The Power of Diverse Ecommerce Integrations

We recently published a blog that listed the five most popular ecommerce platforms used by leading brands. Leading among them was, of course, Shopify for several reasons. At the very basic level, it makes ecommerce retailing effortless by offering a host of features from putting together a website, to designing customised product or service landing pages. It allows the merchandiser to manage, track and edit inventory, product pages, pricing and content from anywhere. It encourages multi-channel marketing.  

A Merit expert adds, “It is also highly secure, and it provides a host of shipping and fulfilment services to its customers, including the trending drop shipping business model. Most important of all, time and again, Shopify has proved to be a developer and creator-centric ecommerce platform.” 

In this blog, through a series of case studies, we’re going to specifically look at how Shopify enabled brands to integrate and apply ecommerce intelligence insights into their daily business. 

How Shopify Collaborated to Build Headless Architecture for ComplexCon 

ComplexCon is an annual festival organised by entertainment company, Complex Networks. ComplexCon is all about pop culture, live music shows, art exhibits and related panels, and has some of the world’s leading brands, like Nike, Adidas and Haagen Dazs, showcasing and selling their merchandise.  

Kicked off in 2016, the event was a roaring success. It was attended by 30,000 people in 2016, and grew to 60,000 by 2018. All was well and succeeding until Covid hit and drove the world behind closed doors.  

Despite the pandemic, Complex Networks decided to adapt and host the event in the virtual world. It partnered with Jam3, a Canadian design & experience agency, to create the digital experience. To bring big brands into the virtual world (most of whom were operating via Shopify), it partnered with ShopifyPlus agency, Riess Group. 

While planning the virtual event, they had to ensure; 

• That instead of building a minimum viable product and optimising on the go, they should get the experience right for the brands and customers from the start 
• A seamless experience for the customers who engage with the event in the virtual world 
• The high-profile brands who will display their merchandise via Shopify will be able to manage the volume of traffic 

Instead of taking customers to each Shopify storefront (that is, instead of linking each Shopify brand-customer individually), the team decided to keep the event attendees on ComplexLand itself by integrating the storefront API, pulling products and data from the stores, and taking the attendee to the Shopify page only to complete their transaction. This meant that while the products would be displayed on the Shopify storefront and on the ComplexCon page, inventory management and ensuring data security and secure transactions would remain with Shopify.  

Secondly, to ensure traffic management on the sites, Riess Group built a unified API which would approve all calls from Shopify, process all incoming data and ensure that the data was shared with ComplexCon. This would ensure that ComplexCon received data only once and thus manage data traffic. 

Thirdly, given that there were many limited edition products likely to be displayed on the site, to prevent bot attacks, the team created a system where the attendees show an intent to purchase, the team would verify them, and they would be added to the queue. 

The result – over five days of the event, ComplexCon was attended by attendees from over 174 countries, and it recorded 1.3 trillion brand and commerce engagements. 

Eyewear Brand Used Shopify Integrations to Record 10X Increase in Holiday Growth 

Based out of San Diego, California, Blenders is a well known eyewear brand that screams fashion forward. Within a few years of launch, the brand recorded a 900% growth year-on-year. By 2018, its founder, Fisher, had decided to up the stakes and sales during that year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. 

Initially, Blenders kicked off by creating a buzz on social media (Instagram and Facebook) about the upcoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale. As the days neared, the campaigns became more engaging and frequent.  

To kick off its email campaign, Blenders integrated Shopify Plus’ email service partner, Klaviyo, and Email Aptitude for strategy. It curated seven emails, the first set that would create the buzz about the upcoming holiday sale, the second set that would extend the sale for visitors who viewed but didn’t purchase, and a third set that would be all about last chances. 

They simultaneously hired a social ad agency, Sum Digital and ran social campaigns targeting different age groups, and integrated Shopify’s Facebook Messenger tool, ShopMessage, which helped it track and target lost sales worth USD 30,000 on Black Friday and USD 10,000 on Cyber Monday. 

Lastly, it integrated Launchpad to launch two separate site designs, one for Black Friday and one for Cyber Monday. This eliminated the need for its team to do live updates at midnight on Cyber Monday, and streamlined the entire web experience for customers. 

The result – it quadrupled its sales, its customer base grew by 17%, and 82% of its profits came from new customers. 

Merit’s Expertise in e-Commerce Data and Intelligence   

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• Three to four times faster than standard scrapers   
• At lower cost   
• With Increased accuracy (up to 30% compared to standard scrapers)   

Our powerful, new scraper engine can gather massive data sets from multiple sites and geographies in real-time so you can stay informed on customer behaviours and market trends.   

Merit’s eCommerce data engine provides a high degree of confidence in insights generated from analytics – thanks to confidence in the data quality and access to enriched data.   

To know more, visit: https://www.meritdata-tech.com/service/data/retail-data/