Audience & Possible Outcomes Any Shopify store owner looking to improve user experience or motivate their customers to hit the cart size required for free shipping. This snippet is designed for ease of installation and usability. It is meant to look good and get the job done on any theme, whether using an AJAX cart [...]

Is Your Web Store Enough to do Fulfillment on Your Own or is it a Recipe for Disaster? If you’re reading this article, you probably sell products using one of the major web store programs, such as Shopify, Magento, or Volusion. There are literally hundreds of options to choose from, and in terms of managing [...]

Foreward This plugin will take about 5 minutes to set up. This is designed for Shopify stores that want to create an increased sense of urgency or scarcity for their stores products. The countdowns, inventory and time, are both fake and do not impact your store in any way. Example Below is an embedded example [...]

Congratulations, if you're reading this you have quite possibly shipped enough orders that warrant the of adding of custom branded shipping box to increase your customer experience. This is an exciting time! Background: My twin brother (also a founder of Ships-a-Lot) started a beef jerky company in college at Ohio State when we were sophomores. The name of [...]

Motivation This is a topic which has always fascinated me: The Dunning-Kruger Effect. The idea that my perception of what I know is nonlinear with respect to what I actually know. Quoting from the Wikipedia article, we are given the definition: This pattern of over-estimating competence was seen in studies of skills as diverse as reading [...]

This is a guest blog article written by Max and Zach Zitney, the owners of JerkyXP.   Why are we writing this? I have always had a touch of accounting to me. I like being able to demonstrate that the cash flowing from sales to final profit (aka retained earnings) balances at the end of [...]

SHIPPING PRODUCT TO AN AMAZON FULFILLMENT CENTER CAN BE NIGHTMARISH. Everyone wants their product on Amazon Prime but what does it take to get a product to an Amazon fulfillment center. First you need to create a listing on Amazon.com through Seller Central. Depending on what you are selling it can take some time to get [...]

Working with crowdfunding projects can be a headache. You have an idea taken from, concept to reality in (hopefully) a few months time. This can be stressful on the campaign owners and consumers that want the products they ordered. When Anthony from Torch Coat Heater needed fulfillment for his new jacket heating system, he contacted us with [...]

In May 2016, we launched the official website for a company that was once our side project: Ships-A-Lot! While it may be a service company, that didn't bar us from building its site on the Shopify platform! Max and I did all of the website design and coding; I was personally surprised by how simple it [...]

Motivation I really feel like the question "should we change our business strategy?" is a question that every entrepreneur has experienced. I want to relay some of my experiences with either deciding to stay the course or making significant business changes. I hope this can help someone in settling this very difficult and oft-disturbing question. [...]

Audience This article is intended for businesses shipping large, light merchandise via USPS. If this sounds like you, read on and you may find some money-saving advice below! Motivation Two weeks ago, I was preparing a quote for a new high-volume client. They had asked me to: Design a set of optimum box sizes for [...]

Motivation Run out of stock and you'll pay. It's as simple as that. Backorders are a result of a failure of a business' inventory process. Sometimes, this is a good problem: your store is unexpectedly selling a large volume of a product that is typically a slow seller. Typically, however, running out of inventory is [...]

The One Place You Need to be Advertising with Video for Your Ecommerce Business Advertising through video is no longer a question of “Should we?”, but rather, a question asking, “Where and how much?” In the evolving web-based landscape where increasingly smaller companies can have a platform for their businesses, there is an equal rise [...]

Motivation The quotation in the title of this article is quickly becoming an increasingly common complaint by newcomers to independent agency in eCommerce. A close second to the quote is certainly: My store is getting lots of traffic but no sales! In this five-minute article, I'll be pointing out the origin of these complaints and introduce the [...]

Dropshipping seems to be all the rage these days, with it's low cost of entry and low overhead, people are gravitating towards this model. I am going to give a quick rundown of the pros and cons of dropshipping and the alternatives. First lets define dropshipping, "(to) move (goods) from the manufacturer directly to the retailer without [...]

Amazon has once again set a standard in the way that orders are warehoused and shipped to customers. For Amazon, yes multiple warehouses makes sense and is a huge reason customers get their orders so quickly. Just because Amazon does it, does not mean you as an online retailer need to follow suit. Lets look at [...]

Motivation We have a fairly popular contact form here at Ships-A-Lot. This contact form is used to collect information on potential leads (their store, their email, and their shipping volume are key). I wanted the emails entered into that contact form to also be submitted to our MailChimp list (while still offering our perspective clients [...]

One of the bigger decisions when it comes to how you're going to get your products to your customers is shipping and the costs you'll charge to do so. Some stores will offer free shipping on all orders and build the shipping cost into their COGS (Cost of Goods Sold). Others will have a flat rate shipping [...]

Foreward This may be incompatible with stores that are using earlier versions of jQuery. This may occur if you have apps installed which had fairly lazy designers or you are using an outdated theme. I won't claim that this is the prettiest or most elegant code ever, but it certainly got the results my clients [...]

Ease of use: When it comes to launching an ecommerce store, you're looking for a way to sell an awesome product to your customers without dealing with the technical aspects of running a website. With Shopify you can go from having no store to fully operational within 24 hours (we have done this personally to confirm [...]

Motivation We received a really wonderful Thank You card from one of our clients recently and decided to run a case study on their brand and strategy. They have asked to retain anonymity. This article contains an introduction to their brand, their unique space in our growing eCommerce community, and their struggles and triumphs. At the end [...]

Why is this interesting? With our relocation, we have obtained the following (verified) benefits as of Q3 2017.   12% overall drop in shipping costs to our clients. Packages delivered an average of 11.5 hours faster than our location in Ohio. Packages can be shipped as late as 10 PM, same-day. Foreword When we started [...]

So you shipped all your packages out of your warehouse (or ours) and you think everything should be smooth sailing from there. The package is on its way and the customer has been sent the tracking information, there's no way they could have any further questions, right? Wrong Your customers are monitoring the tracking page [...]

How does it work? This code tracks a visitor's mouse movements and displays a customizable popup when their mouse behavior suggests they are about to exit your site. Audience Any Shopify store owner interested in trying some free exit pop code on their site. Motivation Some people who come to our website area not interested [...]

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