Heyyy!

How are you?

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I post one reel per day with value!

In today’s newsletter we’re going to see:

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Mat’s Diary

I’ll be traveling and meeting you in 2024

I want to meet as many people in the Shopify ecosystem as possible.

And to do it I travel and meet local people.

It’s always amazing because you learn a lot (and you increase your network)

For 2024 there are already 2 fixed destinations: Japan and Greece

I’ll stay longer in Japan because there are many cities I have to visit.

While in Greece I’ll stay in Athens!

I already have people I have to meet in both countries.

But if you’re here or plan to go there, let me know!

I’ll be in Greece in early March and in Japan in May.

If I were to pick some other cities/countries, where should I go?

In the process of getting “Built for Shopify”

So I started the “Built for Shopify” process.

Shopify introduced this badge a few months ago, and at that time, my opinion was clear: since we didn’t know the impact yet, it didn’t make sense to do it.

Getting the “Built for Shopify” badge is a time-consuming process, especially for older apps.

We already have:

So changing the dashboard to meet new guidelines can be complicated.

After seeing the impact with the first apps doing it I had another opinion:

If you were a big app, you didn’t have to do it because you didn’t rely only on the Shopify App Store. But if you were a small app then it was definitely a good move.

You could appear above bigger apps in the App Store by doing.

And today my opinion changed a third time. I think the impact is bigger and will even be bigger in the future.

I even think Shopify is doing it like this:

And I think we’re currently in the third stage.

So I applied for the badge and Shopify gave me 14 different points to fix.

They were pretty fast to give us feedback (3 hours after submitting)

When in the beginning it could take 1 week to get the first feedback.

If I do get the badge I’ll let you know the impact of it with real data.

My video content is starting to pay off?

In December I started a new challenge: Video content.

I posted my first long format video on Youtube and started to post daily on Instagram/TikTok/Shorts.

(You can follow me on Instagram here: @mat.ds)

During 3 months, I didn’t get any results.

My videos barely got 500 views and were shown only to my followers.

For TikTok it was even 250 views maximum.

But a few days ago something changed…

My videos started to be shown to non-followers.

And my last 2 videos on Instagram had more than 1,000 views with a majority of non-followers watching it.

It proves 2 things:

But that’s okay.

First of all, when you start creating content, you should do it for a year before making any conclusion.

But most people don’t want to do something for a year without any results.

Now imagine this:

You’re guaranteed to get results but only if you post consistently for a year.

Most people would do it.

Well it’s the exact same thing. The guarantee isn’t possible but it’s mostly what will happen.

And I’ve been in the process for 3 months. What will happen at the end of the year?

When I did it for Twitter I reached 10,000 followers, got more partnerships and opportunities.

Toolbox Essentials #2

How I optimized Crisp for my support

Crisp has been one of my favorite tools since starting my Shopify Apps.

I repeat always the same thing: talk to your customers

And Crisp has been really helpful in doing it.

So here is how I set it up to give you ideas.

Step 1: Allowing the merchants to contact you

The first goal is for people to be able to contact you and you want to give them as many ways as possible.

We allow our merchants to contact us from: Messenger, Instagram, Email, LiveChat

We add all of that through Crisp and every message will appear inside Crisp

Some people prefer to contact you through Messenger, some others emails, etc…

Even if you should push everyone to either user Messenger (or Whatsapp) or the live chat. And here is why:

The live chat allows you to get information about the store and the business that we’ll see in a moment.

Messenger (or WhatsApp) it’s because people are always logged in. So if you send them a message, they will see it no matter what.

And when you need a reply from the user it’s better (and also to get reviews)

In the beginning, since our goal was to get reviews, we even “forced” people to contact us through Messenger so that way when we asked for the review we could follow up if they didn’t reply.

Step 2: Getting information about the business

The goal here is to fix problems faster.

When you use Crisp, you have the SDK to push some information about the user.

So you use the SDK to show the live chat in your dashboard and, at the same time, some “session” information.

On top of that, we created a custom link that redirects us directly to our admin dashboard with the shop information to directly see:

Or to update information such as price of the store, change trial period, etc.

That way, with only 1 click we can update it

Step 3: Helpdesk

The Helpdesk is the 2nd most important thing about the live chat. If you had to pick 2 things would be: your live chat and your Helpdesk

In the Helpdesk that you configure with Crisp, you need to write articles for ANY question or problem you receive.

There are never too many articles if you structure them properly.

You should be at a point where, in a conversation, you could be answering only using articles. Even small articles.

For many reasons:

A good thing to do is to review every day/week /month the conversations and write down all the articles that you should create.

To find the articles, ask yourself for each conversation: “What articles could I create to never have this conversation again?”

Then for your Helpdesk create categories and sub-categories on Crisp to make it easy to scan it.

Step 4: Auto Messages

One of your goals is to fix problems before they happen.

Another way of doing it is basically to send auto messages when needed.

For example, when our users are creating bundles, if we see that they’re not doing anything for 30 seconds, we will automatically send, “Do you need help to create your bundles?” as if it was a real person

And you can do it based on specific actions, for example if they start deleting all the bundles, it can be a sign they need help.

Or if they’re updating the settings many times in a row.

Step 5: Using real-time visitors

That page is amazing and let you see who’s currently on your Helpdesk or on your dashboard.

And you can start a live chat conversation that way.

Why is it good?

Because you can contact someone before they do it whenever you need something.

And to know who you have to contact, here are some ideas:

And to do it it’s simple:

For example recently we launched our priority support. So our goal is to understand why people aren’t taking it.

We check for:

And based on that we’ll send the notification when the person opens the dashboard so we can contact him.

Step 5: Bot

Then you can set up the bot in order to welcome new messages.

As you get more conversations you need to get time

Usually every conversation will start like:

So be sure to request it directly within the bot.

You can have complex scenarios.

For example during weekends we’ll tell people that our staff is limited.

At night we’ll tell them that we’ll look into it in the morning.

FYI: This is how my scenario looks like

We used the new AI system inside.

It means we ask people automatically what they want and then the AI will try to find an article for that question/problem.

That’s another reason why you need articles for everything.

People can get their response even at night that way.

And if the AI can’t find an article, we add a segment on Crisp “To update” in order for us to find the conversations that need to be checked.

Shopify Pulse #2: Ecosystem Updates

My prediction about the future of Shopify Apps Dashboards

Shopify released the admin extensions that allow anyone to create sections directly inside the admin dashboard.

And Shopify is going in a direction to reduce (or even remove) technical debt created by partners.

→ Giving more power to embedded apps

→ Deprecating checkout.liquid

→ “Built for Shopify” for Apps

→ Removing script tags

Basically, Shopify wants to be in control where everything you create will work only for Shopify Platform.

It’s really smart.

So knowing this, I think that sooner or later, Shopify will “remove” the dashboards of apps.

And we would have to use admin extensions.

I don’t know if it will be as binary as that but I think we’re going in that directly.

This will allow them to “control” our dashboards completely

New App Comparison Page

Shopify released a new comparison page that is interesting

Now you’ll have to stand out when comparing your app with another one.

And they released new tags that you have to add to your App Listing in the “Distribution” tab.

It won’t change anything for you in my opinion. It will only be better for merchants to compare.

But it won’t give you more installs or a better ranking.

How to use the new Video Generation by AI in your Shopify App

OpenAI announced Sora. Sora is a system that allows you to generate videos with AI.

It’s really simple at the moment and not as easy as using ChatGPT (with just a link)

But soon it will be able to generate incredible videos and this is a good thing.

Merchants need videos of their products.

This could potentially become a Shopify App where the goal is to generate videos for each product. (That’s one idea).

Or you could be generating videos for your own business on social media.

Anyway this is something that you should follow as it can definitely help you improve your Shopify App!

If you enjoyed this email and you want to help me, forward this email to 2 different people!

The goal is to reach 10,000 subscribers before the end of 2024! 🔥

See you next week,

Mat