce platform that was competing neck and neck with Shopify until Shopify pulled ahead and won the race?

Well they’re still around, and they’re about to go public.

When BigCommerce announces their IPO, you’ll be able to invest in the company by buying stock, and actually… I kind of think you should. (Take this with a grain of salt; I’m not an investment banker!)

Even now, after Shopify has become the ecommerce powerhouse that it is, BigCommerce still serves a role in the marketplace. They serve mostly 7-figure+ businesses who want more development flexibility than what Shopify offers.

So I think it’s a good idea to invest in them because they’ve proven they can still compete and they’re not going anywhere.

I believe this stock is going to be worth a lot more than its initial value at its IPO — just like when Shopify came out at $25/share and is now worth hundreds. (It won’t see that big of a growth, but its value will at least stay stable.)

Ecommerce is the now and the future, and BigCommerce isn’t going anywhere. They’ve proven they can survive in a post-Shopify world.

Yotpo Raises $75 Million

Yotpo is a review app for Shopify, but the company has also purchased other apps like SMS Bump, Smile.io and a few others.

And… they just raised $75 million!

So it looks like they’ll continue growing and buying apps and becoming a conglomerate in Shopify app ecosystem. I’m interested to see what else they have their eyes on.

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.

Native Product Page Editor

I’m super excited to announce a big update to Zipify Pages: Native Shopify Product Page Editing.

We can finally edit the native product pages on your Shopify store, and publish them into the “/Products” section of your website.

You heard it here first: Zipify is coming after themes! Our goal is to make our landing page builder so robust that it completely replaces the need for themes. We want to give you the ability to edit your product pages, collections, cart — everything.

Watch the video for a full walkthrough of this feature (04:47), or check out the post we just released breaking down our new Shopify Product Page Editor.

New Template: “High Value Home Page”

Speaking of replacing themes: Zipify Pages already allows you to use our templates to build out your store’s home page.

And the home page is a lot more important than people think.

Even if the bulk of your traffic gets to your store from an ad linking to your product page, most of that traffic will navigate back to your home page looking for one thing or another.

Why do they do this?

Because the biggest websites in the world are training them to consume ecommerce websites this way. The biggest online stores — like Amazon, Walmart, and eBay — train people to navigate to their homepage to find important information on shipping, products, returns, etc.

So it’s super important that you pay attention to your home page, and make sure you’re leveraging it the right way.

That’s why we just released a new template for Zipify Pages: the “High Value Home Page.”

In the video (10:58), I do a full breakdown of all the page elements we use in this template, including:

• Sticky Double CTA Header that points to our most important goals
• Hero Banner that promotes a relevant piece of content
• Product Carousel featuring our most popular products

At Zipify, we only add things to our landing page builder that have been tested on our own stores, so you can be sure that these templates, elements and features are action-ready.

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.

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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

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